Closure (eviction) of Wikia Uncyclopedia

In February 2019, Wikia (Fandom) staff announced that most of the Uncyclopedia wikis they hosted would be closed. This included the original English version, uncyclopedia.wikia.com. In May 2019, this wiki was moved to independent hosting and the domain uncyclopedia.ca, and uncyclopedia.wikia.com was no more.

But what really happened in those two-and-a-half months, and why did it take so long?

Contents

• Prologue: "The Uncyclopedia Reunification Plan"
• Initial announcement of closure
• Hosting options forum
• Moving to Lyrithya's server
• Changing course
• Finalizing the move
• Is uncyclopedia.ca the same website/wiki as uncyclopedia.wikia.com?

Prologue: "The Uncyclopedia Reunification Plan"

For some time, the administrators of the (now former) Wikia site have had regular private discussions via email. This was no secret, as such a discussion had been mentioned in this message on my talk page from 2014.

On 25 February 2019, an email from Zombiebaron was forwarded to the Wikia admins. Zombiebaron is an admin of the other English-language "Uncyclopedia" website, an independent fork created in 2013 with the domain name en.uncyclopedia.co. This is often called just "the fork". It was later posted on-wiki with his permission, so I have reproduced it here in full.

To understand this message and its implications, some background knowledge is required:

• In May 2018, Wikia removed the Monobook skin from their wikis, forcing all wikis to use their "Oasis" skin. Uncyclopedia had previously used Monobook, which enabled it to look similar to Wikipedia. Under Oasis this was no longer possible. Oasis can be modified with CSS and JavaScript to look like another skin, but such extensive changes are forbidden by Wikia's customization policy.
• Wikia had already announced their plan to change the domain names of all their hosted wikis from *.wikia.com to *.fandom.com, but this had not yet affected Uncyclopedia.
• The bad relations between uncyclopedia.co and uncyclopedia.wikia.com had a great deal to do with the actions of fork editors after the split. They tried to present the fork as the only, "real" Uncyclopedia despite the continued existence of a community on the Wikia site, and they behaved highly inappropriately toward that community. (More on this later in a future article.)
• The "simple" wiki referred to is most likely Darthipedia, which was renamed to "Simple Darthipedia" after its community left for an independent fork. The two Darthipedia users who have edited the Uncyclopedia sites are Supergeeky1 and Madclaw, who have historically had bad relations with Wikia Uncyclopedia and were never useful contributors there.
• Many editors of both Uncyclopedias, such as myself, were not present before the fork. It is not the case that Wikia Uncyclopedia "was once [the fork editors'] community".
• As far as I know, "the Featured Article system being broken for long stretches of time" has not happened. Zombiebaron is probably referring to the blank space on the main page that occurred when the feature queue was empty. This was not a technical problem but the result of a lack of sufficient new featured articles to fill the queue, which was in turn caused by a decline in activity. (I use the past tense here because the feature queue has since been abolished.)
• "difficult browser hacks to read our content the way it was always meant to be read" probably refers to some code I wrote called "Fake Vector", which mimics Wikipedia's Vector skin. It involved a CSS style sheet and a JS script. Enabling it required adding one line to your common.css page and one line to your common.js.

As one might expect, reactions were mixed. I was among those opposed to the idea.

Zombiebaron makes much of Wikia's negative effects, even citing an action they had not taken. At this time it was not clear if the fandom.com domain change would happen for us, as Wikia had announced that some types of non-fan wikis would instead be moved to *.wikia.org. The issue was discussed here and here. He goes so far as to say that the site would have to cease being a Wikipedia parody simply because of how it looked. This is presumptuous and illogical. Even with Oasis and Wikia's policy, the appearance can be customized in certain ways to look more similar to Wikipedia, which I had done. Furthermore, there is more to parodying and imitating Wikipedia than having a Wikipedia-like skin — in particular, writing style.

