Transcendence AU Wiki:Migration Guide

We are currently in the process of migrating the Transcendence AU Wiki off of FANDOM. There are a lot of reasons to do this, foremost being how FANDOM commercializes our community and uses the work of our editors for their own profit. Migrating off of FANDOM is notoriously difficult, and this page will go over what we aim to do to achieve it.

New wiki

The textual content and history of all pages have already been imported from FANDOM using a database dump taken on November 9th, 2023. Edits made to the FANDOM wiki past that date are not reflected on the new wiki.

Images need to be manually re-uploaded to this wiki. Here is how you can do so:

1. You can use Special:WantedFiles to find a list of images that need to be copied over. Ignore the ones with red links.
2. When you click on one of the blue link images, copy the page name out of the header. This is the text that looks like File:xxxx.png (including the File:). In a different tab, type in https://transcendence-au.fandom.com/wiki/ and then paste in the page name from before (e.g. https://transcendence-au.fandom.com/wiki/File:xxxx.png).
3. Click on the image so that the whole thing opens up, then right click save as.
4. FANDOM wiki converts images to WebP files, so we need to convert them back to normal images before we upload them to the new wiki. The page name from before will tell you whether you need to convert to a PNG or a JPG. You can search for "webp to png/jpg convertor" and you'll find online utilities that allow you to do this.
5. Back on the new wiki, click "upload it" on the image's page. Click Browse, select the file from your computer, and then click the Upload button. You will get an error telling you that the description page for the file already exists. This is fine. Click "Ignore warning and save file anyway".
6. Optional: If the file you've uploaded doesn't have a description and a source link, you can edit the page to add these in. Reverse Image Search tools are a good resource for finding the source of an image.

Old wiki

One of the hardest things about moving off of FANDOM wiki is that they are a trusted source of information, and thus always appear high in search engine results. It is likely that people searching for Transcendence AU will find the old wiki before they find the new wiki. We are not able to delete the old wiki, because FANDOM wants to continue to profit off of our old work. Part of this project will involve making the old wiki less usable to newcomers.

In order to do so, we will want to subtly vandalize every page of the old wiki. FANDOM's tools tend to notice when big sweeping changes are made. In particular, they notice when a lot of pages are deleted, so we have to avoid doing that. So instead, we can fill existing pages with obviously inaccurate and repetitive information.

Of note: do not link to the new wiki from the old wiki, or otherwise mention that we are migrating to a new site. FANDOM is adept at noticing this, and has been known to revert all such changes and then ban the wiki's administrators in order to stop the migration. We have to trust that people will notice that the FANDOM wiki is not useful, and search for better alternatives.