13 ms·

Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

166 points by unleaded 3y ago

prirai 3y ago
Terraria also moved, in a similar move. https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
charcircuit 3y ago
Reminder that all Mojang and Minecraft accounts were deleted last Tuesday. The fact that they are removing a the ability for people to access a game they paid for is unacceptable and should be illegal.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  Huh? What accounts were deleted from where? As a base reading of what you said sounds like "all Minecraft accounts were deleted Tuesday" which surely would have been major news.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >What accounts were deleted from where? All Mojang and Minecraft accounts were deleted from Mojang's servers. >which surely would have been major news. I wish it was. In a few months people will want to revisit the game and then realize they have to rebuy the game if they want to play it again.
    - boomboomsubban 3y ago
      >All Mojang and Minecraft accounts were deleted from Mojang's servers As somebody who's never touched Minecraft, surely all Minecraft accounts are Minecraft/Mojang accounts? If everybody playing suddenly needed to rebuy the game Tuesday it would have been big news.
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        Minecraft now only supports Microsoft accounts as they deleted all other accounts. Minecraft accounts were the original account system that minecraft used. Once Mojang was working on Scrolls they created the Mojang account system to span all of the studio's games. After the acquisition by Microsoft it was changed so that people buying Minecraft would instead use Microsoft accounts.
      - wingerlang 3y ago
        I assume the ability to create new "Mojang" accounts has been closed a looong time ago in favor of the Microsoft logins. The migration from those accounts started over a year ago and they have sent multiple emails about this migration.
Kye 3y ago
Previously: "Minecraft Wiki considers move away from Fandom to new platform" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325
- dang 3y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Minecraft Wiki considers move away from Fandom to new platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325 - July 2023 (25 comments)
hnbear 3y ago
This is their link to their more detailed reasoning: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki:Moving_from_Fandom https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki:Moving_from_Fandom
rabbits_2002 3y ago
Good, Fandom wikis are a nightmare to use.
RockRobotRock 3y ago
Wasn't the Minecraft wiki first a MediaWiki site?
- mschae23 3y ago
  The Minecraft wiki was always (and still is) using MediaWiki.
  - RockRobotRock 3y ago
    What do you mean? Does Fandom use MediaWiki? I remember them having their own independent website. Maybe I'm thinking of the MC Fandom wiki before the theme changed. It used to look exactly like Wikipedia.
jjice 3y ago
Fandom (I really prefer their old name, "Wikia") is a great concept. Deal with hosting the wiki so you can focus on content. The problem is that they need to make money, and to do that, they do it with some of the most obnoxious ads on any reputable site on the modern internet. Using their site on a mobile browser is one of the worst web experiences I've ever had. Autoplaying video ad banners on the top with a smaller ad banner on the bottom while I scroll past an ad in the middle of the article. I'm all for seeing wikis leave them because it'll be a huge usability win. Fandom can still fill the gap for small niche wikis that don't want to deal with hosting and such, but larger established wikis using their own platform will be great.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  Indeed, it's hard to overstate how bad of an experience it is. The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP, a wiki) https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page vs the Elder Scrolls "Fandom" website https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki is night and day in terms of usability and user respect. I think Google is partially to blame as it seems to rank Fandom pages way higher than self-hosted wikis.
- apohak 3y ago
  "The problem is that they need to make money" Stupid question, why do they need to make money? I thought they are maintained by volunteers. For hosting?
  - jjice 3y ago
    Content is volunteer, but I believe the company's infrastructure and software (I believe they use a modified MediaWiki based on an HN comment from an employee a few years ago) are all from a for-profit company. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation are the non-profits you may be thinking of. From the Fandom Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)): > The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co. But note that Jimmy Wales was a founder as well.
pallas_athena 3y ago
the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure's wiki left fandom in 2019: https://jojowiki.com/Special:WikiForum/Leaving_Fandom https://jojowiki.com/Special:WikiForum/Leaving_Fandom
Kye 3y ago
The same announcement on their official Mastodon account if you prefer (or if the Twitter link ever becomes difficult/impossible to access): https://wikis.world/@MinecraftWikiEN/111121512237906439 https://wikis.world/@MinecraftWikiEN/111121512237906439
msp26 3y ago
Excellent. I hope to see more games following suit away from the bloated messes of fandom/fextralife. At times they feel unusable on mobile. And I don't think a single user has wanted to see the embedded twitch streams when they're just trying to get some information quickly.
- tedivm 3y ago
  Terraria moved their wiki and it's a much nice experience.
  - LordShredda 3y ago
    It's a much much better experience, wiki.gg is a plain old wiki farm that just works
  - hn_version_0023 3y ago
    I wish Valheim would follow suit
- bakugo 3y ago
  > And I don't think a single user has wanted to see the embedded twitch streams when they're just trying to get some information quickly. The embedded Twitch stream is there purely as a way to artificially boost viewer counts on their channel. Almost every time a new game comes out, you can go to its Twitch page and see Fextralife at the top with tens of thousands of viewers, with a dead chat because almost nobody is actually watching, it's all from the embed. Twitch-endorsed pseudo-viewbotting to farm ad revenue is a growing trend, there's even several systems on Twitch itself that encourage it, like the drops system.
  - msp26 3y ago
    Don't advertisers care that they're wasting money? Or are they just unaware?
    - iamacyborg 3y ago
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
For some background, the old wiki was hosted on Fandom. All the major volunteer contributors are moving to minecraft.wiki, but the old page will almost certainly stay up, frozen in time, throwing trackers and ads on kids not savvy enough to locate the new link. It is interesting to me how many games, Minecraft in particular, rely on wikis - they're very different experiences, sometimes almost unplayable, if you don't read up on how to make progress.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  I remember in 2009 or 2010, when I first came across Minecraft. It was not hugely popular yet, but it already had quite an active community. I played quite a few hours of the game, both alone and together with a couple of friends. One day, after a couple of weeks or something, I learned about a crafting wiki that told you how to craft different items. At the time, at least for me, it was not clear how you figure out what items you can craft and what items need to be combined in what patterns to craft those new items. So for me, that crafting wiki became quite essential. Maybe other people were figuring out how to craft things by trial and error? Or maybe there was something in the game that told them how to craft specific things?
  - Kwantuum 3y ago
    There was not. There is now but for the better part of a decade it was just... Something you were supposed to have learned from a youtube video or a friend or something.
  - nickstinemates 3y ago
    People figured out from friends how to craft things or looked at the wiki. Then NEI came out (successor is now called JEI) which showed every item and its recipe. Game changer.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Vanilla now has a recipe book, and it's also now "gated" by things you find in the world. But NEI (and of course, NEI in GregTech New Horizons) is the only way to play. Because what is Minecraft without regular expressions in your inventory? https://wiki.gtnewhorizons.com/wiki/Not_Enough_Items#Search_Bar https://wiki.gtnewhorizons.com/wiki/Not_Enough_Items#Search_...
rob74 3y ago
I wish more wikis would take this step - Fandom (ex-Wikia) has become so ad-infested that I honestly avoid looking up stuff there as much as possible (which is a shame, because lots of fans put a lot of work into building those wikis).
- coldpie 3y ago
  It's pretty usable with an ad blocker, and NoScript makes it perfectly fine. But yeah, it sucks that that's necessary.
sebsebmc 3y ago
The Path of Exile wiki made a similar move a few years ago. Fandom was such a limitation for the community and the ads and page speed were awful. Now the Minecraft wiki will have to spend effort beating the Fandom site on SEO so that people get directed to the actually updated wiki. For Path of Exile there was a browser extension that would hide the Fandom from search results and redirect you to the new community wiki.
