User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The Future of Gamepedia/@comment-26465213-20201104230730/@comment-30755067-20201104232837

I can answer this!

Back when Fandom and Gamepedia first merged, one issue that came about was "What about topics that have a wiki on BOTH platforms" and in an effort to not have a split community, Project Crossover started. It was a way to "archive" one wiki, and merge the communities and information into the other, that way it's not split. When that happened, it was pretty easy. Both URLs would remain the same and the archived one would be read-only and have a banner informing visitors of the status. This worked just fine because they were always on different domains.

But now that Gamepedia is moving to Fandom, it's more complicated. If a Fandom wiki archived in favor of it's Gamepedia counterpart, now that the Gamepedia wiki is moving to Fandom there would be a duplicate. So that's why the archived one is now designated by having Archive on the URL, now that both the merged wiki and the archive wiki exist on the same domain.

So this "archive" change only effects wikis that have a duplicate topic (one on Fandom and one on Gamepedia) and whichever one was designated as the "archived" wiki (either the Fandom one or the Gamepedia one) will end up as "topic-archive.fandom.com"

I hope this helps!