Hollow Knight Silksong community follows WoW, Minecraft, and Fallout as it abandons its wiki over advertising frustrations

Best Steam Games — (Image credit: Team Cherry)

As it prepares for Silksong, the Hollow Knight community is migrating its entire fan-made wiki to a new home.

In a statement released on Twitter, the fan Wiki team says that it, as well as many readers, have become "frustrated" with the "aggressive ad campaigns" of its former host, Fandom. The former wiki has been "abandoned," with all of its content migrating to the new site, hollowknight. wiki.

It's auspicious timing, as while the wait for Hollow Knight Silksong has been a long one, the hope is that the Metroidvania sequel is no longer too far away. Back in May, Team Cherry announced a delay for the game out of the first half of 2023, and while we still don't have a release date, that window does imply we're at least approaching the finish line.

That'll likely prove very important for the wiki, which will be the only host of Silksong content once that game comes out. The Fandom wiki can't be shut down, but the statement recommends not visiting or editing it in the future. That likely means a significant dearth of Silksong content, which is in turn likely to render the Fandom wiki largely unhelpful for the Hollow Knight community going forward.

The frustrations surrounding Fandom have been growing over the years, with large communities like Minecraft wiki and Wowpedia migrating just a couple months ago. These communities are a testament to how the internet doesn't have to exist on just a few large profit driven websitesOctober 31, 2023

The Hollow Knight community is far from the first to abandon Fandom as the home of its wiki in recent years. Contributor and indie developer mossbag points out that the likes of Minecraft, World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Terraria, and Fallout have all left the platform, largely over a high volume of ads, and lack of control over what additional content appears on a wiki page. It's not uncommon to see banners pointing out that wiki editors aren't in control of the videos that appear on their pages, and it seems that's driving several communities away as frustrations grow.

The wait for Hollow Knight is nearly at fever-pitch, as it settles into becoming one of the most-wishlisted games on Steam.

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.