- yllautcaj 3y ago
  Critically, the developers of PoE also provide hosting for the wiki pro-bono. The service is so beneficial for players I imagine they figured the game would benefit from an ad-free (and therefore more usable) community wiki. Personally I have recently started seeing the correct wiki at the top of searches so I think the SEO battle is winnable with community effort. It helps that Fandom wikis are uniquely unusable without an ad blocker running.
- sockmeistr 3y ago
  Are you thinking of the "Indie Wiki Buddy" extension? They have already added support for the new minecraft wiki: https://getindie.wiki/listings/ https://getindie.wiki/listings/ It's pretty incredible that Fandom/Fextralife have driven people to developing browser extensions just to avoid everything they touch...
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    No, there's a Path of Exile wiki specific extension also. It's slightly counterproductive from an SEO perspective as it redirects Fandom clicks to the new wiki, which gives Fandom all the SEO benefits of receiving those clicks.
    - eterm 3y ago
      Indeed, which is I suspect why fandom still ranked so highly above poewiki for many searches for far too long, and initially even appending poewiki would often return no results or just the fandom result. Thankfully there's been a notable shift in the past 3-6 months. What has finally helped I think is the sheer amount of stale or missing data on fandom, so as a really basic current example, it doesn't have mention of tattoos, a fairly critical aspect of the current league.
some_random 3y ago
Fantastic, I'm really interested in how it goes since the fandom wiki might be the single largest fan wiki project I've ever seen. I'd be surprised if they ever hit parity, but assuming people don't keep updating fandom (why would they?) then it'll be _the_ resource in no time at all.
Svip 3y ago
I still maintain an independent Futurama wiki from Fandom. Back when they were called Wikia, they wanted to merge with our wiki, but I insisted on a no ads policy. So talks basically went nowhere. They still have a Futurama wiki, and ours is still online. Though, these days, it's mostly other editors filling in the content, I am just a system administrator at this point. I am still happy with our decision, because Wikia/Fandom has since then just gotten worse.
- gs17 3y ago
  They really have gotten worse and it's incresibly frustrating that DDG seems to ignore the Infosphere (and WikiSimpsons) entirely in favor of the fandom sites.
  - Svip 3y ago
    I agree, but I also don't want to waste too much of my life chasing SEO. Fortunately, some people find our site.
  - bisby 3y ago
    A few games I play have DDG bangs that take you directly to the fandom sites, even though the games now have their own self hosted wiki. Perfect exactly would be _minecraft_. If you search for "!minecraft dirt" it takes you to the fandom page. Will DDG update the bang to search via the official wiki? probably not! Maybe now is the time to switch to Kagi
    - rbits 3y ago
      I've submiited a request to DDG, hopefully they update it
      - bisby 3y ago
        Hopefully, given minecraft is a large game. I've submitted requests over the years for other games with no change or response even.
  - 3y ago
foxbarrington 3y ago
Anyone else thinking of making a service that can easily fork and host a fandom like this?
- YPPH 3y ago
  I fear such a service may simply tread the same path as Wikia. Also, any hosting platform has to balance user control over extensions and customisations, on the one hand, with system reliability on the other. You can't easily delegate control of extension installation to Wiki administrators, unless you give them console access. The Minecraft Wiki is currently hosted by Weird Gloop which is the entity responsible for the forked RuneScape Wikis, and they manage the servers directly: https://weirdgloop.org/ https://weirdgloop.org/ The harder bit is convincing people to move, and trying to beat Fandom on Google. One of the reasons they picked Weird Gloop is the experience in this space - they've pretty much won the battle in respect of the RuneScape Wikis, which have sat dormant for years.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  I'm not sure how much they automate the forking, but a number of these already exist and were contendors for recieving the Minecraft wiki. https://wiki.gg https://wiki.gg is probably the biggest, but there's also https://abxy.org https://abxy.org and https://weirdgloop.org/ https://weirdgloop.org/, who is now hosting the minecraft wiki
adeon 3y ago
NetHack did this when Fandom was still called Wikia. Luckily, the new forked site won search engines over easily and nethackwiki.com easily comes on first results if you search for NetHack stuff. Unlike NetHack, the Minecraft Fandom site is probably a lot more lucrative in ad revenue. I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures." I had no idea they've been collecting sites like infinity stones. I guess ads pay handsomely? Ugh.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  They also made a chunk of money from selling dndbeyond which they bought for peanuts from Twitch.
- Pxtl 3y ago
  > I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures." Enshittification as a service.
- majewsky 3y ago
  > I had no idea they've been collecting sites like infinity stones. Katamari Fandomcy.
perihelions 3y ago
It's currently my 5th result for "minecraft wiki" on Kagi, after I decided to penalize fandom.com's ranking on a whim. (Also, the 2nd result is an official Mastodon post which mirrors this announcement, so it would be easily discoverable. Not too bad!) (For Google, it's the 7th result for me, below three different versions of fandom.com).
- falsenapkin 3y ago
  I was embarrassingly excited to edit my Kagi Personalized Results with a block for Fandom and a pin for minecraft.wiki. This was yesterday and for me searching "minecraft wiki" and some obvious wiki things was not yielding the new wiki on any of Google/DDG/Kagi. Got me thinking it could be interesting for Kagi to release personalized packages, like say you get into a new hobby (Minecraft) and you can quickly peruse/apply sensible personalization.
jerf 3y ago
Is there some reason they can't just edit the Fandom wiki and modify each page to point at the new one? (Maybe Fandom would revert the changes?)
- Drakim 3y ago
  Would probably qualify under "vandalism"
- rbits 3y ago
  Yeah it's against fandom rules. Wikis aren't allowed to link to their replacements
  - yrro 3y ago
    Ugh. I always hesitate before browsing to a Fandom wiki because the user experience is so full of dark patterns. I guess this is just another facet of that...
  - jerf 3y ago
    Thank you and the other repliers who answered. It wasn't a hard guess, as you can see, but it was an important bit of information to be sure about to understand the story.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > Maybe Fandom would revert the changes? That is precisely what they do. They also, in some cases, ban the mods/contributors making the change.
politician 3y ago
Doesn’t the domain name clearly infringe on Microsoft’s trademark? Even as someone who is knowledgeable, I can see this causing confusion. As useful as this is, I don’t see site lasting for very long at the current domain without an agreement from the trademark owner.
- wallhack 3y ago
  They are likely wise enough not to threaten a community that’s doing tons of valuable free work for them.
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  The previous domain was minecraftwiki.net, and I don't see a big difference here?
- kibwen 3y ago
  IANAL but I would assume that, since they're moving from "minecraft.fandom.com" to "minecraft.wiki", it should be no more infringing than what they previously had, unless second-level domain names are subject to more scrutiny than third-level domain names. And if that's the case, then I would expect that the infringing party would be their domain name registrar, for being the one to sell them the hypothetically infringing name (which isn't to say that the operators of the server couldn't be subject to trademark claims for other reasons unrelated to the domain name).
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  minecraftforum.net has been up for well over a decade at this point.
teekert 3y ago
I always wondered why the wiki was so complete yet so shitty at the same time. I though MS was extracting value via ads. I was wrong. In MCs case a wiki is such integral part of the game it should almost be integrated.
- rob74 3y ago
  The "complete" part is thanks to thousands of fans contributing content, the "shitty" part is "thanks" to the company that makes money from that crowdsourced content. It's the same sad story for lots of wikis, some of them pretty high profile like Wookiepedia (Star Wars), Memory Alpha (Star Trek) etc.
- rbits 3y ago
  In fact, Mojang actually somewhat recently removed the "official" status from the wiki. Although that was probably because of the Fandom stuff.
- kevincox 3y ago
  Yeah, I recently replayed Minecraft vanilla and I really don't understand how you are supposed to discover The End with regular play. They do have some light hints for constructing a nether portal but I couldn't find anything pointing at how to discover the end.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
