Former Lexicanum Editors' Warhammer 40,000 Wiki Shuts Down After Dispute With Bell of Lost Souls

How it happened

Bell of Lost Souls announced in September 2014 that Lexicanum had joined its network, and Lexicanum's current terms name BoLS Interactive LLC as the operator.

In their November 6 statement, the wiki staff say they first contacted wiki.gg on June 9, 2026, got the host's legal approval on August 12, and had a private version running by September 11. They say the site left private mode around October 11. A project Bluesky post says it opened to the public on October 12, and the editors announced it on Reddit on October 15.

The editors say they copied Lexicanum's public content using MediaWiki's built-in export tools and a public archiving utility. They say they didn't use AI or copy Lexicanum's internal database, and they acknowledge that user pages were included in the export.

They say legal threats reached wiki.gg on October 21 and that wiki.gg removed some of the copied user pages after that. They also say they "can only surmise" the host weighed the cost of a legal defense and decided to withdraw, which they present as their own guess.

As of November 10 the site asks for a password, and the Internet Archive's last live capture of it is from the morning of November 5. The editors say they're looking for another host but haven't named one.

What the editors say about the license

The editors argue that Lexicanum released its article text under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC-BY-NC), which let them copy and adapt that text with credit and for non-commercial use. "We just took our own work with us," the Feddit statement says.

Lexicanum's general disclaimer says that, "except where otherwise specified in the Terms of Service," text on Lexicanum sites is licensed under CC-BY-NC. Creative Commons' own license deed says "the licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms." That's how the license works in general. Whether its terms were met in this case hasn't been decided by anyone.

The editors say Lexicanum replaced its terms of service on October 18, three days after their Reddit announcement, and that new terms can't apply retroactively to text that was already licensed. A current Lexicanum Terms of Service page says main article text becomes CC-BY-NC only five years after its most recent edit. It also says user pages, talk pages, templates, help pages, and page histories are "expressly NOT subject to the CC-BY-NC license," and it bans automated bulk copying without written consent. The page doesn't show an effective date. Internet Archive captures show it went up sometime between October 3 and October 27, so the October 18 date is the editors' claim.

A second, older Terms of Service page is still live on the same wiki, dated August 2014. It has no five-year clause, but it does ban using "any robot, spider, scraper or other automated means" to access the site without written permission.

The editors also say Lexicanum banned "12 of the community's most productive editors" in a matter of days starting October 16, including some who had contributed for about 15 years. Lexicanum's public block log shows 10 accounts blocked indefinitely on October 16, one on October 20, and another on November 7. Most of those entries say "Unacceptable behaviour" or give no reason, and the log doesn't connect them to the new wiki.

What Bell of Lost Souls says

According to Spikey Bits, Vela said the new wiki was a complete scraped copy of Lexicanum, and that BoLS flagged it to the host, noting that user pages unrelated to Warhammer had been copied too. He said the host then took it down on its own. Spikey Bits also reports Vela saying that anyone is free to start their own wiki, and that Lexicanum has never claimed to own Games Workshop's intellectual property.

Still unclear

It's still open whether the copied lore text was allowed under Lexicanum's CC-BY-NC terms, whether later terms can change that, and what passed between BoLS and wiki.gg. wiki.gg hasn't publicly explained its decision. The editors say the wiki had about 25,000 active users and 20,000 edits during its run. Those are their figures, and we haven't verified them.