Greetings everyone,

As a staff member of warhammer40k.wiki.gg, we unfortunately have to announce to you the sudden closure of our website. This announcement has already taken effect, and the website will not come back on this host. This part of the adventure is done.

The short version: this is due to legal threats made against our host, wiki.gg, by Bell of Lost Souls, LLC (owners of Lexicanum).

As for the longer version and now that we can speak freely, we want to set the record straight about what happened. First, a full timeline of events:

• Bell of Lost Souls acquired the Lexicanum on September 5 2014. With time, conditions steadily degraded for both editors and visitors, in terms of technical performances, monetization, and administration. Things reached a tipping point in 2026 on all these subjects. A large number of editors slowed down their productive output or even abandoned editing entirely because they simply couldn’t take these conditions anymore.

• The idea of a fork, a duplicate of the original website that will then evolve its own way, started floating around in summer 2026. This is a very common thing in wiki culture. If you enjoy a particular gaming wiki on wiki.gg or Weird Gloop, chances are that it started as a wiki on the dreaded Fandom platform, and then forked away from it, only to become best in class about its topic. In the case of the Lexicanum this was legally possible ever since they came up with their new Terms of Service in 2014, since they explicitly put the wiki under the CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial) license. Once again this is a very common thing in wiki culture, but it seems Lexicanum staff didn’t realize what they had written themselves until very recently. More on this later.

• After contacting wiki.gg on June 9 2026, the company’s legal team gave the go-ahead for the fork on August 12 2026 (quite a long wait!) In the meantime, construction of a new community started outside of Lexicanum-managed channels. With the authoritarian streak they had already shown time and time again, there was little doubt they wouldn’t agree with losing their status and powers over the people that provided value to their business model for zero personal benefits.

• The team then took several weeks to discuss its new mission statement, come up with new democratic processes in order to make sure the Lexicanum’s managerial woes would never repeat again, and make its first votes about both staff and hosting. Things then proceeded until the wiki was delivered in private-access mode on September 11th 2026. The team immediately went to work, making thousands and thousands of edits to adapt the content to their new vision. Many editors kept working on both sites as a show of good faith between communities. This is when Lexicanum upper management started learning of the project and started banning editors who spoke of it.

• On the technical side of things, no AI was used in the process of forking away from them. Mediawiki provides, out of the box, the ability to export content. We used a public archiving tool and its dump generator to make backups of the site, a tool that has already been used countless times in such situations. The Lexicanum’s internal database was never copied, only its public content, like it happens in most wiki fork cases. This was done using the built-in export function from MediaWiki, the software Lexicanum is running on. Yes, the same MediaWiki Wikipedia runs on, it’s basic wiki culture.

• The wiki left private-access mode around October 11 (wiki.gg’s onboarding process usually is exactly a month), until we publicly announced our existence on Reddit on October 15. Some were understandably doubtful about our appearance, but many in the 40k community were relieved they could finally access a wiki that had good performances, was readable on mobile devices, didn’t have Cloudflare blocking several entire countries at a time, was not monetized as heavily as Lexicanum, and was finally willing to stand for change and improvements.

• Starting October 16, Lexicanum’s management prowled our wiki’s Recent Changes list in order to go back to Lexicanum and ban there absolutely everyone who contributed to the new site, even people who were 100% unrelated to the fork as a whole, or people who wanted to keep contributing to both sites. It was a blanket ban that resulted in those editor’s user and talk pages being erased, despite their reputation being the only tangible trace of their thankless contribution to the community. This can be seen in their public block logs: 12 of the community’s most productive editors were banned in a matter of days, including some people who had been contributing for 15 years. If you have ever read Lexicanum at some point, there is no doubt that you have read some of these people’s work.

• After that, Bell of Lost Souls completely discarded their old Terms of Service and hastily came up with a new one, effective starting on October 18. At this point it must be said that old content can not retroactively be covered by a new ToS. This new ToS also notably contains the following: “Article text located within the Mediawiki Main Namespace will become subject to the CC-BY-NC licence at a date of exactly 5 calendar years after the creation date of the most recent modification.“ That’s right. Lexicanum actually removed itself from the free information sharing space. It wants to be able to keep copy pasting materials from sources such as Games Workshop or other websites by pretending to respect CC-BY-NC, but they are now forbidding anyone from doing anything with the work of their editors for five years after an article’s last update. Which basically means for life, since a simple edit takes seconds and can be done by anyone to renew Lexicanum’s copyright. They didn’t inform their own users of that change in any public channel whatsoever, which is understandable, considering these volunteers were turned overnight into unpaid Bell of Lost Souls interns.