He mentions "differences in the past" but no details. (In my case, the "difference" was being bullied off the fork. I used to be one of their strongest supporters.) He does not take responsibility for the past bad behavior or apologize for it, instead glossing over it and presenting it as a mere disagreement. Meanwhile, his statements boast of the fork's alleged positive qualities and paint the Wikia site and its editors as having only flaws. We've got a social media presence and technical staff; you don't, and your site is a mess. If they do indeed have "tech experts" there, either they're incompetent or they had no input in writing this message. The featured article system was not "broken", and Fake Vector was not "difficult browser hacks". It was not difficult to enable for oneself and had nothing to do with browsers (except that different browsers may give different results).

In all this, he fails to give any reason for unification other than the fork being better and "Uncyclopedia succeed[ing]". Succeeding at what? Conspicuously absent is how the fork benefits. The reasons are well known to many editors on both sites, and one is contained in the third paragraph: search results. The Wikia site consistently ranked higher than the fork in search results. It also had more backlinks, articles and active editors. None of these things are in the message. It's obvious how the fork benefits from not having this as a competitor, but he presents it as an act of good will toward us in which they have little stake. In the process, he makes what could have been "let's combine our strengths" into "we're better than you".

Finally, the central premise makes no sense. The purpose of the fork was to move Uncyclopedia off Wikia; it failed because of some editors' choices to continue on the Wikia site, choices that went against the fork editors' wishes. The forkers wanting their Uncyclopedia to be the only one is nothing new. The Wikia editors were in no way forced to be separate — they chose freely. If they wanted to unite, they would have already done it. They would have already abandoned the Wikia site for the fork. Were there some Wikia editors who wanted unification? Sure — but plenty of them did not. There was no collective desire for such a thing, only an individual one.

This seems to be difficult to grasp, so it's worth repeating: if they wanted to unite, they would have already done it.

Initial announcement of closure

On 26 February, the very next day, Wikia staffer Sannse announced that Uncyclopedia would be closed in a forum post (usually called a "forum" for short) entitled "A message from Fandom" (archived, live site). Her message read:

Following this post, some rather disorganized discussion took place.

Zombiebaron was the first to mention his email:

Romartus made this comment:

Sannse replied:

A brief discussion about the URLs ensued, which went nowhere.

On 28 February, Lyrithya (using her alternate "Athyria" account) made a post explaining the process that would be involved in moving evicted wikis to the uncyclopedia.co server. About the proposed merger, she said:

This course of action would mean the wikis would not actually be merged, but rather a copy of what was specific to the Wikia site would be made and Wikia editors would be expected to selectively add content from it to the fork.

On 1 March, Miley Spears posted Zombiebaron's email on the forum with his permission.

On 2 March, I added a comment titled "Technical stuff" in which I discussed the technical details of moving. I also mentioned that I had previously installed MediaWiki and suggested I could do so for a new version of the site, and I raised some possible issues with the Miraheze wiki farm.

On 5 March, Sannse requested that a vote be held on what would happen to the site:

Romartus replied saying that a voting forum for hosting options would be posted. On 11 March, Zombiebaron complained that this forum did not exist yet, but he seemed to want it to be about merging the wikis rather than hosting options:

On 13 March, Lyrithya linked to the new voting forum: Forum:Hosting options for Uncyclopedia (wikia).

There was a vote on merging, started on 6 March 2019 by Simsilikesims. Miley Spears had made a forum post linking to a poll about Uncyclopedia on the Discordianism wiki, which Snarglefoop had criticized as "useless", so Simsilikesims added voting sections to the forum as an alternative. Romartus locked it down the same day after a brief, harsh exchange between me and a new user called Dǐll Kevlar, giving the reason "Locking this forum until formal vote is held" (meaning the voting forum he was planning to create). Whether or not this vote should have remained open, it did not have a meaningful result and is unrelated to the Wikia site's ultimate fate. (This forum page is not available in the Wayback Machine, but this edit to it is.)

I found out later that "Miley Spears" was one of several accounts used by a single person (Alden Loveshade) to disrupt this situation. There is more information about these accounts and Dill Kevlar on this page.

Hosting options forum

On 12 March, Romartus made a forum post titled "Hosting options for Uncyclopedia (wikia)" (archived, live site), intended for voting on where the Wikia site would be hosted. Merging with the fork was not presented as an option. Instead, there was an option to have the site hosted on the same server as uncyclopedia.co ("Lyrithya's server") but remain separate.

