User:Blad/Personal Guide from Moving from Fandom

The actual move
So you want to move your wiki.

Images
Images are a pain in the back when moving a wiki from Fandom. Fandom has no tool to make a dump of all the images, so you must make your own. This is easily the most tedious part of moving a wiki from Fandom. What I did is I got a friend (Mali) and we manually downloaded all of the images and uploaded them into the Miraheze wiki. It took over a month and there are easier methods. HOWEVER, they are against Fandom's Terms of Use, as you may not use a content scraper on there, which is completely ridiculous, but I digress. Due to that I cannot share any links.

Once you have all the images, upload them to a safe place. A good starting point is Google Drive. Some other storage solutions are Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. Make sure the upload can be easily accessed (ex. no password protection). Request an image dump via Phabricator, and share the link with sysadmins.

There is no way to easily stop image uploads on a Fandom wiki, so you may want to consider leaving a notice on MediaWiki:Sitenotice on your wiki. This way, your message will display to everyone on the wiki. Also consider pushing out an announcement on the wiki.

Text
This is by far the easiest part. If you are an admin, generate a wiki dump via Special:Statistics on the Fandom wiki. This will allow you to move your text, but NOT your images via this method. I would also suggest skipping to 'Closing' before doing this, as Fandom generates a dump of a wiki upon requested closure, and there's no way to "lock" a wiki on Fandom, unlike Miraheze, which is why I suggest doing this step last.

Close the original Fandom Wiki
You probably don't want to leave the original wiki around when moving, so you should probably close it.

Why?

 * Two sites are incredibly difficult to manage and individually update.
 * Traffic.
 * Fandom SEO is ruthless and will often rank your Miraheze wiki below the Fandom version.

Achieving Consensus
It is generally a good idea to achieve consensus to close the Fandom wiki. Without this, Fandom staff will likely decline your request unless it's a personal project. This can be done basically anywhere. I used a Discord sever based on The Legend of Dark Witch Wiki, and the staff counted it as consensus. Personally I would suggest just posting it on a forum with high visibility, or maybe just make a new page with Project:Request to move to Miraheze. Make a vote section, and make a good argument about why you should move. Comparing Miraheze to Fandom is a good page to link to. Assuming you achieve majority consensus, you're good. If not, tough luck.

Posting an announcement
You should post an announcement on a high visibility place. It can be the main forum, via the aforementioned Sitenotice page, via announcements, and more. If your wiki has a Discord server, you can push an announcement there as well. If you have a twitter account about the wiki, Just get the word out as much as you can.

Closing
Per Fandom policies, you cannot close your own wiki by yourself. You will need to reach out to Fandom staff. Tell them that you want to move a wiki, and close the Fandom Wiki. If you achieved consensus, tell them about it. This step depends if your wiki is popular or not. Fandom will decide if your wiki has "useful content or the potential for content" (i.e. Does your wiki make money or not?), and the decision is up to them. For me, I requested The Legend of Dark Witch Wiki to be closed, and it was done without a hitch. But that wiki is mostly unpopular and The Legend of Dark Witch as a whole is unknown to most of the world. Another wiki I would like to point to is Halopedia. While the wiki technically "moved", the Fandom wiki is still open. The Fandom wiki is still mostly inactive, however. I've also heard horror stories about people getting demoted for even thinking about moving, but that is beyond the point. See this ref if you want to see more.

If Fandom closes the wiki, download the XML dump as soon as possible. Fandom sysops will delete the dump in about a month based on personal experience, and the content will be lost forever.

Post-closure
You're almost done with the move! First, your main page might look a little awkward if you use the mainpage parser. You have to enable DummyFandoomMainpageTags in Special:ManageWiki/extensions in order for it to look right. And just like that, it should look like normal.

You may also not like the default skin, Vector 2022. You may wish to enable Cosmos in the skins tab for a more Fandom-like experience. Personally, I prefer Vector but it's up to you. More info at mw:Skin:Cosmos.

Your infoboxes may be broken if you use Fandom's default infobox creator. Simply enable PortableInfoboxCreator and everything should be good.

You may wish to delete all the Message Wall pages as they are blank. Enable Nuke and make a new namespace for Message Wall. Go to Special:Nuke, click Message Wall, and nuke the pages. If done correctly, all of them should be gone.

Conclusion
If you've gotten this far, congrats. You get a pat on the back.

TL;DR

 * 1) Download all the images, preferably with a script.
 * 2) Make a XML dump.
 * 3) Achieve consensus for the move, if there is none, tough luck.
 * 4) Pray that Fandom staff approve your request, if not, tough luck.
 * 5) There are extensions that make your wiki akin to Fandom if that's your preference.

Needless to say, this is a W.I.P.. --Blad  (talk • contribs • global) 11:40, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments
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