yoyohello13 3y ago
UESP is the gold standard for wikis. https://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page https://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page
- bpiche 3y ago
  Bethesda enjoyers are blessed with this wonderful wiki. And action RPG fans have fextralife - another solid gold standard for wikis. It's a great time to be a fan. https://fextralife.com/ https://fextralife.com/
  - hightrix 3y ago
    Fextralife is worse than fandom, by far. The forced twitch view botting along with the horrendous site layout make it one of the worst wiki sites that exist.
    - bpiche 3y ago
      That's a fair point. Worse than fandom, I am not sure. Fandom takes up 80% of your screen on mobile with ads. I've had all of the ads blocked on fex for so long, I forgot they existed. Thanks for the reminder!
  - digging 3y ago
    I never thought I'd see fextralife called a gold standard. It's also quite bad... better than "Fandom" though I guess. For example, Bloodborne has a "Fandom", a fextralife, and an actual high-quality wiki at https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/ https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/
- SSLy 3y ago
  They also spun up a Starfield wiki, still no salvation for the Fallout players out there https://starfieldwiki.net/ https://starfieldwiki.net/
  - paradox460 3y ago
    I'm hoping this is the one that takes off. It's very young, and the information is very hit-and-miss, but its growing, and since its a young wiki, its easy to add information that's missing
bpiche 3y ago
Crazy thing is that Fandom is (now) owned by Jimmy Wales! Can you imagine if this kind of advertisement came to Wikipedia? Would make the fundraising banners look like nothing.
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  It was founded by Jimmy Wales but was sold to a PE group. Wales is president of the company though.
  - bpiche 3y ago
    I believe that organization was TPG. Was just serendipitously reading about it this morning after another frustrating attempt at using Fandom. Founded by Jimmy, and now he's the president. I'd say he deserves the lion's share of the blame, regardless of who owns it now.
zeroCalories 3y ago
I've always wondered why a wiki needs to monetize so hard. Most of their content easily cacheable and produced by volunteers, plus the technology hasn't really changed in 20 years. The whole site could probably be maintained by a single dev and a few admins. It seems natural that these sites are going to eventually be replaced because of this. Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.
- bronson 3y ago
  Because Fandom is owned by these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc.
  - aendruk 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc%2e
  - somesoftdev 3y ago
    That's a good point. It's very likely that TPG demands constant growth meaning more profits each year. So Fandom has to put ads everywhere to meet the goals.
- cookmeplox 3y ago
  > Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue. I run Weird Gloop (the group hosting the Minecraft/RuneScape wikis) and your view is generally correct. The content is extremely cacheable and the infrastructure costs have extremely strong economies-of-scale. The labor costs are a bit less obvious, but past a certain baseline (of, say, having enough people for a reasonable oncall rotation), the marginal labor cost of hosting additional wikis is quite low.
  - Ar-Curunir 3y ago
    Thanks for hosting the OSRS wiki! It's amazing, out-of-your-face, and just works.
  - 3y ago
jeanlucas 3y ago
As someone said on YouTube: "fandom is the web equivalent of overpriced laundromats"
thrdbndndn 3y ago
WoWWiki (now called Wowpedia) is thinking about leaving Fandom too [1], which is interesting when you consider their past. Back in the day, WoWWiki started as its own thing before it shifted over to Wikia (what we now know as Fandom). Wikia was even worse than Fandom today. They had this set layout that didn’t work for many of the wikis they brought in. This led some folks from the community to branch out and create Wowpedia, which was on its own again. Later, Wowpedia joined Curse's Gamepedia, kind of like Wikia but not as in-your-face. But here’s the twist: in 2018, Fandom/Wikia bought Gamepedia. So, Wowpedia landed back with Fandom. At some point, they decided to archive WoWWiki so there is only Wowpedia now. ---- My personal opinion in general about this topic is that Fandom is a very bad host (Wikia used to be worse, to be fair), but the worst is having two competing wikis. At least in this Minecraft's case, it looks like the majority of contributors moved together. The situation of WowWiki/Wowpedia at the time was just sad, a lot of hard work went down the drain. And speaking of which, isn’t the Terraria Wiki going through something similar right now? Out of two wikis: https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki I can't figure out which one’s busier right now. I understand that terraria.wiki.gg now is the "official" one, but if you check out their recent change frequencies, they seem pretty close. I can’t help thinking there's a lot of duplicated effort here too. [1] https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Forum:Vote_to_Leave_Fandom https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Forum:Vote_to_Leave_Fandom
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  Out of curiousity: In what ways was Wikia worse than Fandom?
  - thrdbndndn 3y ago
    Their fixed-width layout.
hyperno 3y ago
A similar situation happened with the Spanish Pokémon wiki. (now WikiDex) [1] And if you look for "fandom" in the wiki's search, it redirects to an entry about a location in the game called "Castelia Sewers". [2] [1]: https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/WikiDex:WikiDex_ya_no_forma_parte_de_FANDOOM https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/WikiDex:WikiDex_ya_no_forma_par... [2]: https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/Cloacas_Porcelana https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/Cloacas_Porcelana
vorvac 3y ago
"The new Minecraft Wiki will be hosted by Weird Gloop, the company that hosts the RuneScape wikis." OSRS set the bar pretty high: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/ https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/ Clean, concise, and accurate.
rozab 3y ago
The problem is 'Fandom' (a gross brand name I would refuse to say without airquotes) always has better SEO. The Elder Scrolls has an excellent independent wiki, UESP, but normal people click the first Google result and have no way of knowing it isn't the 'right' wiki
- nwsm 3y ago
  Fandom is a fantastic name for this kind of thing...
mdtrooper 3y ago
https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/
pentagrama 3y ago
>Unfortunately, because Fandom does not close wikis that have moved away, the old Fandom wiki will remain in place and continue to appear in search results. Wow that's vendor lock in right there. Fandom should have features to make the wiki read only, disable new posts, also a feature to pin a permanent banner for announcements, in this case for announcing the new home/link. That will be a much better migration path.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  What incentive do they have to do that when they can just keep the old outdated site up and collect ad revenue from Google pointing people their way.
k12sosse 3y ago
I always considered fandom a great resource.. .. for practicing your element blocking technique in uBlock Origin.
paradox460 3y ago
Starfield is currently undergoing a bit of a wiki arms race. There's at least four that I know of, plus an honorable mention: • https://starfieldwiki.net https://starfieldwiki.net • https://starfield.fandom.com https://starfield.fandom.com • https://starfield.wiki.fextralife.com https://starfield.wiki.fextralife.com • https://www.starfielddb.com https://www.starfielddb.com • https://www.ign.com/wikis/starfield https://www.ign.com/wikis/starfield (this is the honorable mention) None of them are complete, and all have vastly different ideas on how it should work and look. Want to know what the best shield generator is? Some wikis will have their own page on them, others just have it stuffed into a table called "starship components", maybe divided by category. --- Whats interesting is that Ward Cunningham saw all these problems YEARS ago, and started pushing for a federated wiki experience. Doesn't seem to have caught on outside a very small niche circle, sadly. IMO because the various wikis that implement the federated wiki are lacking a lot of features that other wiki engines provide
- ivanjermakov 3y ago
  If game developers question how to design something, I suggest checking how Wube (Factorio developers) did it: https://wiki.factorio.com https://wiki.factorio.com.
  - paradox460 3y ago
    Another good example is the TeamFortress wiki: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Main_Page Started as a community wiki, and then Valve started hosting it and supporting it a few years later. They leave most of the admin up to the community, but do step in as needed for Terms of Service.
pie_flavor 3y ago