Three other options were given: Miraheze, Carlb (the host of many foreign-language editions), and me. I was hosting a private personal wiki but had no experience with one like Uncyclopedia, and I had never tried to move/copy a wiki off Wikia before. However, I had already begun making a copy of the site at home. I installed MediaWiki and imported the dump from Wikia into it, then began filling in what wasn't in the dump with the "grabbers" scripts developed by the uncyclopedia.co team.

In the email discussion leading up to the post, Romartus had proposed a rule that no one whose account had been created after 26 February 2019 would be allowed to vote. I suggested these further restrictions:

By "this site" I meant the Wikia site, and by "the fork" I meant uncyclopedia.co.

The intent was that voting on the fate of the site should be limited to established members of its community. Someone who had been actively editing in 2019 or 2018 prior to the closure announcement can be considered an established member, even if they are also active on a competing site. Someone who is established but inactive is still a community member, unless they have indicated by their actions that they are no longer — such as by being active on the fork, meaning they have most likely moved there. I set a fairly low bar for activity. Those who passed it might not be what one would be inclined to describe as active or established, but those who did not pass would clearly be non-members.

Furthermore, as I stated earlier, the purpose of the fork was to be Uncyclopedia's new home — its only home. Many editors of the fork still value that ideal, as was made clear by the talk of merging. This vote did not give merging the Wikia site or shutting it down as an option. When the choice is where — not whether — it will live, those who wish for its death should have no say.

Romartus agreed with the rules I proposed, but no one else commented on them.

When I first saw the forum post, the voting was already in progress. It looked like this. I noticed that Romartus had set out a list of rules that included the account age rule but not "my" rules. I also noticed that Dill Kevlar, who met the first requirement but not the other two, had cast a vote. Romartus had evidently gone to bed at this point, as he lives in England and it was well after 1:00 UTC/GMT. I figured he had made a mistake, and I panicked a little, thinking I had to do something before it got even more out of hand. I added the missing rules and struck DK's vote.

If DK had not yet voted when I saw the page, I would still have added those rules, but I would have been in less of a hurry. I might have realized that I should give some explanation of what I was doing, perhaps in the edit summary. There was none.

DK became angry and hostile, saying "I guess your reader community doesn't matter" and unstriking their own vote. I struck it out again, but Miley Spears appeared, objected to the rules and undid the strike. She had been in the admin email group when I proposed the rules but said nothing. I made this comment explaining my actions:

Whether DK was acting in good faith, I can't really know, but their behavior was not appropriate. DK and Miley did not accept my reasoning and went on attacking me:

As I explain above, I intended the vote to be limited to members of the Wikia site's community (who could also be fork editors). This is not a put-down of anyone who is excluded, as the vote is about what is best for that community. Where the site is hosted is not the business of those who contribute not to it but to its competitor, and it has a negligible impact on the average reader.

At 5:08, Lyrithya made a post with an overview of each candidate host. She said this about her offer to host the site:

This made it even clearer that they were not offering a merger — at least, not at this time. My concern was that, in this case, a future merge vote would come out in favor of the merge because many or most of those opposed to it would not migrate to the Lyrithya-hosted version and the vote would be regulated and judged by fork editors.

She listed "pros" and "cons" for each candidate, giving this list for me:

The "cons" here are legitimate except for the last item. I had already explained myself over two hours ago, and she overlooked or ignored it, instead inventing a motive. Even without that and assuming I was malicious, it is untrue. All I did was strike out one person's vote, so it is not the case that I "[removed] votes" of "community members", and DK was not a community member anyway — they were not an established editor, and they claimed to be just a reader. Lyrithya was so intent on using DK to prove a point that she ignored their own words.

Finally, none of this has much to do with how good I would be at hosting the site. IT people aren't known for their community relations skills. If I act "unprofessional" in a venue like this, it's par for the course.

When Romartus came back online, he confirmed that it was an oversight. He also stated that DK's vote would remain because the rules had not been fixed when it was cast. He asked Lyrithya to strike out her last point. After a brief exchange, she did so.

