Category:Ex-Wikia due to censorship

This Category: Ex-Wikia due to censorship is either empty, or sparsely populated,
and needs to be 'populated' with articles, stubs (and / or other categories)
relevant to the subject matter of this specific category.

Include an article page in this category via one (or more) of three methods:
a. add Ex-Wikia due to censorship in the appropriate field of its infobox template
b. 'tag' a word within the prose of the article, eg. {{tag|Ex-Wikia due to censorship}}
c. add [[Category:Ex-Wikia due to censorship]] at the bottom of its edit box.

Category:Ex-Wikia due to censorship — category: Ex-Wikia is filled with wikis, groups, and people that were once a part of the behemoth that is the commercial for-profit Wikia wiki farm (now known as Fandom), but have since left – for a variety of reasons. The most common issues which have forced communities to fork involve Wikia making decisions which harm the project, such as a long series of advert-heavy re-skins. At various times, Wikia / Fandom staffers have censored or deleted portions of the content from many individual wikis (such as Uncyclopedia, where a 'content warning' posted on the entire site led to a community fork in 2013). These decisions are made not for the benefit of the community, but for the benefit of the Wikia corporation or the marketers or shareholders which it serves.

Any original Wikia wikis which remain after the move or fork (known as 'spoons') would be edited or censored by staff to prevent any remaining Wikia users from mentioning that the community had left to go elsewhere. These abandoned wikis would remain as competitors to the new projects, harming that project's search engine ranking through duplicate content penalties.

In the worst cases, Wikia / Fandom would simply flip from eagerly hosting a project (complete with glib but ultimately misleading claims that "we'll host you for free"), to outright shutting the same projects down years later because their corporate decision makers no longer like the content. Spanking Art was an early example (in 2008; Wikia caved to a troll forum which made threats to complain to Wikia advertisers). Many more wiki communities have followed; especially after the rebrand of Wikia to Fandom in 2018-19 meant that many long-time Wikia communities no longer fit their target theme and demographic.

The affected sites display not an explanation of what happened to the community, but just "This wikia is closed", misleading the public to believe that the project is defunct. Please don't assume they're dead; they're likely with a new nice host family, after having escaped from an unethical farm somewhere! If you see a link on an outside site pointing to (whatever).wikia.com, and that link is broken, please ask the outside webmaster to update their links. The continued survival of these brave independent projects may well depend on it.