Earlier this year, the mods and main contributors behind the Fandom-powered Grand Theft Auto Wiki left to create their own version of a GTA Wiki without all the annoying ads and censorship. Now, these mods and writers are accusing Fandom and its paid contractors of plagiarism, and claim to have evidence proving that the massive company is ripping off the work of the smaller team.
On July 14, Rockstar Games released the latest free update for Grand Theft Auto Online. The Kortz Heist update adds a ton of new content to the open-world multiplayer game, all of which has been quickly and thoroughly documented on GTA Wiki. But according to the people in charge of GTA Wiki, Fandom’s paid writers have allegedly been watching closely, copying content nearly wholesale, and then publishing it on Fandom’s Grand Theft Auto Wiki just minutes later.
According to GTA Wiki admin MonkeyPolice188, all but one of Fandom’s recent articles about the heist are “obvious rip-offs of gta.wiki’s content.” So they posted “receipts” allegedly showing Fandom’s recent history of plagiarism, adding that they wanted “everyone to see how shameless [Fandom] are about it.”
Fandom’s paid staff have been blatantly plagiarizing new articles from GTA Wiki. When we removed the infringing content, Fandom banned our admins and claimed the similarities were just a coincidence.
Now we have the receipts.
— GTA Wiki (@GTAWikiOfficial) July 19, 2026
MonkeyPolice188 shareda screenshot of text from the GTA Wiki as well as Fandom’s version, and nearly all of it is the same, with only a few words swapped here and there. Another damning piece of evidence is that when the GTA Wiki first posted information about Merula, a new car added to the game, it contained a typo claiming the vehicle’s top speed was 1870 KMPH. And interestingly, Fandom’s version of the Merula article that was published a few minutes later seemingly contained the very same top speed number.
“We really couldn’t have come up with a better trap street if we tried,” said MonkeyPolice188, referencing an old trick map makers used to do to catch people copying their work without permission.
Kotaku contacted Fandom and GTA Wiki ahead of this article’s publication but didn’t hear back.
MonkeyPolice188 also claims to have evidence of when a specific Fandom writer opened up newly published GTA Wiki articles to allegedly copy the text and code. And when lined up with the timing of Fandom’s publication of each post, it shows only a few minutes between when GTA Wiki’s went live and when Fandom’s article on the same topic went up.
MonkeyPolice188 reverted the changes made on the Fandom Wiki using their own account since they claim these articles violate GTA Wiki’s CC-BY-NC-SA license, which prohibits Fandom from using any of the wiki’s content for commercial use. In response, GTA Wiki admins claim Fandom banned them and told the team to file a DMCA takedown notice with its legal team. The GTA Wiki team says it did and, about 48 hours later, received this response from Fandom’s lawyers:
…the overlapping material does not constitute copyright infringement or plagiarism. Similarities identified such as the use of standard wiki templating and brief, factual statements regarding game updates consist of public, factual data and standard wiki formatting. Due to the underlying structure of both wikis being historically shared, a degree of structural and formatting overlap is expected when documenting identical, real-time updates…
In other words, Fandom is claiming that there are only so many ways to write about this content and that any similarities are to be expected. Hmmm.
According to MonkeyPolice188, after leaving Fandom behind to create their own GTA Wiki, the folks who did so expected Fandom to hire some “scabs that don’t play GTA” to update the popular wiki in their absence.GTA 6 comes out later this year and will bring millions of people to Fandom’s content, and the company needs to have new GTA 6 and GTA Online articles ready for that flood of users. Fandom’s wiki is too big and profitable to become out of date. But the alleged plagiarism and Fandom’s legal response surprised the team at the much smaller GTA Wiki, and the team is no longer assuming good faith. However, due to a lack of resources, the GTA Wiki folks can’t fight back.
“Unlike the people plagiarizing our content, none of us are getting paid to edit the GTA Wiki,” wrote MonkeyPolice188. “We don’t have the money to escalate this any further. Since Fandom is apparently unwilling to follow the law for clear-cut copyright violations, the next-best-thing I can hope is that this cartoonishly evil business practice gets more attention, and more people become aware that there’s a non-dogshit GTA wiki that isn’t covered in 5000 ads.”
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