It’s a nightmare scenario for Yu-Gi-Oh fans who need to look up cards with complicated descriptions. Over the weekend, the maintainers of Yugipedia – which, as the name implies, is a wiki about everything Yu-Gi-Oh– announced that they accidentally deleted half of the wikia’s primary database. “Yugipedia made a catastrophic mistake,” they declared on Twitter.
“While working on some server issues, one of our server people noticed a storage volume connected to the server that seemed strange. After doing some checks whether the storage was in use, it turned out that this was not the case. In order to save server costs, the storage volume was removed accordingly FAQ page about what happened to Yugipedia. “Unfortunately, we later discovered that the volume was not configured normally, so our previous checks failed to detect that the volume was actually in use, and what we deleted was the storage volume containing the site’s primary database.” This disconnect caused the cloud provider reallocate the storage to other customers. Like many fan projects, the tragedy resulted from limited resources. If the owners were made of money, there would have been no reason to delete their storage volume.
So there you have it: One of the owners of Yugipedia accidentally deleted half of the database because they mistakenly thought the data container was empty. The last time Yugipedia backed up the data was January 12, 2020 (they were back up the data daily, but skipped the save which they assumed contained no data). So anything added to the database after that was deleted. The manager soon clarified on Reddit that the images survived, as they were hosted on a different server.
Yugipedia is a completely separate database from the Yu-Gi-Oh Wiki, which is owned by Fandom. Five years ago, the fan community The YGOrganization and several prominent members of the Wikia community decided to split from the Fandom-owned wiki and create Yugipedia. Fandom’s video ads were unpopular and the wiki did not allow contributors to add custom code to the pages. Some users also accused the Yu-Gi-Oh Wiki of “stealing” videos from the fan community.
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Yugipedia maintainers are currently working with archive websites to bring back the wiki. They are to ask contributors to help by submitting Yugipedia pages from their browser cache. “You can confirm all data to be sent before sending it anonymously,” a Yugipedia admin wrote. “This tool is also open source; there is a link in the bottom right corner, so feel free to confirm it yourself!”
Hopefully they can get the entire Yugipedia database back soon.