The situation appeared to have settled down at this point, but Miley began causing trouble again. My efforts to counter this were largely ineffective.

On 16 March, Romartus restarted the vote. The new vote had separate sections for each option instead of just one section. He added votes cast in the original round of voting to the new sections, including DK's vote. I think this was unwise, as all the rules were already in place at that point and a single vote could make a very large difference. Whose vote counts in something like this is not about being fair and inclusive to everyone who has an opinion, but rather what is best for the community of the website under discussion. As unfair as it may seem to exclude someone like DK, it is even more unfair for their vote to count against the wishes of actual community members.

The only person to vote for me was Nigel Scribbler. I asked him in an email to switch to Miraheze because I thought it had a better chance of winning, but he instead switched to Carlb. Snarglefoop had voted for Carlb but switched to Miraheze because Carlb would not win. Later, however, Nigel switched to Miraheze as well.

Romartus did not vote himself until 24 March. At this point, Miraheze and Lyrithya's server would have been tied at 8 if not for DK's vote. Carlb had one vote in favor, from Expert3222, and I had none. Romartus voted for Lyrithya's server and locked the voting forum, stating that this is where the site would move to.

Moving to Lyrithya's server

On 24 March, Romartus opened a forum titled "Uncyclomedia" (archived, live site) in which he announced that the Wikia site would move to Lyrithya's server. This server is often called "Uncyclomedia", though the term can also refer to Carlb's hosting.

I left this comment on it:

Rhubella Marie responded:

I gave this reply, then made no more comments there. At this point I had decided to walk away from Uncyclopedia issues entirely because I did not want to be part of the site anymore if it was hosted on Lyrithya's server. I also needed a break, as the whole situation was a stressful mess. I intended to come back if (and only if) there was a change in direction and it ended up being hosted somewhere else. I stopped work on the backup during this period, resuming it at a later date.

This was actually incorrect. Nigel had said that he thought the score for Miraheze should be 9, and I took him at his word; in fact, he miscounted. His vote brought it to 8. Also, Romartus had previously stated that the vote would end on 23 March at "midnight in Hawaii". However, the consensus is still clearly lacking.

Before Romartus cast his vote and closed the forum, Miraheze and Lyrithya were nearly tied. The only thing breaking the tie was the vote from DK. DK's vote was dubious and probably shouldn't have been counted. Who else voted for Lyrithya is also telling. I noted in an email that "no one who has said they, personally, want the site to survive has voted for Lyrithya". Simsilikesims said the sites should remain separate, but she herself supported merging them, taking the separatist position for the sake of others. Aside from her and Romartus, no one else supporting that option had endorsed remaining separate in these discussions, either publicly or privately. Conversely, those voters who supported merging were all in favor of Lyrithya. There seemed to be a general feeling on both sides that moving to Lyrithya's server = merging with the fork. It's not hard to see why: while it is not the same as merging, it is clearly a step in that direction, and it was presented as such.

I was too hard on Romartus, and on reflection I don't blame him. I blame those who put him in that position. People who know how to conduct something like this the "right way" don't just grow on trees, and the "right way" in this case is not obvious. Neither is the rightful outcome.

Miraheze had been looking less and less like a good candidate. They are a small operation that runs on donations, and during the discussions it came to light that they were really struggling. In particular, they were running out of disk space and probably could not fit a wiki as large as Uncyclopedia until the situation was resolved. Also, as above, not everyone who voted for Miraheze preferred them. Nigel and Snarglefoop didn't, and neither did I (I would rather have voted for Carlb).

Lyrithya posted this response to me:

I did not reply because I wasn't sure how or if I should do so. On one hand, it came closer to making up for the past than any statements by other fork editors. On the other, she does not apologize for anything specific, only for things she speculates about having done but says she doesn't remember. She also says nothing about her attack on me in the voting forum. That said, I remember her as one of the better people on the fork. There was some negativity between us, but most of what she did wrong was fail to intervene.

This was the extent of her remarks addressed to me in that discussion. She and other fork editors did not seem to notice the problems with the vote.

On 4 April, Lyrithya (using another account "Haydrahlienne") announced that a copy of the Wikia site's database had been started and "should finish in a few days".