Hallelujah. Fandom I think is the single most unusable site I have any reason to visit; every time there's a Show HN about a service to 'simplify' a webpage, Fandom is the site I test it on. A history recap for those who do not know: 2013: Minecraft Wiki migrates from a self-hosted solution to Gamepedia run by Curse. This was a good decision at the time, because Curse was pretty trusted in the community; Minecraft modding centers around CurseForge the way Skyrim does around Nexus. 2016: Twitch buys Curse. The Curse Launcher is rebranded as the Twitch Launcher and turned into a desktop Twitch client that also does Minecraft modding. The wikis are initially unaffected. This sucks. 2018: Twitch starts breaking up Curse, and sells off Gamepedia to Fandom. This also sucks because Fandom starts inserting more ads, but the ads are manageable compared to Fandom proper. 2020: Gamepedia wikis are migrated over to Fandom proper, for SEO. Overnight the site becomes completely unusable. This sucks much worse, and actually manages to damage Twitch's brand (because a lot of people think they're involved, due to it still being called the Twitch Launcher) and they shutter the launcher and sell off CurseForge (the modding part) to Overwolf.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  2022: Former Curse/Gamepedia execs create wiki.gg and start poaching wikis from Fandom as a cheap vehicle to expose those audiences to ads of their new videogame publishing company.
  - apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
    Satisfactory recently migrated theirs from Fandom to wiki.gg and the improvement was night and day. Same exact content, but instantly it was way easier to use.
    - iamacyborg 3y ago
      It's for sure a big improvement from Fandom and the fact that they have a commercial interest in running the farm means it should continue to see good support.
- ivanjermakov 3y ago
polski-g 3y ago
Its shocking how unusable Fandom is if not using an ad-blocker. I don't know why developers just don't host their own mediawiki installation. The Paradox Studios wiki's are the best: https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki
terracottalite 3y ago
Nice. Before this, I was using BreezeWiki[0], which is frontend for Fandom. [0]: https://breezewiki.com/ https://breezewiki.com/
- thrdbndndn 3y ago
  Search seems to be totally broken? https://breezewiki.com/dota2/search?q=Chaos+Knight https://breezewiki.com/dota2/search?q=Chaos+Knight Exception raised in Racket code at response generation time: string::2: bytes->jsexpr: bad input starting #"You are not allowed to access this resource " context...: /home/cadence/racket/collects/syntax/readerr.rkt:15:2: -raise-read-error /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/breezewiki/src/page-search.rkt:70:2 /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/racket/share/pkgs/web-server-lib/web-server/dispatchers/dispatch-lift.rkt:11:0 /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/private/more-scheme.rkt:163:2: select-handler/no-breaks [repeats 9 more times] /home/cadence/racket/share/pkgs/web-server-lib/web-server/private/dispatch-server-with-connect-unit.rkt:141:2
p0w3n3d 3y ago
I have a low end to play Minecraft, hence I could choose either play or browse fandom (Linux, Firefox) because fandom so much slowed down it. However other sites seem okay. So in this way I'm glad the Minecraft wiki is faster now. Need to check the performance. However the money does not come from the sky. I understand you have to have ads on your site to haven't it funded and I wonder who funds minecraft.wiki
dang 3y ago
Url changed from https://twitter.com/MinecraftWikiEN/status/1706004078206103965 https://twitter.com/MinecraftWikiEN/status/17060040782061039..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
aendruk 3y ago
Browser userscript (e.g. Tampermonkey) redirect: // @match https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/* window.location.hostname = "minecraft.wiki"; Kagi search result rewrite rule: ^https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/(.*)|https://minecraft.wiki/w/$1
SCLeo 3y ago
In all seriousness, what fuck is going on in Fandom? It has soooo much ads! I just turned off my ad blocker and literally only 21% of the page is content and the remaining is ads. After 2 seconds, it got replaced by a full screen ad. What? How? What are the people at fandom thinking? This is completely unusable without adblockers! Don't believe me, here are the screenshots I just took: https://imgur.com/a/sNg3IlJ https://imgur.com/a/sNg3IlJ
jiofj 3y ago
The WoW wiki is also leaving Fandom. In my experience the Fandom wiki will stay always above the new wiki in google, making this move pointless.
- sogen 3y ago
  That might be true, for a while. After that, pagerank will move on to the new one.
  - jiofj 3y ago
    The doom wiki moved like 10 years ago and it's still below.
    - unleaded 3y ago
      Doom fandom wiki is still active, i didn't even know they moved until just now.
      - brucethemoose2 3y ago
        This is part of the problem. The community "moves" but the old wiki isn't down, and it picks up contributors from sheer SEO rank. UESP predates Fandom and was extremely fleshed out, and is frankly superior to the Fandom version at every point in history. But even with the "head start," UESP has really suffered due to the existence of Fandom, for no reason other than artificial SEO dominance.
- runeblaze 3y ago
  While you have a point, this move is still in the right direction. This move gives people to power to choose. At least I don't have to use BreezeWiki for minecraft again.
  - jiofj 3y ago
    I use adblock rules and the site looks perfectly fine. Every few months I have to add something new, but all in all, I don't have a problem with viewing wikis hosted by Fandom. OTOH, I refuse to edit wikis in Fandom, because it feels like I'm not doing it for the community but for the Fandom company, which I don't care for.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Here's a good summary of controversy surrounding Fandom and why fandoms tend to leave: https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-wikis.html https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-... And it doesn't even really touch on how Fandom, sometimes, refuses to delete the old wiki for traffic purposes, and leaves it up as a "zombie" wiki that smothers the new wiki due to SEO, or the more serious conflicts between some admins and contributors in some other specific fandoms.
- mcmoor 3y ago
  Anyone who tries to worship Jimmy Wales for Wikipedia should know that if he really have his way, he'd turn it into this horrible mess of Fandom, which he also founded. Luckily the volunteers rightfully take Wikipedia from him. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork
  - ravetcofx 3y ago
    Surprise surprise the rich aren't our friends
  - rendall 3y ago
    There have been shenanigans where articles describing fictional lore have been taken down or merged with other articles due to being against Wikipedia policy ("Wikipedia is not a game manual"). e.g. see endless discussion on the Dungeons and Dragons Plane article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Drago... For instance, under that policy, this article was taken down https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&oldid=1086521358 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&o... and "merged" (with loss of information) to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#Plane_of_Shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#P... I saw a comment accusing Wales of enforcing this policy in order to direct traffic to Fandom. I thought when I read it that the accusation was uncalled for, but given Fandom's intransigence about taking old wikis down and the money-grubbing quality of its UX, I have wondered. Whatever the merits of this policy, it is applied inconsistently or not at all to topics not likely to be in Fandom.
matthews2 3y ago
The RuneScape Wiki and OldSchool RuneScape Wiki left Fandom in 2018, for similar reasons: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia I think the move has been really successful. They've managed to add lots of exciting game-specific features to the wiki, like tracking requirements for a quest, or historical item prices. It also didn't seem to take long for the new wiki results to rank above the Wikia/Fandom results on search engines. Good luck to the Minecraft wiki and its contributors!
- subtra3t 3y ago
  The Terraria wiki also left fandom a while back and they were able to implement things like special biome themes that they would never have been able to in fandom.
- tech234a 3y ago
  Minecraft Wiki moved to the same host as the RuneScape Wikis
gherkinnn 3y ago
Good. Fantom is a plague. And unlike Pinterest, it actually contains stuff I'd be interested in. These ad-traps can't die soon enough.
msm_ 3y ago
>Our new host has better built out infrastructure that makes the site load significantly faster than Fandom, especially in different parts of the world and with slower internet connections I'm reading this over the ultra-slow[1] airplane satellite wifi. The wiki loaded reasonably quickly. I don't even want to try opening any fandom wiki (it probably wouldn't load at all). Congrats! I had to search for this information a bit, but looks like the new wiki is powered by MediaWiki. I wonder if there's a market for fandom alternative that would offer easy to onboard instances to various groups (so they don't get locked into fandom early). [1] Because I bought the cheapest plan, of course.

