The dispute which began in 2012 over which website should be considered the “true MicroWiki” came to an end yesterday evening, when Wikia staff officially renamed micronations.wika to MicroNations Fandom.
The website generally considered MicroWiki is at micronations.wiki, but another, smaller wiki at micronations.wikia – known by most as “MicroWikia” – has for six years now claimed to be the “true” MicroWiki due to being the original domain at which the community was founded.
The MicroWiki community left the Wikia site in 2010 in order to create a website independent from the Wikia corporation, but two years later some younger users left MicroWiki and reactivated the original website in a successful attempt to start their own community. Attempts to heal the rift were rejected by Wikia staff, who encouraged the new community in order to maximise advertisement revenue.
It had been intended for the original Wikia site to be left as an archive, displaying a “snapshot” of the community as it had been in 2010. However, subsequent editing and deletions by the break-off community lost a substantial amount of community and micronational history.
Poor leadership and generally immature users at MicroWikia prevented it from being seen by most as a serious alternative to the independent MicroWiki, but the very existence of the break-away community remained a sad reflection on the inability of some members of the wider community to work together.
Over the past few months, Emperor Jonathan I was able to get himself appointed as a leading administrator on the Wikia site, and lead the way in petitioning Wikia staff to rename the website.
With micronations.wikia no longer officially claiming the MicroWiki “title”, the rift between the two communities is formally at an end.
Although the community remaining at MicroNations Fandom is very small compared to that of MicroWiki, the fact that the former no longer claims the same name will make it far easier for its users to co-operate and interact with the main MicroWiki community.