On 7 April, Awesome Aasim asked what the new domain name would be, since uncyclopedia.org had not been released. On 8 April, Lyrithya responded:

On 9 April, Carlb offered the domain name uncyclopaedia.org, but Nigel said it would be a bad idea. They discussed the domain on the 10th and 11th but did not conclude anything. The discussion stopped here and resumed on the 19th.

Finally, on 20 April, Lyrithya announced that the site was online at a placeholder domain.

From the backup copy I had made, I knew that some piece of JavaScript was causing the main page to appear blank. (I didn't figure out what it was until later.) I also knew that it contained code that required one of the "DynamicPageList" (DPL) extensions to function. I made sure one of these was installed on my wiki, partly because I wanted to produce a presentable screenshot.

The main page of un.uncyclopedia.co looked like this:

That mangled raw code at the top is the featured article system. This is what it looks like when DPL is not installed.

Lyrithya's request that we "try to fix stuff" was not something we could entirely follow through on. MediaWiki extensions can only be installed with server access. DPL is hard to work with but easy to install, and the problem was obvious, so in theory it could have been recognized and fixed in minutes by a member of the technical team. It was not.

Even if it had been possible to fix all the issues without server access, we still couldn't have because she had not set up logins.

What does this mean? Wikia does not provide dumps of user data, so for users to carry their accounts over when a wiki is moved off, workarounds are required. Included with the grabbers is a script called "populateUserTable.php" that creates user accounts with no passwords based on other imported data such as edits. There are two MediaWiki extensions (MediaWikiAuth and StubUserWikiAuth) that enable users to log in to these accounts with their Wikia credentials. On un.uncyclopedia.co, there was only one user account (the one created automatically as part of the MediaWiki installation), and neither of those extensions was installed. Also, editing and account creation by anonymous users were disabled. All this meant that there was no way for us to do anything on the wiki.

Changing course

While I had stopped editing, I had not asked to be taken off the email list, so I continued to receive messages from the admin group. On 6 April, I received an email saying that Miley Spears and Alden Loveshade were the same person. Evidently Zombiebaron had sent evidence of this to Romartus. It turned out that this person had voted three times for Lyrithya's server using the accounts Miley Spears, Alden Loveshade and Devil Details. Discounting the two extra votes, Lyrithya was at best tied with Miraheze. Discounting both the extra votes and DK, Miraheze was the obvious winner.

At this point, logically, someone should have made a public statement that Miraheze was the rightful outcome and begun the process of moving there. Instead... nothing happened. No one was willing to take that step. There hadn't really been a consensus for Miraheze either, and there was little support for it in the admin group, as it was still looking dubious and unfeasible. (The disk space issue was not resolved until 9 April.) There was also no collective interest in any other option. We didn't know what to do.

In an effort to provide a "proof of concept", I rented some cheap web hosting and imported my copy of the Wikia site into it. On 17 April I sent out an email linking to this, offering my services as a backup option in case other options did not work out or the site moved away from Lyrithya. I regretted not doing something like this earlier, as if I had, others would have known I could pull it off and there could have (possibly) been a more likely candidate for getting the majority vote. I had considered doing it when the vote was in progress, but I did not want to seem pushy. Also, I am not really a technical person. I have no formal training in anything computer-related, never mind the areas relevant to a project like this. I learned most of what I needed to know after I started the work. At the beginning I didn't even know what kind of web hosting would be required. If I had been an expert in MediaWiki and the so-called "LAMP stack", I could have put up something good-looking and visible in a lot less time... but I wasn't.

I wasn't really expecting to end up hosting the site, as others were still intending to use Lyrithya's version. This had not gone up yet because we were waiting for them to pick a domain name and they were waiting for us to do the same.

After Lyrithya's site finally went up on 20 April as un.uncyclopedia.co, we noticed the broken main page and inability to log in and edit. I suggested telling her to open the site up for logging in, but others seemed to feel that her team just wasn't done yet and we should wait for them. So we waited. And waited. Meanwhile, I continued working on my version of the site, since it looked like we might need a "plan B" but I hadn't been told yes or no.