166 points by unleaded 3y ago

Terraria also moved, in a similar move. https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

charcircuit 3y ago

Reminder that all Mojang and Minecraft accounts were deleted last Tuesday. The fact that they are removing a the ability for people to access a game they paid for is unacceptable and should be illegal.

boomboomsubban 3y ago
Huh? What accounts were deleted from where? As a base reading of what you said sounds like "all Minecraft accounts were deleted Tuesday" which surely would have been major news.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >What accounts were deleted from where? All Mojang and Minecraft accounts were deleted from Mojang's servers. >which surely would have been major news. I wish it was. In a few months people will want to revisit the game and then realize they have to rebuy the game if they want to play it again.
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    >All Mojang and Minecraft accounts were deleted from Mojang's servers As somebody who's never touched Minecraft, surely all Minecraft accounts are Minecraft/Mojang accounts? If everybody playing suddenly needed to rebuy the game Tuesday it would have been big news.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      Minecraft now only supports Microsoft accounts as they deleted all other accounts. Minecraft accounts were the original account system that minecraft used. Once Mojang was working on Scrolls they created the Mojang account system to span all of the studio's games. After the acquisition by Microsoft it was changed so that people buying Minecraft would instead use Microsoft accounts.
    - wingerlang 3y ago
      I assume the ability to create new "Mojang" accounts has been closed a looong time ago in favor of the Microsoft logins. The migration from those accounts started over a year ago and they have sent multiple emails about this migration.

Kye 3y ago

Previously: "Minecraft Wiki considers move away from Fandom to new platform" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325

dang 3y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Minecraft Wiki considers move away from Fandom to new platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325 - July 2023 (25 comments)

hnbear 3y ago

This is their link to their more detailed reasoning: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki:Moving_from_Fandom https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki:Moving_from_Fandom

rabbits_2002 3y ago

Good, Fandom wikis are a nightmare to use.

RockRobotRock 3y ago

Wasn't the Minecraft wiki first a MediaWiki site?

mschae23 3y ago
The Minecraft wiki was always (and still is) using MediaWiki.
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  What do you mean? Does Fandom use MediaWiki? I remember them having their own independent website. Maybe I'm thinking of the MC Fandom wiki before the theme changed. It used to look exactly like Wikipedia.

jjice 3y ago

Fandom (I really prefer their old name, "Wikia") is a great concept. Deal with hosting the wiki so you can focus on content. The problem is that they need to make money, and to do that, they do it with some of the most obnoxious ads on any reputable site on the modern internet. Using their site on a mobile browser is one of the worst web experiences I've ever had. Autoplaying video ad banners on the top with a smaller ad banner on the bottom while I scroll past an ad in the middle of the article. I'm all for seeing wikis leave them because it'll be a huge usability win. Fandom can still fill the gap for small niche wikis that don't want to deal with hosting and such, but larger established wikis using their own platform will be great.

doublepg23 3y ago
Indeed, it's hard to overstate how bad of an experience it is. The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP, a wiki) https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page vs the Elder Scrolls "Fandom" website https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki is night and day in terms of usability and user respect. I think Google is partially to blame as it seems to rank Fandom pages way higher than self-hosted wikis.
apohak 3y ago
"The problem is that they need to make money" Stupid question, why do they need to make money? I thought they are maintained by volunteers. For hosting?
- jjice 3y ago
  Content is volunteer, but I believe the company's infrastructure and software (I believe they use a modified MediaWiki based on an HN comment from an employee a few years ago) are all from a for-profit company. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation are the non-profits you may be thinking of. From the Fandom Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)): > The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co. But note that Jimmy Wales was a founder as well.

pallas_athena 3y ago

the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure's wiki left fandom in 2019: https://jojowiki.com/Special:WikiForum/Leaving_Fandom https://jojowiki.com/Special:WikiForum/Leaving_Fandom

Kye 3y ago

The same announcement on their official Mastodon account if you prefer (or if the Twitter link ever becomes difficult/impossible to access): https://wikis.world/@MinecraftWikiEN/111121512237906439 https://wikis.world/@MinecraftWikiEN/111121512237906439

msp26 3y ago

Excellent. I hope to see more games following suit away from the bloated messes of fandom/fextralife. At times they feel unusable on mobile. And I don't think a single user has wanted to see the embedded twitch streams when they're just trying to get some information quickly.

tedivm 3y ago
Terraria moved their wiki and it's a much nice experience.
- LordShredda 3y ago
  It's a much much better experience, wiki.gg is a plain old wiki farm that just works
- hn_version_0023 3y ago
  I wish Valheim would follow suit
bakugo 3y ago
> And I don't think a single user has wanted to see the embedded twitch streams when they're just trying to get some information quickly. The embedded Twitch stream is there purely as a way to artificially boost viewer counts on their channel. Almost every time a new game comes out, you can go to its Twitch page and see Fextralife at the top with tens of thousands of viewers, with a dead chat because almost nobody is actually watching, it's all from the embed. Twitch-endorsed pseudo-viewbotting to farm ad revenue is a growing trend, there's even several systems on Twitch itself that encourage it, like the drops system.
- msp26 3y ago
  Don't advertisers care that they're wasting money? Or are they just unaware?
  - iamacyborg 3y ago

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

For some background, the old wiki was hosted on Fandom. All the major volunteer contributors are moving to minecraft.wiki, but the old page will almost certainly stay up, frozen in time, throwing trackers and ads on kids not savvy enough to locate the new link. It is interesting to me how many games, Minecraft in particular, rely on wikis - they're very different experiences, sometimes almost unplayable, if you don't read up on how to make progress.

