Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Started/@comment-24676271-20200706181843

So I have been an active member of Fandom for some time and this is my number one burning question, so I decided I had to ask it at some point. When a new show/game/etc comes out, it seems logical that a lot of fans will immediately migrate to their fandom accounts to create a wiki for these new things. However, when I look up "x wiki" I only usually see one wiki devoted to that fanbase. I always wonder what happens to all those wikis that presumably were created for that fandom but never became the "official wiki", and why they didn't.

I ran an experiment for myself a while back. There was an interesting new indie game that had just come out, and I looked everywhere online to see if there was already a wiki for it. There wasn't yet so I knew this was the perfect opportunity to test my theories. I created the wiki and thought 60 pages would be enough. I saw other wikis become "official" with only 20 pages so I didn't want to waste too much time. A few days later, I looked up "game + wiki" on Google, and the thing was I didn't see any wiki- and that was including my own that I had just set up! I don't even think it showed up when I typed in the name of my wiki in quotation marks! I waited a few more weeks and still nothing, then one day a wiki did show up regarding the video game, but when I clicked on the link it wasn't my wiki! And to add insult to inury, there were already tens of collaborators working there, as if they had all somehow known this was the "official" wiki and that no other wikis but that one was worth collaborating on!

My theory on the issue is that the "official" wiki is whatever wiki the search engines decide to display, since my wiki still isn't easy to find on Google. As for what determines if you are search engine lucky or not, I don't know. Perhaps you can add insight into that, and also tell me if my theory is correct or not. I appreciate any comments you may have to this concern of mine! 