Please Help Save the Gender Wiki

Hello, Tumblr. I've never posted here, only lurked. But this is one of the most important things in the world to me, and I honestly need to ask you for help. Please reblog if you can.

This will be a long post. It will be summarized with a TLDR at the end, including ways that you can help.

With over 9,200 pages, we are the biggest collection of gender identities on the Internet, especially the biggest source that is readily available. We are a community that has existed since 2009, and has taken off in terms of growth in the last few years.

Today, Fandom decided to close the Gender Wiki. We were given absolutely no warning, and they've only given us a two-week deadline to move the entire wiki to a new host, which we are utterly unprepared to do. The download would also not include any of the 17,000+ images on the Gender Wiki, many of which do not exist anywhere else on the Internet.

Here is a link to the post Fandom staff gave us today, and a paraphrased summary of it below:

https://gender.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000000132176

Fandom staff says that they won't continue to host our wiki because it "spreads harmful misinformation". They believe we have gone too far in "positioning everything as a gender identity", referring to xenogenders. They mention pages with xenogenders referring to suicide/self-harm and violence --- which we, the staff members, were /already/ in the process of deleting before this notice was given to us. They decided that the best solution was not to ask us to delete those pages, or even delete the pages themselves, but instead to remove our entire database.

There are many other wikis on Fandom with much worse references to violence than the Gender Wiki, which Fandom appears to have no problem with whatsoever.

I cannot express enough that this is erasure, and it will absolutely negatively affect the LGBTQ+ community to not have this treasure trove of information readily available.

I am an admin on the Gender Wiki, and I can assure you that our entire staff team is already trying to appeal to Fandom staff. I'll add any updates if they decide to respond to us, but they have no yet given staff any more information than the above

PLEASE help in any way you can. Reblog, spread awareness, or sign this petition if you have a Fandom account. Archive any Gender Wiki pages, especially ones that don't have pages elsewhere, with the Wayback Machine or alternatively archive.is, or even write posts about them here or on other sites. Please help us save this information. It can't possibly be done this quickly without help.

TLDR: Fandom staff decided that, in two weeks, they will close the Gender Wiki, the biggest gender resource on the Internet. They gave us no warning. It will be impossible to save all of the information on the wiki. Please reblog or sign this petition if you have a Fandom account. Help save the data by archiving pages here or here. Post about this. Help spread awareness.

Update on the Gender Wiki: Switching Directions

In a reply to the original announcement, a member of Fandom staff informed us that Fandom's decision was final, and the Gender Wiki will be closed on April 13. We will no longer be making an effort to change their mind, because clearly it will fall on deaf ears; Fandom still refuses to give us any real answers (such as to why Gender Wiki staff wasn't consulted before this decision).

However, we will not disappear. The wiki is being archived by WikiBot and should appear on this site within 24 hours, thanks to help from ArchiveTeam. Additionally, I'm working with a few users on a possible project that will organize a public "archive" on Tumblr, in which anyone can post all the information about a given gender and tag it, so the information is not lost and is kept accessible.

The Gender Wiki staff is also currently in conversations about moving the wiki to a public and editable site again. At this point it is most likely that we will move to another site (probably Miraheze), and continue from there. After this experience, our ultimate goal will be self-hosting, but this is still a little farther out than two weeks, as we lack experience with self-hosting and that advanced level of coding. (Experienced advice is welcome.)

I'd like to thank everyone, a thousand times, for all the things you've said, in reblogs to my original post or in signatures on the petition. It makes me so incredibly happy to know that our work on the Gender Wiki has positively affected so many people --- because that was /always/ the goal.

Please, please do not harass any particular people about this, even the user who posted the notice on the Gender Wiki. You can make posts targeted at Fandom as a whole, but don't target or harass any person.

So, on April 13, the Gender Wiki as we know it will be no more. But it will NOT be lost forever. We will NOT disappear. We will be coming back, and we hope to see you all there. I'll continue to post updates as things become clearer and plans are put in action.

hi @thegenderwiki ! can you please remove the article on rainic from the gender wiki?