Fantendo - Game Ideas & More
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For Fantendo's home page, see Project:Main Menu. For Fantendo's visitor introduction and FAQ, see Project:Help/About.
Wiki-wordmark

Current Fantendo wordmark, typically a blue obround with the text "Fantendo"

Fantendo was a mistake
Plumber, Fantendo's founder, joking on January 26, 2019

Fantendo is a creative writing wiki hosted on Fandom. (If you aren't reading this on fantendo.fandom.com, you're viewing a mirror website.) The idea behind Fantendo is that anyone can describe entertainment they think of in an encyclopedic style, without needing to actually program or produce it. Project:Help/About includes more detail on Fantendo's premise.

The initial focus of the wiki was Nintendo game ideas, as indicated by the former tagline, "Nintendo Fanon Wiki". However, users quickly began creating other forms of media, original works, and ideas related to other franchises, all of which are encouraged to this day. The wiki also covers real media and content from it in relation to fan ideas.

Fantendo's mascot is Unten. Litle P and Redge have also been considered mascots at certain points.

History[]

See the Interview with Fantendo’s Founder

Fantendo was created by Plumber on April 13, 2007 as a serious, expanded take on UnMario Wiki. Two other Super Mario Wiki users helped convince Wikia staff to start the wiki separately from UnMario Wiki. Plumber created the first fangame article, Paper Luigi, and would eventually start Unten's home series, That One Series With a Long and Uninteresting Name That I Do Not Wish to Remember.

Fantendo would far exceed early expectations for its longevity—Plumber expected it to languish within months, persuaded by a Super Mario Wiki server outage called the Wiki Drought. In its first year, Fantendo attracted a userbase that used dedicated chatrooms and planned the first Fantendo Fanon Federation. Though the event was viewed as a failure at the time, F3 2007 began a tradition of showcases for users to hype up and promote their work. Before the turn of the decade, the community had come into its own. Many users, including admins, had joined Fantendo on its own merits, rather than through Super Mario Wiki, UnMario Wiki, or Userpedia.

The Image Hall of Fame was established in January 2009, showcasing users' eagerness to match official Nintendo renders and box art by whatever means were available. Later in the year, the first Fantendo Smash Bros. game was created, and Fantendo enabled Wikia's blog feature, superseding the community's own blog infrastructure. A Facebook page was created in December, the first of many attempts at giving Fantendo an external social media presence.

In early 2010, the community approved plans to transition Fantendo off of Wikia and join NIWA, the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, of which the Super Mario Wiki is a member. Technical problems hampered usability and stifled the effort. In June of that year, the Sysop Approval system was created, originally intended to mark articles that would have priority in a move to other wiki hosts. Also paralleling Super Mario Wiki, a weekly poll system was created soon thereafter. October 2010 brought an attempted move to ShoutWiki. This also fell through, in spite of the promotion of new administrators to monitor and ease the transition.

Elite Fisticuffs was created in June 2011, and is credited as the first umbrella game. The following days then brought contentious infrastructure changes, the Wall of Shame and a shipping section, both of which were later removed. Meanwhile, Twitter accounts and a gaming variety YouTube channel were created, but would only last for a couple of years.

In September 2011, the first community character, Zerita, was designed and became a major ally for Unten in subsequent works. The Fantendoverse's article was then created in December.

Throughout 2013, Fantendo amassed a TV Tropes article, a French-language sister, an official Tumblr blog, and Wikia's onsite chat client alongside another secondary chatroom. As of early 2014, Craptendo was founded, serving as a satirical, spammy repository for low-quality articles and jokes. The Fighters of Lapis Wiki was also founded in April 2014, followed by a Spanish-language Fantendo in the next month.

Despite this growth, 2014 is considered a sore point in Fantendo's history. Contentious administrator promotions led to new rules and blocks that many other users found unjust. They migrated to another new wiki as a refuge. Eventually, Wikia staff agreed to step in to demote the administrators in question. The overall changing of the guard was farther-reaching; by the end of the year, the bureaucrat team had seen a complete turnover.

In January 2015, Fantendo Smash Bros. Shattered was created. It sent the Fantendoverse into a massively popular rebooted era, which, arguably, would define the rest of the decade in Fantendo content creation.

An appeal process for blocked users was instated in late 2015. However, other administrative struggles would mount over the following years, such as content-light articles for Mario character edits, and questionably handled cases of sockpuppetry.

While Fantendo's Skype presence transitioned onto Discord in early 2017, the onsite chat client remained active with custom extensions, chatbots, and message archival. However, the community's health could be questioned. Exaggerated conflicts and toxic social norms compounded throughout the latter half of the year. In February 2018, many users reflected on issues such as aggression, perceived elitism, and misconstruction of criticism, sparking varied efforts for a more welcoming community.

