Thanks again, Neshomeh, happy to help condense down some of what we've discussed elsewhere.

While it's true that WikiTide as a service is a relatively new entry compared to the other players, we are by no means new to the wiki space. Our volunteer team and board of directors has had presence on and volunteered for several farms beyond just Fandom and Miraheze, including pre-acqusition Gamepedia, the Miraheze predecessor Orain, and its predecessor TropicalWikis. We've seen farms grow and fall for several reasons - disinterest, lack of resources, technical issues, interpersonal conflict or worse: morph into hyper-capitalist entities we had no interest in continuing to associate with.

Given that wealth of prior lived experience, we took a long look at where things went wrong with each and decided that rather than reacting to a sudden downfall, we had an opportunity to build something with a solid foundation from the start. Our key learnings:

• 100% reliance on goodwill donations and accepting every single wiki request is a surefire way to overshoot our resources in terms of both people and funds
• We are uninterested and unwilling to sacrifice user privacy through ad sales or other forms of user data exploitation, but running donation drives every half-year/quarter/month is demoralizing to volunteers and damages user confidence
• There is an underserved market for paid wiki hosting that exists somewhere between the free and professional/enterprise space, and we have the right mix of technical and professional experience to serve it sustainably without compromising our personal ethics

It's from there that we developed the working model we've implemented today, with great success. Instead of the perpetual fundraisers of past platforms, we have in WikiTide an advertisement-free, free-to-use hosting service that grows in a deliberate and manageable way that keeps pace with our budget. Between community contributions, donations of excess profits from our companion paid service (WikiForge) should it become necessary, and our pursuit of not-for-profit status for WikiTide, we are fully confident (and have been proved correct thus far) that our approach to financing WikiTide will allow a resilience to grow with our community and keep any tendrils of capitalist overreach far, far away from our core service.

We are smaller, by design. By being more selective with the scale and scope of hosted wikis, we can ensure that we devote our time, funds and attention more equitably and provide a higher level of experience to those who choose to host with WikiTide. No member of the WikiTide volunteer team is paid to be there (even members of the board of directors), we're simply folks that believe quality wiki-hosting is a public good and should be maintained as such. It's our intent to be transparent as possible, so please feel free to ask any additional questions you may have.

--NotAracham

Hello! I meant to update y'all on this sooner, but this weekend I was sitting for an adolescent labradoodle that demanded pretty much all of me, so here we are.

As of today, the survey has responses from 27 people (myself included). There are still a few folks I know are more or less around, but haven't answered, so I'm not closing it yet.

You can view all the results in spreadsheet form here. To sum up the mandatory responses, in descending order:

I consider myself a...
* Discordian - 20 (74.1%)
* Boarder - 15 (55.6%)
* Wiki editor - 8 (29.6%)
* Lurker - 7 (25.9%)
* Non-PPCer with PPC friends - 2 (7.4%)

Should PPC Wiki leave FANDOM?
* Yes, at some point. - 13 (48.1%)
* Yes, as soon as possible. - 10 (37%)
* No, the problems don't outweigh the risks/headache of leaving. - 2 (7.4%)
* I need more time to think about it. - 2 (7.4%)
* No, FANDOM is fine. - 0

For those who want the math, that's 23 (85.1%) for a general Yes, and I'll note that hS hasn't done the survey, so for accuracy we should really count 3 for a general No.

If we had to move, where do you think would be best?
* I don't know - 16 (59.3%)
* WikiTide - 8 (29.6%)
* Miraheze - 3 (11.1%)
* Other - 0

Since some of you felt it should be left up to people who are active on the wiki, and I'm curious how the results from that contingent break down, too, here are the answers from just the 8 people who consider themselves wiki editors (myself included):

Should PPC Wiki leave FANDOM?
* Yes, as soon as possible. - 4 (50%)
* Yes, at some point. - 2 (25%)
* No, the problems don't outweigh the risks/headache of leaving. - 2 (25%)
* No, FANDOM is fine. - 0
* I need more time to think about it. - 0

That's 6 (75%) for a general Yes.

If we had to move, where do you think would be best?
* WikiTide - 5 (62.5%)
* I don't know - 2 (25%)
* Miraheze - 1 (12.5%)
* Other - 0

I'll note that of these 8, one didn't give a name, but doesn't appear to be a duplicate (ETA: and isn't Linstar, who tested the survey for me before I added the name question). One I'm quite unfamiliar with (Sogga aka VestaServal), but they're relatively new. One is not Yuki, despite how active you've been on the wiki lately and the fact that you started this thread. Are you sure you're not a wiki editor? {; P

~Neshomeh

WikiTide has a section in the Terms of Use called Links, which states:

WikiTide has not reviewed all of the sites linked and is not responsible for the contents of any such linked site. The inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by WikiTide. Use of any such linked website is at the user's own risk.

IMO, that's a strong point in their favor!

However, for legal reasons they may still have qualms about linking to anything that could be considered pornography, especially involving underage characters. The exact line between "a story that has underage sex in it" and "child pornography" is one that they (and we) may not care to test. It's something else we can ask them if they say they'll have us at all, I guess.

~Neshomeh

They seem to have educational topics foremost in mind for their service, but they also have a category for fandom-related wikis, so that's heartening. Their Terms of Use seem favorable, too.

It definitely seems like Miraheze has a solid plan to move forward from what seems to have amounted to a lack-of-communication problem, though, so we shouldn't write them off just yet. We'll have to look at the pros and cons of each.

~Neshomeh

Or at the least backing it up. It is functionally an archive at this point, Plort having been silent for years, so I'm not sure we need a shiny new live version if the current one remains intact. But I should make sure it's backed up, yeah.

(Thankfully the images are mostly various clippings of the maps, so no issues with bothering to download all of those.)

hS

Regarding fandoms, people trying to avoid spoilers know to steer clear of articles and fanfics about them. Plus, our wiki has no need to go into great detail about any particular fandom, so spoilers can be minimized or avoided altogether.

Regarding PPC works, people who follow a spin-off closely enough to care about spoilers are probably reading the stories as they come out anyway. I tend to believe we're deluding ourselves if we think anyone is so passionately engaged a spoiler would upset them, though. Heck, knowing more about what a particular story is about may generate interest instead. In fact, I myself confess to often reading people's comments on a PPC story before deciding to read the story itself. >.>

That said, if there's a strong call to have spoiler formatting available for various uses (including, e.g., Blacklist content, NSFW content), I'd do it. But either way, I'm not implementing anything new until we're well settled on the future home of the wiki.

~Neshomeh

Assuming for the moment that we're going to Miraheze, they have helpful information on moving a wiki to Miraheze, including specifics about moving from Fandom.

They note that images are not included in the XML dump I can get from Fandom, so we will likely have to do all image downloads manually. {= / I'll state now, anything non-essential is likely to get left behind in the process (and that may not be a bad thing).

I don't exactly know what they mean when they say we "may provide Miraheze with image dumps from your Fandom for us to import." Can someone explain how to create an image dump?

I expect the process is likely to be similar for anywhere else we might choose, too.

~Neshomeh

I'd say to put crosslinks to the new wiki over articles but... I'm pretty sure Fandom hates that and might stop us. Which is unfortunate.

I'll happily read your mission, but there's no need to worry about indexing your it. You can always do that later, depending on what happens.

--Ls

… and even a wiki on real-life criminals (but they're called real-life villains which is a major yikes).