4 ms·

The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wi

by chx 4y ago

The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.

insightcheck 4y ago
The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and several others for less popular games) remain active, though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find some for particularly niche games, as some information (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than nothing for smaller games. [0] https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche. How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.
  - piperswe 4y ago
    There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      Fandom's lockin is mainly not being able to migrate your community (they will ban you if you link to the new community) and having more SEO juice than you.
    - Arcorann 4y ago
      Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).
    - EamonnMR 4y ago
      Someone will copy your wiki's content into Fandom and Fandom will starve you voa SEO.
      - antifa 4y ago
        If that's really happening, then DCMA take-down?
        EamonnMR 4y ago
        Most Wikis use permissive licenses. Also, has anyone actually
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Gotta make a profit. Gotta make the most profit possible. At any cost. Man I hate what the Internet became. Once upon a time your Internet connection would have come with some hosting space that you could use to put up a wiki for your favorite show or whatever. Not any more. Now it's just a pipe to an endless series of people eager to give you a space to put your content that's framed with ads.
nerdponx 4y ago
The Dota 2 wiki is pretty much the canonical "technical reference" for the game.
- joe-collins 4y ago
  There are a few games, mostly high-profile ones, with exceptional wikis or fan sites, but they are exceptions.
  - mjr00 4y ago
    There's probably more than you think -- they can just hard to find due to the shortcomings/user hostility of Google, as has been discussed here recently [0]. As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as its Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half of the second page results that you'll find a link to RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and documents pretty much every detail about the game. In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will never show up at the top of Google results. I still post in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are in the same boat. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010 [1] https://rabidb.com/ https://rabidb.com/
    - Sharparam 4y ago
      What do you mean by PCGamingWiki being a "copycat site"? Copying who? It's always the go-to site I use to check various technical details on games and any tricks that can be done to improve shortcomings of especially older games.
  - wishfish 4y ago
    I don't know that they are exceptions. The wikis for moderately popular but kinda niche games are often in good shape. For example, wikis for The Long Dark and the Kingdom series are two I've used in the recent past. Detailed information. Even the comments are good. Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.
Arcorann 4y ago
There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations). [1] https://miraheze.org/ https://miraheze.org/
FemmeAndroid 4y ago
Completely agree. Since I’ve enjoyed taking a look at some of the good community run wikis others have posted, I’ll shout out coppermind.net, a very useful tool when digging into the lore of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe.

by chx 4y ago

insightcheck 4y ago

The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and several others for less popular games) remain active, though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find some for particularly niche games, as some information (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than nothing for smaller games. [0] https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche. How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...

nerdponx 4y ago
Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.
- piperswe 4y ago
  There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Fandom's lockin is mainly not being able to migrate your community (they will ban you if you link to the new community) and having more SEO juice than you.
  - Arcorann 4y ago
    Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    Someone will copy your wiki's content into Fandom and Fandom will starve you voa SEO.
    - antifa 4y ago
      If that's really happening, then DCMA take-down?
      - EamonnMR 4y ago
        Most Wikis use permissive licenses. Also, has anyone actually
egypturnash 4y ago
Gotta make a profit. Gotta make the most profit possible. At any cost. Man I hate what the Internet became. Once upon a time your Internet connection would have come with some hosting space that you could use to put up a wiki for your favorite show or whatever. Not any more. Now it's just a pipe to an endless series of people eager to give you a space to put your content that's framed with ads.

nerdponx 4y ago

The Dota 2 wiki is pretty much the canonical "technical reference" for the game.

joe-collins 4y ago
There are a few games, mostly high-profile ones, with exceptional wikis or fan sites, but they are exceptions.
- mjr00 4y ago
  There's probably more than you think -- they can just hard to find due to the shortcomings/user hostility of Google, as has been discussed here recently [0]. As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as its Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half of the second page results that you'll find a link to RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and documents pretty much every detail about the game. In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will never show up at the top of Google results. I still post in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are in the same boat. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010 [1] https://rabidb.com/ https://rabidb.com/
  - Sharparam 4y ago
    What do you mean by PCGamingWiki being a "copycat site"? Copying who? It's always the go-to site I use to check various technical details on games and any tricks that can be done to improve shortcomings of especially older games.
- wishfish 4y ago
  I don't know that they are exceptions. The wikis for moderately popular but kinda niche games are often in good shape. For example, wikis for The Long Dark and the Kingdom series are two I've used in the recent past. Detailed information. Even the comments are good. Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.

Arcorann 4y ago

There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations). [1] https://miraheze.org/ https://miraheze.org/

FemmeAndroid 4y ago

Completely agree. Since I’ve enjoyed taking a look at some of the good community run wikis others have posted, I’ll shout out coppermind.net, a very useful tool when digging into the lore of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe.