Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25805649-20180830095121/@comment-168424-20180830221117

One of FANDOM's specific problems is alienating veteran admins and not being very negotiable about significant changes.

Although I work on WoWWiki, it is largely a zombie wiki as the amount of active editors and contributors of any significance all went to Wowpedia. This problem falls right in the lap of FANDOM. Similar things are going on right now. The GDPR changes have driven away some very valuable veteran admins. Before that it was the portability push and Discussions. FANDOM has good reasons for many of its changes, but their PR aspect is often handled very poorly.

It is pretty obvious who the favored wikis are and they get most of the flexibility from FANDOM and also tend to have admins that are so heavily invested in the FANDOM infrastructure that they are loathe to leave, but that's not always the case. I am getting the sense that if FANDOM loses a few very large key wikis (Star Wars, Runescape, Marvel, Fallout, etc.) it could be the beginning of the end, since they aren't getting replaced by up and comers. You may think this is unlikely, but early in the year one of the high WAM, big wikis, Yu-gi-oh had some serious discussions about forking off of FANDOM and it looks like they basically did it, but are sill working out the aftermath.

FANDOM is successful because it is a big fish in a semi-small pond, but I feel like this fish is trying to leap onto land (entertainment news and click-bait) without making sure its pond is in order (wiki content that gives it credibility). Fortunately for FANDOM, there is not significant competition of similar scale or as much broad coverage, so their position is relatively safe for the time being.