On 25 April I acquired the domain name "uncyclopedia.ca" because it was available, it was cheap, and I could obtain it due to living in Canada. I attached this to my copy of the site to add some completeness. On 30 April I rented a dedicated server and moved it there.

The aforementioned problems with un.uncyclopedia.co continued to be unfixed, and there were others as well, most remarkably the presence of cached content from en.uncyclopedia.co. I was informed of this by other admins but didn't see it for myself on the Linux computer I mostly use. When I looked at the site on my Windows laptop, however, it became obvious. The main page looked like this:

There are several differences between this and the screenshot in the previous section, notably:

• The content of the main page. Aside from the obvious lack of broken code, it closely resembles this snapshot of the fork's main page from April. The Wikia site's main page was very different.
• In the first screenshot, the links in the top right indicate that account creation by anonymous users is disabled, as there is no link for creating an account. (MediaWiki does this automatically.) The second screenshot has the set of links that appears when account creation is enabled. Account creation was disabled on un.uncyclopedia.co but not on the fork.
• The links in the left sidebar. In May 2019, the main page of uncyclopedia.ca looked like this, with a sidebar like the first screenshot. (This sidebar was not available in the Oasis skin, so it could not be seen on the Wikia site.) The main page of en.uncyclopedia.co looked like this, with a sidebar like the second.
• The number of articles given. The Wikia site had over 32,000 articles, while the fork had closer to 30,000.

un.uncyclopedia.co is present in the Wayback Machine. One snapshot shows the erroneous main page, while the other shows the real, broken one. The statistics page shows that 32,252 is the real number of articles, not 30,788.

On 10 May, after a lot of waiting and indecision, it was decided: uncyclopedia.ca would be the Wikia site's new home — not un.uncyclopedia.co.

Finalizing the move

On 10 May, Nigel Scribbler created a forum post titled "Uncyclopedia is moving" (archived, live site), announcing that uncyclopedia.wikia.com would close soon and the site would continue elsewhere. He did not give the new location yet because we were waiting for me to finish some aspects of uncyclopedia.ca. There were problems that had to be worked out, including bad decisions I'd made about how to handle updating the database after new changes to the Wikia wiki (discussed here).

On 12 May, Romartus announced the new location there as uncyclopedia.ca. This prompted the following discussion:

Both sides of this try to put all the blame on the other. Neither is entirely right, but I believe that Lyrithya is the closer to being entirely wrong.

There should have been communication between us and Lyrithya's team about what was going on. It would have been good if someone in the admin group had let them know we were considering hosting the site somewhere else, mentioning both the lack of a real consensus and the problems with un.uncyclopedia.co. It would also have been good if someone from Lyrithya's team had made clear why logins, account creation, etc. were not available and that they were waiting to hear from us — that is, assuming this is true and not just a reason she gave after the fact. Neither of these things happened. This is unsurprising, however, and requires no assumption of bad faith to explain: both the Wikia site and the fork tend to be somewhat disorganized, and neither side fully trusts the other.

Lyrithya is unwilling to accept any responsibility for what was wrong with the site. She puts all the blame on us for not telling anyone about the problems. Coming from the spokesperson of the technical team, this is a disturbing attitude. Reporting problems is good and should be encouraged, but the people who actually fix them should be looking out for them too. Given what un.uncyclopedia.co was like, this did not seem to be happening. The DPL and caching problems (which had nothing whatsoever to do with "upstream MediaWiki") were so glaring that someone should have noticed them and at least tried to do something, or even just mentioned them to us as being known issues and on the to-do list. Did they? Apparently not.

Most people on the Wikia site were not technical experts, not even to the extent that I was. Nigel Scribbler is no exception. His remarks here show that he didn't understand the nature of the caching problem well enough to report it. Lyrithya still blames him for not telling her, and she doesn't seem to grasp the issue herself. While it's, again, disturbing that she doesn't get this, it's little wonder that Nigel doesn't. The average person who saw something like that would just be baffled or assume the misplaced content had been put there on purpose. I had to think about it before I understood what was happening, and even now I don't know what really goes on inside the server to produce something like this. I can't recall ever seeing it before. All I really know is, if this happens to your website, you're doing it wrong.

