If you're looking for information about the game, there's a very good chance you'll find what you're looking for on a fan wiki. And in most cases, those fan wikis are hosted on Fandom.
Because fandoms have a monopoly on fan wikis, you often have little choice but to look at them, even though the user experience has continued to deteriorate over the years. Due to excessive and intrusive advertising that often makes it difficult to even scroll the pages, the fan community is often complaining about the Fandom wiki, and now one of the largest groups is doing something about it.
From now on, GTA Wiki will be independent from the fandom. This means all pages have been moved to the new site, with the operators citing issues with ads and auto-playing videos as reasons for the move. They were also concerned that fandom could potentially be further developed through AI, something the team did not want to see happen on its own wiki.
A GTA Wiki employee explains why he moved away from the fandom.
“It’s no secret that Fandom is generally disliked by readers and editors alike,” a page on the new wiki reads about the move. “The situation worsened in February this year with the appointment of a known pro-AI CEO following an internal restructuring of the company.”
Many other reasons are given, including videos playing on every fandom wiki page and taking up a large portion of the mobile screen. Wiki editors said they had no say in the content of the video and were not happy with its addition. Furthermore, they say they faced issues with excessive censorship, especially the use of slurs, when directly quoting the GTA games for the purposes of the wiki.
Now, this may not break the dominance of the fandom, but it is a huge loss for the site. With GTA 6 just around the corner, all GTA wikis will see a huge surge in traffic as fans look for guides or even want to read about older games. Now, the fandom may have a hard time taking advantage of this launch if enough fans move to this new wiki.