• Legal threats were then sent to wiki.gg on October 21 2026. We won’t enter details about this because there is much wiki.gg didn’t tell us, but as a show of good faith, measures were taken by wiki.gg on the 40k Wiki to comply with some of the demands, such as the erasure of user pages copied from the old website. Things stayed relatively quiet and gentlemanly during this time period as the 40k Wiki kept growing in content and editor count.

• On October 27, renowned Black Library author Noah Van Nguyen, writer of books such as Elemental Council, discovered the website and enthusiastically posted a message about it on Bluesky. This metaphorically broke a dam, as Lexicanum staff on the same social media then started going after Noah Van Nguyen themselves, and then launched a campaign of harassment against our own staff, spreading slander and weird threats of doxing and physical assault pretty much non-stop ever since. This resulted in the launch of our own Bluesky account. While we didn’t want to get into a flamewar, we wanted to make public our initial mission statement, which even now we are still firmly holding on to. We still believe in the values of democracy, of treating editors fairly and respectfully, and of making sure readers from all over the world can access our content.

• We thought things were going fine until, on November 5 2026, wiki.gg suddenly decided to drop their support of our community, despite having greenlighted every step of the process ever since June of the same year. The wiki was closed on November 6, leaving us very little time to handle the fallout of their decision.

So now that the timeline is done, let’s address some specific points.

Are you doing this for money?

No. We are simply a group of editors who heavily contributed to the old Lexicanum, some of us for 5 years, some of us for 15, and who left for a better alternative because we couldn’t take it anymore. We just took our own work with us.

Lexicanum explicitly followed the CC-BY-NC licence between 2014 and October 2026, as shown in their own Terms of Service. CC-BY-NC explicitly allows copy, redistribution, transformation, and the building upon of material as long as appropriate credits are given, which we did, and as long as content is not monetized, which we weren’t. None of us is getting any dime for our work, unlike the Bell of Lost Souls staff, who are happy having ads overload with a Patreon-walled ad-free experience for what is essentially summarized Games Workshop content written by unpaid and poorly-treated volunteers.

Lexicanum’s new Terms of Service are essentially turning it into a closed-off moneymaking machine, but those terms can’t be retroactively applied to content that was forked before they were written.

Then what happened?

We don’t know. We can only surmise wiki.gg compared the projected cost of our legal defense and decided not to take the risk.

This is as far as we know an unprecedented example in wiki history. As explained earlier, tons of wikis fork away on the regular, and even the global corporation Fandom never tried to go legal over it. We can only theorize that Bell of Lost Souls would have lost the trial had it gone to court, but that wiki.gg preferred not to try it, since once again this is a first for the wiki editing community.

What did you achieve?

In the three weeks of its public existence, warhammer40k.wiki.gg’s stats absolutely soared. We recruited about 10 more editors, becoming the biggest and most active 40k wiki community, created about 300 new articles, uploaded around 500 new files and updated loads more, and made around 20k verifiable, human-made edits. What we were most proud of, was our ability to service readers from all over the world, unlike the old Lexicanum which heavily restricts readers by their countries or devices of choice, with a bias against regions such as South America, the Middle East, or Asia. A thing that Lexicanum management seems to find very funny in private channels.

Analytics showed us getting 25k active users and 163k views in these short three weeks, showing a clear interest from the community in our project. Fair and free elections were held, resulting in the democratic election of 2 new Administrators (including me yay!). The frontpage and many templates were heavily overhauled, resulting in a streamlined user interface. We started writing summaries for all Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40k novels. We even made RTS pages about Dawn of War IV. We had extremely cool icons made by one of our members.

We weren’t just a lore website, we intended to become a full and complete hub about Warhammer 40k and home wiki for games such as Dawn of War and Total War 40k, something similar to what the Warcraft Wiki is in relation to Warcraft as a setting. We were even in the process of voting a policy that would allow us to cover selected community content, wanting to preserve and safeguard 40k culture as a whole.

How does this impact the wider 40k community?

Rather terribly, we’d say. Since they banned the large majority of their own editors, Lexicanum has become a shell of a website, only useful as a money-making tool for Bell of Lost Souls. Most of the wiki was already written around the times of 4th edition, so prepare for things to get even more outdated, while you are served slowdowns, ads, Patreon messages and video shorts generated out of unpaid volunteer-written content. Also, if you are visiting from a country on Lexicanum’s blocklist, you have no alternative solution anymore.

What’s next for you?

We are exploring options for what is coming next. One of the things we can tell, is that we would like to remind Lexicanum staff that doxing is punishable by a prison sentence of up to two years in their own country.

We are all very proud of what we managed to offer the community in less than a single month of public existence. Shame about wiki.gg dropping us out.

The Planet broke before the Guard did. We hope to see you all again soon.

The 40k Wiki team