codetrotter 3y ago
I remember in 2009 or 2010, when I first came across Minecraft. It was not hugely popular yet, but it already had quite an active community. I played quite a few hours of the game, both alone and together with a couple of friends. One day, after a couple of weeks or something, I learned about a crafting wiki that told you how to craft different items. At the time, at least for me, it was not clear how you figure out what items you can craft and what items need to be combined in what patterns to craft those new items. So for me, that crafting wiki became quite essential. Maybe other people were figuring out how to craft things by trial and error? Or maybe there was something in the game that told them how to craft specific things?
- Kwantuum 3y ago
  There was not. There is now but for the better part of a decade it was just... Something you were supposed to have learned from a youtube video or a friend or something.
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  People figured out from friends how to craft things or looked at the wiki. Then NEI came out (successor is now called JEI) which showed every item and its recipe. Game changer.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Vanilla now has a recipe book, and it's also now "gated" by things you find in the world. But NEI (and of course, NEI in GregTech New Horizons) is the only way to play. Because what is Minecraft without regular expressions in your inventory? https://wiki.gtnewhorizons.com/wiki/Not_Enough_Items#Search_Bar https://wiki.gtnewhorizons.com/wiki/Not_Enough_Items#Search_...

rob74 3y ago

I wish more wikis would take this step - Fandom (ex-Wikia) has become so ad-infested that I honestly avoid looking up stuff there as much as possible (which is a shame, because lots of fans put a lot of work into building those wikis).

coldpie 3y ago
It's pretty usable with an ad blocker, and NoScript makes it perfectly fine. But yeah, it sucks that that's necessary.

sebsebmc 3y ago

The Path of Exile wiki made a similar move a few years ago. Fandom was such a limitation for the community and the ads and page speed were awful. Now the Minecraft wiki will have to spend effort beating the Fandom site on SEO so that people get directed to the actually updated wiki. For Path of Exile there was a browser extension that would hide the Fandom from search results and redirect you to the new community wiki.

yllautcaj 3y ago
Critically, the developers of PoE also provide hosting for the wiki pro-bono. The service is so beneficial for players I imagine they figured the game would benefit from an ad-free (and therefore more usable) community wiki. Personally I have recently started seeing the correct wiki at the top of searches so I think the SEO battle is winnable with community effort. It helps that Fandom wikis are uniquely unusable without an ad blocker running.
sockmeistr 3y ago
Are you thinking of the "Indie Wiki Buddy" extension? They have already added support for the new minecraft wiki: https://getindie.wiki/listings/ https://getindie.wiki/listings/ It's pretty incredible that Fandom/Fextralife have driven people to developing browser extensions just to avoid everything they touch...
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  No, there's a Path of Exile wiki specific extension also. It's slightly counterproductive from an SEO perspective as it redirects Fandom clicks to the new wiki, which gives Fandom all the SEO benefits of receiving those clicks.
  - eterm 3y ago
    Indeed, which is I suspect why fandom still ranked so highly above poewiki for many searches for far too long, and initially even appending poewiki would often return no results or just the fandom result. Thankfully there's been a notable shift in the past 3-6 months. What has finally helped I think is the sheer amount of stale or missing data on fandom, so as a really basic current example, it doesn't have mention of tattoos, a fairly critical aspect of the current league.

some_random 3y ago

Fantastic, I'm really interested in how it goes since the fandom wiki might be the single largest fan wiki project I've ever seen. I'd be surprised if they ever hit parity, but assuming people don't keep updating fandom (why would they?) then it'll be _the_ resource in no time at all.

Svip 3y ago

I still maintain an independent Futurama wiki from Fandom. Back when they were called Wikia, they wanted to merge with our wiki, but I insisted on a no ads policy. So talks basically went nowhere. They still have a Futurama wiki, and ours is still online. Though, these days, it's mostly other editors filling in the content, I am just a system administrator at this point. I am still happy with our decision, because Wikia/Fandom has since then just gotten worse.

gs17 3y ago
They really have gotten worse and it's incresibly frustrating that DDG seems to ignore the Infosphere (and WikiSimpsons) entirely in favor of the fandom sites.
- Svip 3y ago
  I agree, but I also don't want to waste too much of my life chasing SEO. Fortunately, some people find our site.
- bisby 3y ago
  A few games I play have DDG bangs that take you directly to the fandom sites, even though the games now have their own self hosted wiki. Perfect exactly would be _minecraft_. If you search for "!minecraft dirt" it takes you to the fandom page. Will DDG update the bang to search via the official wiki? probably not! Maybe now is the time to switch to Kagi
  - rbits 3y ago
    I've submiited a request to DDG, hopefully they update it
    - bisby 3y ago
      Hopefully, given minecraft is a large game. I've submitted requests over the years for other games with no change or response even.
- 3y ago

foxbarrington 3y ago

Anyone else thinking of making a service that can easily fork and host a fandom like this?

YPPH 3y ago
I fear such a service may simply tread the same path as Wikia. Also, any hosting platform has to balance user control over extensions and customisations, on the one hand, with system reliability on the other. You can't easily delegate control of extension installation to Wiki administrators, unless you give them console access. The Minecraft Wiki is currently hosted by Weird Gloop which is the entity responsible for the forked RuneScape Wikis, and they manage the servers directly: https://weirdgloop.org/ https://weirdgloop.org/ The harder bit is convincing people to move, and trying to beat Fandom on Google. One of the reasons they picked Weird Gloop is the experience in this space - they've pretty much won the battle in respect of the RuneScape Wikis, which have sat dormant for years.
madeofpalk 3y ago
I'm not sure how much they automate the forking, but a number of these already exist and were contendors for recieving the Minecraft wiki. https://wiki.gg https://wiki.gg is probably the biggest, but there's also https://abxy.org https://abxy.org and https://weirdgloop.org/ https://weirdgloop.org/, who is now hosting the minecraft wiki

adeon 3y ago

NetHack did this when Fandom was still called Wikia. Luckily, the new forked site won search engines over easily and nethackwiki.com easily comes on first results if you search for NetHack stuff. Unlike NetHack, the Minecraft Fandom site is probably a lot more lucrative in ad revenue. I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures." I had no idea they've been collecting sites like infinity stones. I guess ads pay handsomely? Ugh.

iamacyborg 3y ago
They also made a chunk of money from selling dndbeyond which they bought for peanuts from Twitch.
Pxtl 3y ago
> I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures." Enshittification as a service.
majewsky 3y ago
> I had no idea they've been collecting sites like infinity stones. Katamari Fandomcy.

perihelions 3y ago

It's currently my 5th result for "minecraft wiki" on Kagi, after I decided to penalize fandom.com's ranking on a whim. (Also, the 2nd result is an official Mastodon post which mirrors this announcement, so it would be easily discoverable. Not too bad!) (For Google, it's the 7th result for me, below three different versions of fandom.com).

falsenapkin 3y ago
I was embarrassingly excited to edit my Kagi Personalized Results with a block for Fandom and a pin for minecraft.wiki. This was yesterday and for me searching "minecraft wiki" and some obvious wiki things was not yielding the new wiki on any of Google/DDG/Kagi. Got me thinking it could be interesting for Kagi to release personalized packages, like say you get into a new hobby (Minecraft) and you can quickly peruse/apply sensible personalization.

jerf 3y ago

Is there some reason they can't just edit the Fandom wiki and modify each page to point at the new one? (Maybe Fandom would revert the changes?)