I can sympathize with her apparent feeling of betrayal on finding out that she would not be hosting the site after all and the work done was for nothing. I know exactly what kind of work is involved and how hard it is. I admit I was disappointed when I thought I would not be hosting the site and my own work would serve as nothing but a historical record. I'm also aware that she and the other technical staff have busy lives, including setting up the other ex-Wikia wikis they'd agreed to host, while I had the privilege of basically unlimited free time. But to the people you're doing the work for, none of that matters. All that matters is if you can get the job done. I did, more or less; Lyrithya's team did not. Who is to blame for that is ultimately irrelevant.

On the other hand, I believe there's a darker side to this than Lyrithya's team being busy and disorganized and then having hurt feelings. They host a competitor site, en.uncyclopedia.co, and the original statement about the hosting offer implied strongly that it was meant as a step on the way to merging. They were not invested in keeping their hosted version of the Wikia site alive in the long run, so they naturally had less of an incentive to work on it than on the other newly acquired wikis. Those other wikis came out better but had their own serious problems, indicating that there was also a general insufficiency of time to work on technical issues, interest in doing so, and/or competence. un.uncyclopedia.co just got hit harder. As for putting responsibility on us for picking a domain name and dealing with problems, this can be ascribed to a view of us as a separate community — which we were. It was our site, the line of thinking must go, and so they're our problems that we have to go fix. They're just providing the space. To an extent this makes sense; ideally, domain choice and rewriting code on wiki pages should be dealt with by the community. It stops making sense when the community can't or won't deal with the issues themselves. This is not respect but "us" vs. "them". "We" are not "their" problem.

During the discussion on 13 May, un.uncyclopedia.co was taken down, putting the final nail in the coffin of Lyrithya hosting the site. The very next day, uncyclopedia.wikia.com was closed. Sannse brought it back up briefly so one last dump could be obtained; after that it went down for good.

And so it was that uncyclopedia.ca became the Wikia site's new home. I don't like that the domain name is close to uncyclopedia.co, but using the Canadian TLD is oddly appropriate: this is the Uncyclopedia that stayed with Wikia when a rival faction broke away for independence, much like Canada staying with the British Empire when the Americans fought to leave.

Is uncyclopedia.ca the same website/wiki as uncyclopedia.wikia.com?

Yes and no.

From a technical point of view, they are obviously not the same wiki. uncyclopedia.ca is an imperfect copy on a different server. But when moving a website to a new server, you always have to copy it; it's never really "the same". Digital information is not transferred the way physical objects are. If Wikia provided full database dumps instead of just pages and history, I could have made a much better copy in much less time, but it would still be a copy.

There was a brief period in which uncyclopedia.wikia.com and uncyclopedia.ca coexisted, meaning that uncyclopedia.ca could be considered a fork. Usually, though, the point of making a fork is that it splits off from the original project and goes its own way. uncyclopedia.ca was meant to be a mirror or replacement. It diverged somewhat when it first began to be edited, but I recovered everything I could from uncyclopedia.wikia.com right up to the day of closure, meaning that it is less a fork and more a continuation. It picked up where the closed wiki left off. (I merged content from uncyclopedia.wikia.com into uncyclopedia.ca twice, once with edits up to 8 May and once with edits up to 14 May. The first time, I brought over a more up-to-date copy and imported new changes from uncyclopedia.ca into that. The second time, I imported material from the final Wikia dump. The imports I made are logged here.)

uncyclopedia.ca is not a domain name Uncyclopedia has previously had, and no previous domain redirects there. This was sadly unavoidable because Wikia has not given us any previous domains. Does this mean it is not the same site? Plenty of websites have changed domains, and their old domains do not always redirect for one reason or another, but they do not become different websites.

It's difficult to prove that uncyclopedia.ca contains the uncyclopedia.wikia.com data, but there is strong evidence. While the Wayback Machine does not contain a complete archive of the Wikia site, it has a good deal of it. If you find any page from uncyclopedia.wikia.com there that hasn't been deleted, I am 99.99% certain that you can also find it somewhere on uncyclopedia.ca. If you try one and don't find it, tell me.

