Wikia was originally launched on October 18, 2004 with the name Wikicities.
Co-founded by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, the name of the project was changed to Wikia on March 27, 2006, following its first investment round that earned it $4 million.
It was in 2018 that Wikia announced a change to its name, as it rebrands to 'Fandom'.
Fandom has long used the same software that powers Wikipedia, and then the heavily-modified version of MediaWiki.
But quickly, MediaWiki was marked obsolete.
This is why Fandom switched to a Service Oriented Architecture. While it removed many custom extensions, it remained a functional wiki but in a more modern platform.
Then it was on March 2020, that Fandom announced that all wikis created after March 11 would be on the Unified Community Platform (UCP).
Fandom is powered by the open-source wiki software, the same software used by Wikipedia. Its approach of creating content is also similar to Wikipedia, where it allows the communities to contribute to its ever-increasing contents.
Although Fandom allows almost anything to be its contents, the most common contents it has, includes those from popular fiction franchises of films, games, books, and other media.
With its more-relaxed policies that allow the communities to include their own personal point-of-view regarding something, Fandom is more or less, an informal Wikipedia.
By migrating to UCP, Fandom is getting a more modern platform that is also cross-platformed.
"At its core, the Unified Community Platform is all about bringing Fandom and Gamepedia wikis together on to the same version of MediaWiki, serving as the foundation upon which we can innovate," wrote Fandom in a blog post.
The rollout happens in stages, as Fandom breaks its complex extension system and features down before moving them to the new platform.
The first phase, would be Fandom focusing on the "technical side of things and getting everything moved onto the platform". The planned duration for this phase, is about 5 months.
The second phase, is the pre-production step.
Once phase 1 is completed, Fandom shifts its focus to "overall user experience with improvements and new development."
"In conclusion, Phase 1 is our work to get the existing wikis running on the new codebase [...] Once that work is complete, we will move onto new experiences and enhancing your existing wiki features in Phase 2," Fandom explained.
By using UCP, Fandom can also:
- Receive the latest features from the Wikimedia Foundation (maintainers of MediaWiki software).
- Enable more new and modern extensions in an easier manner.
- Experience faster development and rollout of brand new features to both Fandom and Gamepedia.
- Have mobile editing capabilities.
- Get the best experiences of both Fandom and Gamepedia.