Circular reporting

As befitting a franchise that has run continuously for 42 years, the Transformers brand is a vast and sprawling one. However, as an intellectual property based around the inherently transient medium of merchandising, both Hasbro and TakaraTomy have, historically, taken a laissez-faire approach to storytelling and have shown general reluctance to compile any kind of official "lore bibles" or "development documents" designed to help new creatives in the franchise get up to speed with individual characters, concepts, or settings.

As a result, the largest compendium of Transformers knowledge is, in fact, this very website you are reading this article on right now, and many creatives have confirmed that they have used our wiki when writing stories or looking for toy references. While wikis have a few advantages over "in-house" lore bibles—they can be edited by anyone, not just professionals, for instance—their main downside is that... well, they can be edited by anyone. Although we at TFWiki.net strive for accuracy and neutrality when covering Transformers topics, there have, historically, been cases where inaccurate or misinterpreted information or photographs on this very wiki have gone on to inform official Transformers toys and fiction. Wikipedia formally terms this circular reporting, but we opt to call the phenomenon citogenesis, based on the xkcd strip that satirized the concept.

Some of the biggest shows and franchises you follow have zero in-house continuity documents. They do everything off of fan wikis.Gail Simone, Twitter

Examples of citogenesis

Color Conundrum

Azimuth

File:Mc-06 kronoform catalog.jpg

Azimuth was originally a minor character who appeared in The Covenant of Primus. Beyond a brief namedrop, she went unseen for several years until 2015, when the "Ask Vector Prime" Facebook feature revealed that she sported a body based on the gold MC-6 Kronoform toy. However, when a different version of Azimuth appeared in 2020, in IDW's Transformers comic, she was colored silver—a mixup that almost assuredly stems from the photo on Azimuth's wiki article more prominently displaying that figure, with the "correct" gold figure tucked away on the far right.

Lost Light vehicles

Scrapmetal

YOU MAAAADE MEEEEEE!

The character that the wiki identifies as "Scrapmetal" was created through a complicated, decade-long tennis match between the wiki and Hasbro. In 2009, shortly after the theatrical release of Revenge of the Fallen, the wiki created a page for the then-nameless character under the half-jokey title "Ze little one". Rather than assuming that the character was a Scrapper clone, wiki editors at the time decided that he was his own character, as the scene where Constructicons went underwater featured a yellow Volvo excavator that didn't match to any of the other characters. "Ze little one" quickly picked up an ironic fan following, and by December of 2009 Hasbro called him "Scrapmetal" and identified his alternate mode as "the bulldozer." The wiki documented this and moved on. Around the same time, Revenge of the Fallen Devastator's page noted that the film version of the character was formed from an extra bulldozer compared to the official list of his components.

Almost ten years later, Hasbro announced a giant, fully-articulated Devastator toy formed up from multiple figures from the Studio Series toyline. It is not 100% clear, but what appears to have happened is that whoever was planning the character selection looked at both Devastator and Scrapmetal's pages and decided to marry these two random tidbits by making Scrapmetal the extra bulldozer. Then, the individual(s) assigned to design Scrapmetal's toy consulted the wiki page to figure out who the character was and instead made them a yellow excavator with the robot mode of the concept art randomly chosen for the main picture of the article—the end result of the wiki stringing together tidbits of contradictory information from the movie.

Notes

• In case it is not clear, the term "citogenesis" derives from the verb "to cite". Be not confused by the pronunciation; citogenesis is unrelated to the cytoplasm of cell biology.