Drakim 3y ago
Would probably qualify under "vandalism"
rbits 3y ago
Yeah it's against fandom rules. Wikis aren't allowed to link to their replacements
- yrro 3y ago
  Ugh. I always hesitate before browsing to a Fandom wiki because the user experience is so full of dark patterns. I guess this is just another facet of that...
- jerf 3y ago
  Thank you and the other repliers who answered. It wasn't a hard guess, as you can see, but it was an important bit of information to be sure about to understand the story.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
> Maybe Fandom would revert the changes? That is precisely what they do. They also, in some cases, ban the mods/contributors making the change.

politician 3y ago

Doesn’t the domain name clearly infringe on Microsoft’s trademark? Even as someone who is knowledgeable, I can see this causing confusion. As useful as this is, I don’t see site lasting for very long at the current domain without an agreement from the trademark owner.

wallhack 3y ago
They are likely wise enough not to threaten a community that’s doing tons of valuable free work for them.
red_trumpet 3y ago
The previous domain was minecraftwiki.net, and I don't see a big difference here?
kibwen 3y ago
IANAL but I would assume that, since they're moving from "minecraft.fandom.com" to "minecraft.wiki", it should be no more infringing than what they previously had, unless second-level domain names are subject to more scrutiny than third-level domain names. And if that's the case, then I would expect that the infringing party would be their domain name registrar, for being the one to sell them the hypothetically infringing name (which isn't to say that the operators of the server couldn't be subject to trademark claims for other reasons unrelated to the domain name).
iamacyborg 3y ago
minecraftforum.net has been up for well over a decade at this point.

teekert 3y ago

I always wondered why the wiki was so complete yet so shitty at the same time. I though MS was extracting value via ads. I was wrong. In MCs case a wiki is such integral part of the game it should almost be integrated.

rob74 3y ago
The "complete" part is thanks to thousands of fans contributing content, the "shitty" part is "thanks" to the company that makes money from that crowdsourced content. It's the same sad story for lots of wikis, some of them pretty high profile like Wookiepedia (Star Wars), Memory Alpha (Star Trek) etc.
rbits 3y ago
In fact, Mojang actually somewhat recently removed the "official" status from the wiki. Although that was probably because of the Fandom stuff.
kevincox 3y ago
Yeah, I recently replayed Minecraft vanilla and I really don't understand how you are supposed to discover The End with regular play. They do have some light hints for constructing a nether portal but I couldn't find anything pointing at how to discover the end.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

yoyohello13 3y ago

UESP is the gold standard for wikis. https://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page https://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page

bpiche 3y ago
Bethesda enjoyers are blessed with this wonderful wiki. And action RPG fans have fextralife - another solid gold standard for wikis. It's a great time to be a fan. https://fextralife.com/ https://fextralife.com/
- hightrix 3y ago
  Fextralife is worse than fandom, by far. The forced twitch view botting along with the horrendous site layout make it one of the worst wiki sites that exist.
  - bpiche 3y ago
    That's a fair point. Worse than fandom, I am not sure. Fandom takes up 80% of your screen on mobile with ads. I've had all of the ads blocked on fex for so long, I forgot they existed. Thanks for the reminder!
- digging 3y ago
  I never thought I'd see fextralife called a gold standard. It's also quite bad... better than "Fandom" though I guess. For example, Bloodborne has a "Fandom", a fextralife, and an actual high-quality wiki at https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/ https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/
SSLy 3y ago
They also spun up a Starfield wiki, still no salvation for the Fallout players out there https://starfieldwiki.net/ https://starfieldwiki.net/
- paradox460 3y ago
  I'm hoping this is the one that takes off. It's very young, and the information is very hit-and-miss, but its growing, and since its a young wiki, its easy to add information that's missing

bpiche 3y ago

Crazy thing is that Fandom is (now) owned by Jimmy Wales! Can you imagine if this kind of advertisement came to Wikipedia? Would make the fundraising banners look like nothing.

uxp8u61q 3y ago
It was founded by Jimmy Wales but was sold to a PE group. Wales is president of the company though.
- bpiche 3y ago
  I believe that organization was TPG. Was just serendipitously reading about it this morning after another frustrating attempt at using Fandom. Founded by Jimmy, and now he's the president. I'd say he deserves the lion's share of the blame, regardless of who owns it now.

zeroCalories 3y ago

I've always wondered why a wiki needs to monetize so hard. Most of their content easily cacheable and produced by volunteers, plus the technology hasn't really changed in 20 years. The whole site could probably be maintained by a single dev and a few admins. It seems natural that these sites are going to eventually be replaced because of this. Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.

bronson 3y ago
Because Fandom is owned by these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc.
- aendruk 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc%2e
- somesoftdev 3y ago
  That's a good point. It's very likely that TPG demands constant growth meaning more profits each year. So Fandom has to put ads everywhere to meet the goals.
cookmeplox 3y ago
> Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue. I run Weird Gloop (the group hosting the Minecraft/RuneScape wikis) and your view is generally correct. The content is extremely cacheable and the infrastructure costs have extremely strong economies-of-scale. The labor costs are a bit less obvious, but past a certain baseline (of, say, having enough people for a reasonable oncall rotation), the marginal labor cost of hosting additional wikis is quite low.
- Ar-Curunir 3y ago
  Thanks for hosting the OSRS wiki! It's amazing, out-of-your-face, and just works.
- 3y ago

jeanlucas 3y ago

As someone said on YouTube: "fandom is the web equivalent of overpriced laundromats"

thrdbndndn 3y ago

WoWWiki (now called Wowpedia) is thinking about leaving Fandom too [1], which is interesting when you consider their past. Back in the day, WoWWiki started as its own thing before it shifted over to Wikia (what we now know as Fandom). Wikia was even worse than Fandom today. They had this set layout that didn’t work for many of the wikis they brought in. This led some folks from the community to branch out and create Wowpedia, which was on its own again. Later, Wowpedia joined Curse's Gamepedia, kind of like Wikia but not as in-your-face. But here’s the twist: in 2018, Fandom/Wikia bought Gamepedia. So, Wowpedia landed back with Fandom. At some point, they decided to archive WoWWiki so there is only Wowpedia now. ---- My personal opinion in general about this topic is that Fandom is a very bad host (Wikia used to be worse, to be fair), but the worst is having two competing wikis. At least in this Minecraft's case, it looks like the majority of contributors moved together. The situation of WowWiki/Wowpedia at the time was just sad, a lot of hard work went down the drain. And speaking of which, isn’t the Terraria Wiki going through something similar right now? Out of two wikis: https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki I can't figure out which one’s busier right now. I understand that terraria.wiki.gg now is the "official" one, but if you check out their recent change frequencies, they seem pretty close. I can’t help thinking there's a lot of duplicated effort here too. [1] https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Forum:Vote_to_Leave_Fandom https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Forum:Vote_to_Leave_Fandom

red_trumpet 3y ago
Out of curiousity: In what ways was Wikia worse than Fandom?
- thrdbndndn 3y ago
  Their fixed-width layout.

hyperno 3y ago

A similar situation happened with the Spanish Pokémon wiki. (now WikiDex) [1] And if you look for "fandom" in the wiki's search, it redirects to an entry about a location in the game called "Castelia Sewers". [2] [1]: https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/WikiDex:WikiDex_ya_no_forma_parte_de_FANDOOM https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/WikiDex:WikiDex_ya_no_forma_par... [2]: https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/Cloacas_Porcelana https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/Cloacas_Porcelana

vorvac 3y ago

"The new Minecraft Wiki will be hosted by Weird Gloop, the company that hosts the RuneScape wikis." OSRS set the bar pretty high: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/ https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/ Clean, concise, and accurate.

