Gigantic Wiki FAQ
Welcome to the Gigantic Wiki! An online encyclopedia about action MOBA hero shooter Gigantic, made by fans for fans!
The wiki
How it's started?
The Gigantic Wiki was created on Fandom (formerly known as Wikia) wiki hosting service on 15 July 2014 by user BlizzKrut. It's a community run project, and is separate from the official Gigantic Wiki created on Gamepedia wiki hosting on 16 July 2014.
Why it's not on Fandom anymore?
After Fandom rebranding and several technical updates, a lot of things on the wiki broke apart, and since the game was officially dead at that point, nobody was bothered to fix it. In the following years the overall quality of Fandom as wiki hosting has degraded significantly, so Legroom (the last active administrator of the wiki) considered the migration of the project at some point in the future. On 3 October 2023, in the light of Gearbox Publishing's announcement of the Throwback Event, the process has finally started, and by late November it was finished. Thus Fandom wiki won't be updated in the future, and instead the community is encouraged to use and contribute to this new instance.
What's happened to official wiki?
The Gamepedia wiki has an official status, there actually was a Motiga (Gigantic's developer studio) employee behind it. But prior game's full release it already was in very poor condition, a lot of info was outdated or missing and there was zero activity. In December 2018 Gamepedia wiki hosting was bought by Fandom's parent company. Eventually that wiki was archived as inactive and having less content, while Fandom wiki inherited its official status in the merging process, despite the game itself being shut down at that moment already, and Motiga being disbanded even earlier.
What is Miraheze?
Miraheze is another free wiki hosting. It was founded in 2015, and unlike Wikia/Fandom it has no ads, it's strictly non-profit and runs on donations and volunteering. On top of that, it recently has merged with a 501(c)(3) charity organization. Other advantages Miraheze has over Fandom include a software instance full of diverse and handy additions and without restrictive modifications or bloatware, a lot of freedom in customization, very transparent government and communities staying fairly autonomous. This platform is the closest thing one can get to independent wiki hosting, without worrying about hardware, software and other complicated things.
Why not wiki.gg?
wiki.gg hosting is basically Gamepedia 2, it has the same people behind it and the same rationale. On surface level it looks like a better alternative to Fandom, but in reality, it’s nearly as restrictive as Fandom. On top of that, being under ownership of a commercial company, there’s a high risk that some kind of corporate buy-out will happen again.
Why this wiki is so hard to find in Google?
Fandom is infamous for its ridiculously overpowered SEO (search engine optimization), which is a result of excessive ads, tracking and modifications of MediaWiki (the software which powers many wiki sites) to cater to Google’s requirements. So, no matter how low quality or inactive a Fandom wiki is, in 99% of cases it will be the first link you’ll see in results, and in our case it's two Fandom wikis. While wiki.gg has some of these perks too, it still struggles heavily against Fandom. And finally, Miraheze wikis are left to themselves in SEO department and it’s incredibly hard to get indexed by Google in the first place, let alone crawl to the first page. For that reason, wikis which depart from Fandom rely heavily on wider community support, such as:
- ignoring Fandom links, and looking up and clicking on
gogigantic.wikilinks instead; - using Indie Wiki Buddy browser add-on for results filtering and redirect;
- sharing
gogigantic.wikilinks on public places, like Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit etc (Twitter, Instagram and Discord aren’t public though).
One good thing, however, we don’t have to worry about other search engines, like DuckDuckGo and Bing, they do their thing by themselves already. It’s just Google’s popularity and jankiness that hinders us.
Why not delete Fandom wiki?
Unfortunately, it's impossible due to Fandom's so-called Forking Policy. In short, admins of Fandom wikis have no full control over them, and if they want to move a project away, Fandom staff will demote them and suppress any mentions of or links to migrated (forked) wiki. The real intention here is, of course, to keep the wiki open for continuous ad revenue; as proven of several occasions, this platform doesn't care about projects and communities around them. Both mammoths like Minecraft Wiki, and smaller ones like Pizza Tower Wiki, all of them are going trough the same SEO battle as Gigantic Wiki does now. The only way to make Fandom delete a fairly big and remarkable wiki is IP owner sending DMCA, in our case it must be Arc Games.
