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Something I’ve always wondered: Why don’t fan communities host their own MediaWiki instance? I don’t imagine that the storage/bandwidth/compute needs of a nic

Something I’ve always wondered: Why don’t fan communities host their own MediaWiki instance? I don’t imagine that the storage/bandwidth/compute needs of a niche fan wiki would be cost-prohibitive. Then you could completely avoid all of Fandom’s ads.

RheingoldRiver 4y ago
MediaWiki is pretty technically challenging to self-host. It updates frequently and the updates are nontrivial to do especially if you have a large userbase. Also, if you want an extension like Cargo, SMW, DPL, etc, that lets you query data from one page to another, your server demands will go up a lot and hosting can get quite expensive. There's a new competitor though for gaming wikis that's started hosting some forks & some new original wikis, https://wiki.gg/ https://wiki.gg/. Disclaimer: I was a contractor for Fandom until they terminated me in August this year (I ran their esports wikis including Leaguepedia).
- bombcar 4y ago
  Someone needs to offer mediawiki-as-a-service (apparently https://miraheze.org https://miraheze.org tries to do this) similar to Wordpress. It's much easier to do "free on fandom" and so lots of them move that way.
sbarre 4y ago
Because the hosting costs are the cheapest part of it? The real, time-consuming work is building the site up front, then on an ongoing and perpetual basis: doing technical maintenance and updates, moderating the site for trolls and spam, monitoring and logs, backups, user support, community administration, etc.. It's also thankless work because wikis, unlike forums, are much harder places to build a critical mass of users who will be engaged and want to invest time and effort. So you have a proportionally small number of people who maintain the content, and a potentially large audience of read-only drop-in users who are not invested in the community in any way, but just want answers so they can leave. Finding people to operate this kind of site reliably and long-term, unpaid, is really difficult. So instead, for better or worse people get it for free from Fandom, in exchange for ads.

RheingoldRiver 4y ago

MediaWiki is pretty technically challenging to self-host. It updates frequently and the updates are nontrivial to do especially if you have a large userbase. Also, if you want an extension like Cargo, SMW, DPL, etc, that lets you query data from one page to another, your server demands will go up a lot and hosting can get quite expensive. There's a new competitor though for gaming wikis that's started hosting some forks & some new original wikis, https://wiki.gg/ https://wiki.gg/. Disclaimer: I was a contractor for Fandom until they terminated me in August this year (I ran their esports wikis including Leaguepedia).

bombcar 4y ago
Someone needs to offer mediawiki-as-a-service (apparently https://miraheze.org https://miraheze.org tries to do this) similar to Wordpress. It's much easier to do "free on fandom" and so lots of them move that way.

sbarre 4y ago

Because the hosting costs are the cheapest part of it? The real, time-consuming work is building the site up front, then on an ongoing and perpetual basis: doing technical maintenance and updates, moderating the site for trolls and spam, monitoring and logs, backups, user support, community administration, etc.. It's also thankless work because wikis, unlike forums, are much harder places to build a critical mass of users who will be engaged and want to invest time and effort. So you have a proportionally small number of people who maintain the content, and a potentially large audience of read-only drop-in users who are not invested in the community in any way, but just want answers so they can leave. Finding people to operate this kind of site reliably and long-term, unpaid, is really difficult. So instead, for better or worse people get it for free from Fandom, in exchange for ads.