Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with <10k players, recently had to disable new signups, because the spam was so bad (and it was stuck on an old version of MediaWiki, which didn't have CAPTCHA-support).
On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as a source of such malware.
I imagine the fix for the OP is a thorough audit/cleansing of all malicious content on the wiki, followed by some sort of appeal to Google (which will no doubt take months, if they even respond at all, because ... Google).
Really OP's only hope is that the Google team responsible for this has an Italian Pokemon fan; otherwise they are probably screwed.
For small platforms it makes a lot of sense, for larger the potential for abuse is still there in different forms.
I remember begging my older step brother for an invite since he had the college email to get in
EDIT: I don't actually think it is related, but now that I think of it, the timing corresponds with when I started setting up TDMRep to forbid using my content to train LLMs.
This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.
These organisms aren't collectively sentient, though it could be argued some of the constituent cells are. They are able to influence their environment by using individual cellular consciousnesses to communicate with conscious constituent cells in other organisms.
Ultimately, the organism itself has the goal of producing value for its owners. The methods the organism used to achieve these goals are somewhat opaque to the owners, and potentially inscrutable to the individual constituent cells. If the owners stop receiving value the organism becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.
Recently these organisms have become biological / technological hybrids including unconscious computational models in their reasoning process. That increases the inscrutability and opacity of the process by which it reasons. It's likely the unconscious computational models will eventually be tasked with communicating with similar models in other organisms, at which point the inscrutability will probably increase by an even greater amount.
There's a lot of delayed cause and effect in search, and it's much easier to make a minor mistake that excludes 0.1% of websites from crawling or indexing than it is to detect that it's happened except from affected websites telling you about it.
Scherzi a parte, spero che possiate recuperare presto…
Perhaps they will investigate why 541,000 pages aren’t being indexed. In my experience, Google provides adequate tools for identifying and resolving indexing issues.
Google won’t serve pages it hasn’t indexed. Seems they left a lot of relevant details out of that tweet.
The Pokemon Industrial Complex has advanced astroturfing especially on YouTube/Twitch, where streamers mention the damn things in any second episode, they "accidentally" meet people going to Pokemon conventions in live streams and so on.
Try to audit the Wiki if anyone abused it.
All we can hope for is that people will stop using search (after eventually having enough of the AI wave) for these sort of niche sites and will bookmark and access them directly in future. I don't have much hope.
Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well.
It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or revenue to any third parties at all.
We're watching Google's "embrace-extend-extinguish" arc for the web. It's not over by a long shot, but they absolutely intend to finish the job.