Can you become an official wiki?
It depends on whether Arc Games wants to support community projects or not. We don't strive for official status, but an attempt to bring their attention to Fandom claiming to host two “official” wikis and plaguing SEO was made.
Can I support the wiki financially?
As mentioned above, Gigantic Wiki is hosted by a non-profit wiki platform. If you want to keep the wiki online, donate to Miraheze here. Gigantic Wiki admins and editors are volunteers who work on this project out of sheer love for this beautiful game and for its amazing community.
What happens if wiki goes fully independent?
Miraheze doesn't utilize profit seeking practices and doesn't enforce anti-community policies like Fandom. If community seeks to migrate the project to another hosting or manages to self-host MediaWiki by themselves, Miraheze won't oppose its decision and won't keep its resources by deleting its instance on request.
Contributing to the wiki
I never edited a wiki, where do I start?
First you need to register an account on the wiki, which is going to be tied to Miraheze’s global account system. After creating an account you’ll notice that there are two types of buttons next to titles and section headings: Edit and Edit source.
The first one will lead you to the visual editor. It won’t reload the page and you’ll be able to edit it as rich content, or seeing as is on the fly. It’s, however, pretty buggy across all MediaWiki sites, no matter how they are hosted, and sometimes it can mess up page’s code.
The other variant will load source code editor. There you will work with page’s actual wiki code. Wiki code, or markup, isn’t hard to understand and is kinda similar to Discord’s markdown. Many experienced wiki editors prefer source editor over visual one, the trick here is to enable syntax highlight by pressing a pen button in the toolbar, and there’s preview button under editor area, next to save. To learn the basics of wiki markup, check these MediaWiki guides:
You also can see how things works by looking into the code of existing pages.
What are templates?
Templates is very neat type of pages used on wiki sites. As the name suggests, they will save your time in adding things which are same across the wiki, such the neat decorated card of a hero with their stats and image, the skill table with upgrades and so on. In visual editor templates are highlighted by a jigsaw icon. In source code templates and their content are purple and contained inside figure brackets - {{…}}. All templates on the wiki have detailed documentations on what they do and how to use them. All available template can be found in Category:Templates, or you can click on "Templates" link in Wiki sidebar. Again, you can also see existing pages as examples of template usage.
What are categories?
Categories is another type of wiki pages. Their purpose is to organize pages, including other categories, like in folders. Some of our templates add categories automatically, but some categories have to be added manually by typing [[Category:…]] at the end of the page. For example, to add Grenn page to category for guardians, we need to type [[Category:Guardians]]. If we need to have a link to the category without actually using it, we type [[:Category:Guardians]] - note the additional colon (:). Here you can see all categories on the wiki in hierarchical tree view.
How to monitor updates on wiki?
Recent changes page is basically wiki's chronological feed; there's a link sidebar on the left, right under Main page link. It shows which pages were edited, which users made these changes, etc. It can be used to quickly fix mistakes or report malicious users.
Is there a roadmap of what needs to be done?
Yes, we have a to-do list. At the time of writing the primary objective is to update all info about heroes according to the new version of the game. Second and third behind are unfinished articles, aka stubs, and wanted pages, aka red links.
Are there standards on how to write?
At the moment of writing this FAQ, we don’t have a solid manual of style. The main rule is “don’t make up stuff”: check the game and sources, and don’t hesitate to ask around. And, of course, keep things grammatically correct and understandable.
Any way to communicate with other editors or admins?
We have a Discord server as the main communication and coordination venue. If you don't have Discord account, you can use talk pages (the Discussion links under page titles), including user ones (User talk:Username).
