Circular reporting

As befitting a franchise that's 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 stortytelling and have shown general reluctance in compiling 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 calls this circular reporting, but we have opted to call the pheneomenon citogenesis, based on the xkcd strip that satirized the concept.

Three times recently, I have been asked to work on IP with extensive lore and backstory that I needed to brush up on. When I asked if they had bibles or development documents...I was told the same thing all three times... I was told in each case that no suck[sic] official documents exist, and that they 'just use the fan wikis online.' Not because they are lazy or for cost-cutting measures, but because the fans ‘keep better track of this stuff, anyway.’ 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