Tutorial: Track canon changes on a Fandom wiki

Goal

Monitor how a Fandom wiki's canon pages change over time: when lore-critical statements appear, disappear, or are rewritten — and how editorial consensus shifts.

Steps

1. Point Refract at a Fandom wiki

Fandom wikis use the standard MediaWiki API. Pass --api with the wiki's API endpoint:

refract analyze "Midi-chlorian" --api https://starwars.fandom.com/api.php --depth brief --json

brief reads the latest 20 revisions and prints one event per line, without the changed text.

Use the title of the page itself. Redirects are not followed: "Darth_Vader" on this wiki redirects to "Anakin Skywalker", and analyzing it reports the redirect page's own history.

2. Bound each run

Fandom API rate limits differ from Wikipedia, and the revision cache (-c) is not used with --api: every run fetches from the wiki. Give a revision range to keep the run small and repeatable:

refract analyze "Midi-chlorian" --api https://starwars.fandom.com/api.php --from 15147177 --to 15819492 --json

This range holds 20 revisions. Without --from and --to, detailed depth reads the page's whole history.

3. Export for comparison

refract export "Midi-chlorian" --api https://starwars.fandom.com/api.php --from 15147177 --to 15819492 --format ndjson > canon-events.jsonl

4. Track a specific lore claim

refract claim "Midi-chlorian" \
  --text "midi-chlorians" \
  --api https://starwars.fandom.com/api.php --limit 20

This prints the matching sentence in each of the latest 20 revisions, then when the passage was first matched, changed, removed or reintroduced within them. Without --limit the latest 50 are read; --from and --to select an earlier range.

5. Watch for new edits

refract watch "Midi-chlorian" --api https://starwars.fandom.com/api.php --interval 60000

Polls the wiki every 60 seconds and prints new events as they appear. Press Ctrl+C to stop.

Understanding what you see

Fandom wikis differ from Wikipedia in important ways:

Signal	On Wikipedia	On Fandom wikis
`sentence_first_seen`	New factual claim	New character backstory, power level, or timeline entry
`sentence_removed`	Claim removed (possibly contested)	Retcon — lore being erased or rewritten
`category_added` / `category_removed`	Content tagging change	Canon classification shift (e.g., "Canon characters" → "Legends characters")
`template_added`	Policy template	"Citation needed" on lore claims, "Speculation" tags
`revert_detected`	Editorial dispute	Canon war — competing interpretations of what's official

Retcon detection pattern: Watch for sentence_removed on a long-standing claim followed by sentence_first_seen with different text in the same section. This is the mechanical signature of a retcon — old lore replaced by new canon.

Canon divergence across wikis: Compare the same topic across two Fandom wikis with refract diff. Divergence in categories or template usage between wikis signals different interpretations of what's official.

Example: 2014 Disney acquisition

After Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2014, many characters and ships had their canon status reclassified. Refract captures this as a pattern of:

category_removed: Canon characters
category_added: Legends characters
sentence_modified events as backstories were rewritten to match new canon
template_added: {{Legends|canon}} banners

  △ category removed (rev 123456→123457)
    category=canon characters

  △ category added (rev 123456→123457)
    category=legends characters

The revision IDs and categories above are illustrative; the layout is refract analyze's text output.

Cross-wiki comparison

For the same fictional universe across competing wikis, use refract diff:

refract diff "Darth_Vader" \
  --wiki-a https://lego.fandom.com/api.php \
  --wiki-b https://battlefront.fandom.com/api.php \
  --depth brief

This prints side-by-side counts for the two wikis over their latest 20 revisions: events by type, sections, citations, templates, categories and wikilinks. The title has to be a page, not a redirect, on both.

Troubleshooting

Fandom rate limits: Fandom APIs may throttle more aggressively than Wikipedia. The cache (-c) is not used with --api; bound runs with --depth brief or --from/--to, and add --interval 120000 for watch mode if you hit limits.
Private wikis: Pass auth credentials for private or institutional MediaWiki instances: --api-key <token> or --api-user <user> --api-password <pass>.
Custom domain wikis: Fandom wikis hosted on custom domains still expose the MediaWiki API at https://<domain>/api.php. Find the API endpoint by appending ?action=query&format=json to the wiki's base URL.