This article has some examples of archived content, namely the links to forum posts. Every pre-move forum I mentioned can be found on uncyclopedia.ca and in the Wayback Machine, though what's in the latter does not always have all the discussion. Another good example is the abuse filters. I made sure all public data relating to them was in the Wayback Machine because the script provided with the grabbers for importing the filters did not work and I wanted to make sure they were preserved. Later I wrote my own script, ran it, and retrieved every filter and its full history. This is the page on uncyclopedia.wikia.com that lists all the abuse filters. This is the corresponding page on uncyclopedia.ca; this is how it looked on 12 July 2019. You can see it is somewhat different, but this is because changes have been made to some of the filters and some of the usernames on the Wikia site were wrong due to a Wikia technical problem. If you look at the filter histories for the public filters, you will see that all the entries from the Wikia site are there. Here is the history for the filter numbered 1; here it is on uncyclopedia.ca. This is one of the filters affected by the username problem, so here's one without it: here is the history of filter 24, and here it is on uncyclopedia.ca.

The statistics page is also telling. The last archived version of this page on the Wikia site is from March 2019, and most numbers it lists are very close to those given on uncyclopedia.ca in May 2019. Note, however:

• All Wikia wikis have a unified login and share a user table, so the number of registered users listed on their statistics pages is always the same large figure that includes every account created anywhere on Wikia. This is somewhat misleading. The number of users listed on uncyclopedia.ca only includes accounts created by populateUserTable.php (corresponding to Wikia users that had made at least one edit or logged action to the site, including creating an account there) or created directly on that wiki after it went live.
• The number of edits listed on uncyclopedia.ca is smaller because deleted edits (edits to pages that were later deleted) are included in the number and about 70,000 of these could not be downloaded with the script provided for that purpose. This is because of a problem on Wikia's end. I was not able to do anything about this, but I screenscraped most of these edits with a script I wrote and saved them as HTML pages. They are preserved but not in the database.
• The number of articles listed on uncyclopedia.ca is slightly smaller. I originally wrote that this was because of "a database table that did not fill in properly", but I now believe it to be a combination of Wikia counting articles differently from the default MediaWiki setting (as I observed a similar discrepancy in article count after moving Wackypedia, where I made sure to rebuild the database tables) and a small number of missing pages (which I've now fully retrieved).

Many of the Wikia site's editors came to uncyclopedia.ca as well. Most of the regulars came over, though some who were new or edited less frequently have not yet arrived; they may not have found us. Wikia wikis no longer provide lists of active users, but I can show contribution histories that list edits extending from before uncyclopedia.ca existed to after the closure. Here are some:

• Alec Pradeux
• Aswaldi
• Carlb
• EStop
• Llwy-ar-lawr (me!)
• Nigel Scribbler
• Romartus
• Simsilikesims
• Snarglefoop
• Spike

If uncyclopedia.co did not exist, I think no one would question that uncyclopedia.ca is essentially the same site as uncyclopedia.wikia.com. The existence of one fork makes it seem as if this is yet another fork and not the original, but is it really? I would say no.

Uncyclopedia was not hosted on Wikia to begin with, and it was located at the address "mrpalmguru.com/uncyclopedia". When it moved to Wikia, what came to reside there was a mere copy of the original — and a broken one at that — and the "mrpalmguru" URL went dead instead of becoming a redirect or a separate version. Was it still the same website that had been founded in January 2005? Of course it was.

When en.uncyclopedia.co was created in January 2013, most of the active editors moved over there, but many remained behind. uncyclopedia.wikia.com still lived. Was it no longer Uncyclopedia, the original, just because another website had the same name and its own fork of the content? Of course it was. Even if every editor had departed never to return and it never saw another edit, it would be. Usually it is technically impossible to "move" a wiki away from Wikia because they are unwilling to close the original wiki, so the closest one can get is a fork.

So when the content and editors from uncyclopedia.wikia.com moved somewhere else and there was nothing more at that domain, was that "somewhere else" not still the same thing? What else could it be?

uncyclopedia.ca has the original Uncyclopedia's soul in a new body. Its old body withered and died, but it lived on. So it goes.