The biggest community-created Grand Theft Auto wiki on the internet is tired of its site being covered in annoying pop-up ads and being forced to censor some words and images. So, less than 8 months before GTA 6’s launch, the editors have ditched the Fandom platform and recreated the wiki as an independent site. It’s the latest example of communities ditching the hated media company over ads and censorship.
Over the weekend, the people who run the Fandom-powered GTA Wiki asked users and editors if they wanted to jump ship and create a new version of the wiki on their own site, completely separate from Fandom’s rules, regulations, restrictions, and guidelines. After a few days of chatting and voting, it was near unanimous: GTA Wiki would leave Fandom behind. On March 16, GTA Wiki announced it had launched a new website with a new domain. This new version of the wiki contains all the articles and content from before, but now more directly under the control of its editors and without annoying ads and videos clogging everything up.
“The biggest [reason for leaving] is [Fandom’s] increasingly aggressive use of ads, which is something us editors do not generally think about as the majority of ads are hidden when logged in,” explained the people in charge in a blog post over the weekend. “But given that 60%+ of our viewers (and a similar stat on many other Fandom wikis) are logged-out mobile visitors, the concern for advertising being aggressive and intrusive is not one we should take with a grain of salt. It is terrible.”
The blog post also listed complaints about large, obtrusive videos that appear at the top of Wiki articles. These videos started showing up in 2017 and have annoyed many wiki editors across different fan communities as they have no control over what videos appear. Often, these videos contain inaccurate or out-of-date information. Another sore point for GTA Wiki’s editors was Fandom’s “Communication Creation Policy.”
“[The CC Policy] has become increasingly tightened, particularly regarding offensive language and graphic media, with enforcement often so overzealous that it even affects images of in-game adverts and audio clips of character quotes,” explained the editors in the blog post. GTA Wiki editors even claim that Fandom’s “restrictive” rules against customization are the reason the wiki no longer features its “iconic” middle-finger cursor when users visit the site on desktop browsers.
With over 20,000 articles, the GTA Wiki is the largest wiki focused on the Grand Theft Auto franchise. And it is likely to only grow bigger in the lead-up to GTA 6′s release in November and in the weeks after the highly hyped open-world game’s launch. So the decision to dump Fandom comes at a very important moment in the wiki’s history.
Other fan wikis have ditched Fandom
The GTA Wiki isn’t the first community-created and maintained wiki to leave Fandom behind. It’s a trend that’s been happening for many years now. In 2025, the Minecraft wiki announced it was leaving Fandom for some of the same reasons listed by the GTA Wiki editors, including restrictions on customization and the abundance of ads. That same year, the Balatro wiki ditched Fandom, too. In October 2024, the official League of Legends wiki announced it was going to leave Fandom behind and create its own site.
These moves have something else in common with the GTA Wiki’s departure from Fandom beyond similar motivations: Weird Gloop. This is a small company that was formed in 2018 to help the Runescape wiki editors and staff leave Fandom and take back control of their site. Since then, the company has started helping other game communities and studios move official and fan wikis to its own hosting platform, as it has become increasingly clear that Fandom isn’t a great platform for wikis that wish to be fast, customizable, and uncompromising on content.
Another reason wikis are growing weary of Fandom is that in February, the company appointed a new, reportedly pro-AI CEO, sparking fears that Fandom-powered wikis would one day be forced to use AI or would be fed into some future AI-generation tool created by Fandom.
“There comes a point when a serious discussion and decision must be held and eventually made,” said the GTA Wiki editors about moving from Fandom. “We feel this time is now.”
Update: 3/16/26, 1:45 p.m. ET: A Fandom spokesperson sent over this statement in response to the admis behind the GTA wiki leaving the platform:
“With more than 250,000 wiki communities across entertainment and gaming, Fandom works with thousands of admins and editors around the globe to create positive, robust online communities for the millions of fans who visit our platform each month. The relationships we have with our creators are extremely important and built upon mutual respect and close collaboration.”
“As the world’s leading platform for fans, we continue to invest in new features, products, and dedicated community support while regularly reviewing policies and best practices based on community feedback.”
“While we’re always disappointed when admins choose to leave, the Grand Theft Auto wiki remains active for the more than 9 million fans who visit each month. We’ll continue to grow and manage the community with new creators and those who choose to remain.”
