The Fandom/GTA Wiki Plagiarism Scandal

There are few sites on the internet that have generated as much vitriol as Fandom.

The site, which allows users to create and manage wikis on various topics, has battled controversy after controversy over the way it attempts to generate revenue from the community-generated content that it hosts.

Over the past few years, many of the site’s largest communities have left including the Warcraft Wiki, The Hollow Knight Wiki, the Runescape Wiki, and the Minecraft Wiki to name just a few.

However, back in March, the Grand Theft Auto Wiki (GTA Wiki) became the most recent major defection. Citing censorship and excessive advertising, the site opted to move to its ew home, gta.wiki, just months ahead of the of the highly anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto VI.

Though the move has been largely successful, as per Fandom’s policies, the old Wiki is still up, albeit becoming more and more out of date. With nearly 23,000 articles and none of the previous active contributors, it is struggling to keep up with the changes in that space.

Still, no one expected that the wiki would be the subject of plagiarism allegations. However, that is exactly what happened as user Monkeypolice188 highlighted at least five examples of content being copied nearly verbatim from the new GTA Wiki to the old one.

To make matters worse, Fandom, when approached with these similarities, did not handle the situation well, even going as far as to deny a copyright takedown request. Though they have since backtracked on that position, the damage has been done.

However, this is just the latest in a large number of issues users have had with the site. To that end, to understand why this story is not unexpected, we first need to understand a bit of Fandom’s history and how it got to be so reviled.

A Brief History of Fandom

Fandom was originally founded by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales in 2004. At the time, it was named Wikicities, though it would change its name to Wikia just two years later.

Built on the open-source MediaWiki platform, the site allowed users to create and manage wikis on targeted topics. Overall, it was successful and rebranded as Fandom in 2016.

However, 2018 was something of a turning point for the site. The site was acquired by the private equity firms and, over the next few years, began to expand its empire by purchasing other sites such as Giant Bomb, Metacritic and GameSpot.

Things began to truly turn sour in early 2023. That was when the company’s financial situation began to deteriorate and it was forced to conduct multiple rounds of layoffs. It’s also the time in which the site began to ramp up its efforts to generate revenue from the community-generated content that it hosts.

To be clear, there had always been some contention between the for-profit company and the community-driven user base. However, during this time, the company began to increase the number of ads on the site, often to the detriment of the user experience.

The highlight (or lowlight) of this was the “Grimace Milkshake” incident, which took place in June 2023. There, Fandom sold and replaced the Grimace page on the McDonald’s Wiki to McDonald’s to promote the mascot’s birthday. The company also modified other elements of the wiki, to promote the event.

By the end of 2023, many of the site’s largest communities had either moved or were in the process of doing so. The company began to clamp down on these communities, limiting their ability to link to their new sites and not allowing them to remove the content from the old site.

Then, in early 2024, Fandom began to add new AI features that added yet another layer to the controversy.

Still, even for those who stuck around, the situation continued to deteriorate, leading to the GTA Wiki’s move in March 2026. That, in turn, brings us to what happened this week.

The Fandom Plagiarism Controversy

After the GTA Wiki made the move to its own site, Fandom did not take the old version down. Instead, it continues on in a “zombified” form, with all of the active contributors moving to the new site.

The biggest development since the move was the release of The Kortz Center Heist DLC for GTA Online. Predictably, the GTA Wiki covered this expansively, with several articles related to the DLC being published.

However, text from those articles began to appear in the original (and abandoned) version of the GTA Wiki. The text was largely copied verbatim with only minor changes (see above). To make matters worse, the admins of the GTA Wiki were able to track who was making the edits and caught them accessing the new site just minutes before the edits were made on the old one.

It’s a rare case where plagiarism isn’t just proved through similarity, but through direct access and logs.

But, at this point, it would be easy to dismiss this as the new admins of the old site just doing a poor job. After all, these are both supposedly community-driven sites.

However, after admins from the GTA Wiki removed the content, someone from Fandom put the content back up and banned the admins from editing the old site. They then told the admins to file a copyright notice. The admins did just that and then Fandom rejected it saying:

“The overlapping material does not constitute copyright infringement or plagiarism…. Due to the underlying structure of both wikis being historically shared, a degree of structural and formatting overlap is expected when documenting identical, real-time updates.”

The explanation did not sit well with the GTA Wiki contributors and admins. They noted that the GTA Wiki’s Creative Commons license requires both attribution and non-commercial use, both of which were likely violated by posting the content to Fandom. However, due to a lack of resources, they felt they couldn’t do anything about it.

But as the media got involved, Fandom backtracked on its decision and removed the content. It said a second review found that the content did not meet their editorial standards for originality and had terminated the relationship with the responsible contributor.

Still, the story isn’t going to do a great deal to turn around Fandom’s reputation. The past three years have been incredibly rough for the company and allegations of content theft from a competing wiki aren’t going to improve things.

What it Means Moving Forward

I’m going to set aside the allegations that the plagiarism was done by someone paid by Fandom. While Fandom “terminated the relationship” with the contributor, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were hired. However, even if they were, that doesn’t mean that Fandom told them to steal the content.

Instead, I’m going to focus on what happened after it was detected and what it means for the future of Fandom.

The admins of the GTA Wiki tried two different times to draw attention to the issue. First by editing the old site and then by filing a copyright notice. Both times, Fandom shut the door in the face. The solution wasn’t to address the plagiarism, but to ban the admins from editing the old site and then claiming that the content was not infringing when it clearly was.

This is not the first instinct of a company that is healthy ethically and financially. Instead, it’s an act of desperation.

There’s no kind way to put it, Fandom is a dying site. While it’s easy to blame its issues on private equity or recent business decisions, the issue was baked into the concept from day zero. A for-profit wiki host was always going to have be in conflict with the community and non-profit model of wikis themselves.

Those two halves could only co-exist for as long as they didn’t interfere with each other. When that started to happen, the wikis who could leave began to do so and that only degraded the quality of service for those who stayed.

Fandom has taken a lot of steps including preventing the deletion of relocated or forked wikis, banning links to the new sites and, as we’ve seen here, blocking access for former admins. These are not steps that a company takes if they are confident in their future. They are steps you take if you are trying to hold on to what you have.

The plagiarism and Fandom’s response is simply a symptom of a much bigger problem. One that Fandom may never be able to truly solve.

Bottom Line

To me, this story is a cautionary tale, but not one for Fandom, for the wikis and other types of creators.

Many of these wikis got their start on Fandom back when it was a perfectly viable solution. Many even got their start when it was under a different name. However, the issues at Fandom have crept more and more into the daily operations of the wikis and led to increased conflict with wiki operators and users.

It’s a classic example of building your castle in someone else’s kingdom. That might work out fine for a while, but you are always subject to the whims of your (land)lord.

To be clear, this is not just a problem with Fandom. It’s a problem on social media, YouTube, Medium and countless other places. That’s not to say that you should never do this, but you should be aware of the risks and adjust your strategy accordingly.

If you want to avoid what happened to the GTA Wiki, the solution isn’t to find a better wiki host. It’s to host it yourself in a way that ensures portability and independence. Sometimes that isn’t practical, good luck hosting video content anywhere other than YouTube or TikTok, but when it is an option it needs to be considered the default.

Even if the kingdom you are building in is great today, you don’t know where it will be in five, ten or twenty years. If you want to build something that lasts, you have to own the virtual land you are building it on.