It’s a nightmare scenario for Yu-Gi-Oh fans who have to look up cards with convoluted descriptions. Over the weekend, the administrators of Yugipedia – which, as the name suggests, is a wiki about all things Yu-Gi-Oh-announced that they had accidentally deleted half of wikia’s primary database. “Yugipedia has suffered a catastrophic error,” they declared on Twitter.
“While working on some server issues, one of our server staff noticed a storage volume connected to the server that seemed foreign. After doing some checks to see if the repository was in use, it appeared not to be. Therefore, to save server costs, the storage volume was removed,” read FAQ page about what had happened to Yugipedia. “Unfortunately, we later discovered that the volume was not configured normally, so our prior check failed to detect that the volume was actually in use, and what we removed was the storage volume containing the site’s primary database.” This outage was caused by the cloud provider redistribute the stock to other customers. Like many fan projects, the tragedy was a result of having limited resources. If the owners had been made money, then there would have been no reason to delete their stock volume.
So there you have it: One of Yugipedia’s owners accidentally deleted half the database because they mistakenly thought its data container was empty. The last time Yugipedia had backed up the data was on January 12, 2020 (it had been back up data on a daily basis, but skipped the storage they assumed contained no data). So anything added to the database after that had been deleted. The administrator later clarified on Reddit that the images had survived as they were hosted on another server.
Yugipedia is a completely separate database from the Yu-Gi-Oh Wiki, which is owned by Fandom. Five years ago, the fan community YGOrganization and several prominent members of the Wikia community decided to break away from the Fandom-owned wiki and create Yugipedia. Fandom’s video ads had been 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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The administrators of Yugipedia are currently working with archive sites to bring the wiki back. So are they asks contributors to help by submitting Yugipedia pages from their browser cache. “You will be able to verify all data entries to be submitted before anonymously submitting them,” a Yugipedia admin wrote. “This tool is also open source; there’s a link in the bottom right corner, so feel free to verify this for yourself!”
Hopefully they can get the entire Yugipedia database back soon.