In early 2019, users again considered moving away from Fandom, but a new move to ShoutWiki tapered off like before. The following year, a community scandal led to months of fallout and unrest, inspiring a mass exodus. The Unified Community Platform rolled out within the same timeframe. It deprecated several wiki features, thus reigniting the hosting debate, and exposed issues with local custom CSS.

As the community slowly recovered, newer works and characters were praised while users reevaluated and rebooted classic series with a new perspective. In February 2021, Fantendo changed its tagline to "Game Ideas & More" for clarity. Preparations for Fantendo's fifteenth anniversary in 2022 further boosted morale. Several inactive community members returned to celebrate their formative experiences on the wiki, including Plumber, who accepted multiple interviews. Fantendo was considered to enjoy a renaissance.


Governance and community[]

Fantendo is moderated by a team of volunteers with special user privileges, with the goal of enforcing the wiki's rules and article standards.

The main role in this hierarchy is the admin, which can rollback, protect, and delete pages; block users; and edit protected pages and MediaWiki messages. The bureaucrat role includes all of these powers as well as the right to promote users. Bureaucrats are considered Fantendo's head admins. The maximum amount is currently three. There are also several lower moderator roles that offer subsets of the admin rights, geared towards specific aspects of the site.

Admins also have the exclusive non-technical right to warn users for breaking the rules or continuously breaking the article standards. Depending on the severity of the infraction, up to one reminder and two successive levels of warnings can be issued before a user is blocked. Each warning expires a year after being issued, or once the user's block expires. If a user is blocked for 6 months or longer and meets certain other criteria, they may submit a block appeal to attempt to reintegrate into the community.

The admins communicate using a private Discord server; this was formerly arranged using Skype.

Fantendo's articles on existing subjects are, like on many other wikis, communally owned and editable by the entire community. However, Fantendo users are considered to own any fanon articles they create, and must extend editing permission to others if desired. Users are allowed to make minor presentational corrections to others' articles, and to flag them for violation of the rules or standards, but altering the vision or content of a fanon article without permission is considered vandalism.

Fantendo has an enduring community of editors, some of which have contributed to the wiki since its inception. It is a common source of observational humor that many established users are drawn back to the wiki after announcing their departure.

Community members often hold discussions through user blogs, and use a chat client for general real-time discussion. The first such client was the now-deprecated Fantendo Babblecoaster™ IRC channel, which was succeeded by a new IRC channel on mibbit, called #fantendo. In the early-mid 2010s, the mibbit channel was complemented by the addition of the on-site chat client, colloquially known as wikichat, and the two services were simultaneously used; however, by the mid 2010s, the mibbit channel became mostly inactive, and the wikichat became the main chatting service of Fantendo. The current iteration is an official Discord server; users migrated to Discord in 2017 due to the platform being more sophisticated than the wikichat, with persistent message history, multiple channels, reduced need for plugins, and a stable API.

Fantendo has attracted a diversity of users in many respects such as geography and identity. The community has substantial queer and neurodivergent demographics, and increasingly pushes back against intolerance.

In February 2018, several users voiced concerns that the community was treating new users unempathetically and in bad faith. In response, new measures, such as a mentorship program and introductions page, were enacted to reduce hostility and attempt to onboard more users. The following years reinforced this as many established users moved on from the wiki.

Affiliates[]

Fantendo is officially affiliated with Nintendo Wiki. It was formerly affiliated with Fighters of Lapis Wiki and Mario Kart Racing Wiki. The Lapis Wiki was initially created for the Fighters of Lapis series, and later expanded into a general umbrella game host, with a stated goal of focusing on content creation over Fantendo's community aspect. Another sister wiki was Craptendo, which was created to host content that would not meet Fantendo's standards; site staff took Craptendo down on July 17, 2019.

Additionally, Fantendos have been created in other languages than English. Due to the creative nature of Fantendo, these editions vary wildly in coverage, original content, rules, and feature sets. Multilingual users embody a variable overlap between the communities. The language editions currently recognized by the English Fantendo are the French Wiki Fantendo, created in 2013, and the Spanish Fantendo Hispana, created in 2014.

Fanon uses[]

Fantendo is often cited as a generic developer or publisher in company fields on fan works' infoboxes.

Fantendo can also refer to several fictional game series, typically involving crossovers between other original series on the wiki. These include Fantendo Smash Bros., Fantendo Saga, Fantendo Kart, Fantendo Origins, Fantendo RPG, and likely various one-off projects.

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