How Fans Saved Sexypedia From Being Erased From the Internet

On October 25, the small fan community behind a chronicle of fandom called Sexypedia awoke to find that years of work had been erased. Anyone who tried to visit the wiki was greeted by a message informing them the wiki had been “closed.” The volunteer archivists panicked and scrambled to pick up as many pieces as they could—and move them to a new home.

Sexypedia’s name comes from the tongue-in-cheek idea of the Tumblr Sexyman. The term arose in the early 2010s, after Tumblr users noticed commonalities between the most popular characters on the site. The MCU’s Loki, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, even The Once-ler from The Lorax—all were some combination of skinny, white, well-dressed, and morally gray. Since then, the term has shifted to describe a range of fan favorites. More than a specific label, “Tumblr Sexyman” is a way to think about discrete fan communities as linked, part of a greater cultural movement.

Created in 2020 as a joke that quickly turned serious, Sexypedia became the primary reference text for this movement. Hosted by Fandom, formerly known as Wikia, the database was a labor of love, managed by a small staff of volunteers who mostly organized its contents via Discord server. During the past four years, Sexypedia, while not exactly sexy in the explicit sense, became a valuable repository for, and oral history of, an otherwise ephemeral part of cheeky internet horniness.

On the night of October 24, that archive began to disappear. Confused users started posting screenshots to the wiki’s Discord server, showing that every page on the entire site had been replaced with a notice reading that the entire database had been closed.

After a fan craze dies down, it can vanish like it was never there. Thousands of creative works, dozens of developing ideas and entire trends can be lost to history. The internet hasn’t changed this: A Pew Research Center study earlier this year found 38 percent of webpages from a decade ago are no longer accessible. Efforts to preserve the web are often under threat, like the recent attack on the Internet Archive. The Archive remains up and running, but other sites aren’t as lucky.

Sexypedia’s disappearance “was a punch to the gut for everyone,” says Danny, an administrator on the wiki who declined to give their last name for privacy reasons. The staff received no warning from Fandom before the site was taken offline, and most woke up to the news the next day, with no opportunity to save any recent data. “We really couldn’t do much other than try to appeal the ban and try to figure out what caused it.”

Neither would be simple. The Sexypedia had withstood other attempts to remove the site, including one by its original owner after they left. Fandom received multiple takedown requests, but community members pointed the finger at a YouTube video created by Trig Jegman, a volunteer staff member of multiple other Fandom wikis.

The video, which has received about 3,000 views, recommended Sexypedia be deleted for “outright sexual in content coverage.” The video also claimed hundreds of other databases violated Fandom’s policies. “The decision to add Sexypedia [to the list] was not done out of personal hatred or deliberate targeting,” Jegman says.

The reports led to an internal discussion for Fandom, which must have decided Sexypedia was too inherently sexual to be allowed. Once the decision was made, the site was taken down with no consultation or warning given to the site’s staff, who had thought they were in compliance.

“Our wiki contained no explicit content and was strictly PG-13,” says Lee, who had owned and maintained Sexypedia since 2021. (Lee declined to give their last name, citing privacy concerns.) “[Fandom’s] reason doesn’t make sense, unless they just saw the word ‘sex’ in the title.”

Unlike the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, Fandom is a for-profit company, owned since 2018 by venture capitalist Jonathan Miller’s Integrated Media Company. Recently, a number of fan wikis have elected to create new databases unaffiliated with Fandom rather than deal with the company’s shifting practices and policies. Last year, users and staff of the enormous Minecraft Wiki voted to leave Fandom, saying the company had been “prioritizing its own interests and engagement over those of wiki communities.” (Fandom declined to provide comment on the record for this story.)

The Sexypedia team didn’t have those concerns. “We ran fine with no issue for years, even having Fandom staff help us with things,” says Lee. However, on October 30, when mods asked why the wiki had disappeared, Fandom responded to their support request by saying it violated the company’s Terms of Use and Community Creation policies, effectively denying their appeal to reopen the site. As per policy, though, Fandom permitted the staff to archive the wiki’s data, so it could be restored elsewhere.

The day Fandom denied their appeal, Lee officially requested space from Miraheze, a nonprofit hosting service, as a new home. The community lent their full support to the decision, and for the next two weeks the Discord was a hive of activity, preparing the legions of skinny white men before the new site was approved on November 11. It’s currently under construction, but it appears as though the one-of-a-kind catalog of fan love has been saved.

To inaugurate the new site, the community even held a vote on which character would get the honor of the first page on the site. The Once-ler won handily, continuing a tradition that even those who continue it don’t completely understand. It’ll be a little easier, though, now that the Sexypedia is back online.