rozab 3y ago

The problem is 'Fandom' (a gross brand name I would refuse to say without airquotes) always has better SEO. The Elder Scrolls has an excellent independent wiki, UESP, but normal people click the first Google result and have no way of knowing it isn't the 'right' wiki

nwsm 3y ago
Fandom is a fantastic name for this kind of thing...

mdtrooper 3y ago

https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/

pentagrama 3y ago

>Unfortunately, because Fandom does not close wikis that have moved away, the old Fandom wiki will remain in place and continue to appear in search results. Wow that's vendor lock in right there. Fandom should have features to make the wiki read only, disable new posts, also a feature to pin a permanent banner for announcements, in this case for announcing the new home/link. That will be a much better migration path.

iamacyborg 3y ago
What incentive do they have to do that when they can just keep the old outdated site up and collect ad revenue from Google pointing people their way.

k12sosse 3y ago

I always considered fandom a great resource.. .. for practicing your element blocking technique in uBlock Origin.

paradox460 3y ago

Starfield is currently undergoing a bit of a wiki arms race. There's at least four that I know of, plus an honorable mention: • https://starfieldwiki.net https://starfieldwiki.net • https://starfield.fandom.com https://starfield.fandom.com • https://starfield.wiki.fextralife.com https://starfield.wiki.fextralife.com • https://www.starfielddb.com https://www.starfielddb.com • https://www.ign.com/wikis/starfield https://www.ign.com/wikis/starfield (this is the honorable mention) None of them are complete, and all have vastly different ideas on how it should work and look. Want to know what the best shield generator is? Some wikis will have their own page on them, others just have it stuffed into a table called "starship components", maybe divided by category. --- Whats interesting is that Ward Cunningham saw all these problems YEARS ago, and started pushing for a federated wiki experience. Doesn't seem to have caught on outside a very small niche circle, sadly. IMO because the various wikis that implement the federated wiki are lacking a lot of features that other wiki engines provide

ivanjermakov 3y ago
If game developers question how to design something, I suggest checking how Wube (Factorio developers) did it: https://wiki.factorio.com https://wiki.factorio.com.
- paradox460 3y ago
  Another good example is the TeamFortress wiki: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Main_Page Started as a community wiki, and then Valve started hosting it and supporting it a few years later. They leave most of the admin up to the community, but do step in as needed for Terms of Service.

pie_flavor 3y ago

Hallelujah. Fandom I think is the single most unusable site I have any reason to visit; every time there's a Show HN about a service to 'simplify' a webpage, Fandom is the site I test it on. A history recap for those who do not know: 2013: Minecraft Wiki migrates from a self-hosted solution to Gamepedia run by Curse. This was a good decision at the time, because Curse was pretty trusted in the community; Minecraft modding centers around CurseForge the way Skyrim does around Nexus. 2016: Twitch buys Curse. The Curse Launcher is rebranded as the Twitch Launcher and turned into a desktop Twitch client that also does Minecraft modding. The wikis are initially unaffected. This sucks. 2018: Twitch starts breaking up Curse, and sells off Gamepedia to Fandom. This also sucks because Fandom starts inserting more ads, but the ads are manageable compared to Fandom proper. 2020: Gamepedia wikis are migrated over to Fandom proper, for SEO. Overnight the site becomes completely unusable. This sucks much worse, and actually manages to damage Twitch's brand (because a lot of people think they're involved, due to it still being called the Twitch Launcher) and they shutter the launcher and sell off CurseForge (the modding part) to Overwolf.

iamacyborg 3y ago
2022: Former Curse/Gamepedia execs create wiki.gg and start poaching wikis from Fandom as a cheap vehicle to expose those audiences to ads of their new videogame publishing company.
- apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
  Satisfactory recently migrated theirs from Fandom to wiki.gg and the improvement was night and day. Same exact content, but instantly it was way easier to use.
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    It's for sure a big improvement from Fandom and the fact that they have a commercial interest in running the farm means it should continue to see good support.
ivanjermakov 3y ago

polski-g 3y ago

Its shocking how unusable Fandom is if not using an ad-blocker. I don't know why developers just don't host their own mediawiki installation. The Paradox Studios wiki's are the best: https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki

terracottalite 3y ago

Nice. Before this, I was using BreezeWiki[0], which is frontend for Fandom. [0]: https://breezewiki.com/ https://breezewiki.com/

thrdbndndn 3y ago
Search seems to be totally broken? https://breezewiki.com/dota2/search?q=Chaos+Knight https://breezewiki.com/dota2/search?q=Chaos+Knight Exception raised in Racket code at response generation time: string::2: bytes->jsexpr: bad input starting #"You are not allowed to access this resource " context...: /home/cadence/racket/collects/syntax/readerr.rkt:15:2: -raise-read-error /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/breezewiki/src/page-search.rkt:70:2 /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/racket/share/pkgs/web-server-lib/web-server/dispatchers/dispatch-lift.rkt:11:0 /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/private/more-scheme.rkt:163:2: select-handler/no-breaks [repeats 9 more times] /home/cadence/racket/share/pkgs/web-server-lib/web-server/private/dispatch-server-with-connect-unit.rkt:141:2

p0w3n3d 3y ago

I have a low end to play Minecraft, hence I could choose either play or browse fandom (Linux, Firefox) because fandom so much slowed down it. However other sites seem okay. So in this way I'm glad the Minecraft wiki is faster now. Need to check the performance. However the money does not come from the sky. I understand you have to have ads on your site to haven't it funded and I wonder who funds minecraft.wiki

dang 3y ago

Url changed from https://twitter.com/MinecraftWikiEN/status/1706004078206103965 https://twitter.com/MinecraftWikiEN/status/17060040782061039..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

aendruk 3y ago

Browser userscript (e.g. Tampermonkey) redirect: // @match https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/* window.location.hostname = "minecraft.wiki"; Kagi search result rewrite rule: ^https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/(.*)|https://minecraft.wiki/w/$1

SCLeo 3y ago

In all seriousness, what fuck is going on in Fandom? It has soooo much ads! I just turned off my ad blocker and literally only 21% of the page is content and the remaining is ads. After 2 seconds, it got replaced by a full screen ad. What? How? What are the people at fandom thinking? This is completely unusable without adblockers! Don't believe me, here are the screenshots I just took: https://imgur.com/a/sNg3IlJ https://imgur.com/a/sNg3IlJ

jiofj 3y ago

The WoW wiki is also leaving Fandom. In my experience the Fandom wiki will stay always above the new wiki in google, making this move pointless.

sogen 3y ago
That might be true, for a while. After that, pagerank will move on to the new one.
- jiofj 3y ago
  The doom wiki moved like 10 years ago and it's still below.
  - unleaded 3y ago
    Doom fandom wiki is still active, i didn't even know they moved until just now.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      This is part of the problem. The community "moves" but the old wiki isn't down, and it picks up contributors from sheer SEO rank. UESP predates Fandom and was extremely fleshed out, and is frankly superior to the Fandom version at every point in history. But even with the "head start," UESP has really suffered due to the existence of Fandom, for no reason other than artificial SEO dominance.
runeblaze 3y ago
While you have a point, this move is still in the right direction. This move gives people to power to choose. At least I don't have to use BreezeWiki for minecraft again.
- jiofj 3y ago
  I use adblock rules and the site looks perfectly fine. Every few months I have to add something new, but all in all, I don't have a problem with viewing wikis hosted by Fandom. OTOH, I refuse to edit wikis in Fandom, because it feels like I'm not doing it for the community but for the Fandom company, which I don't care for.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Here's a good summary of controversy surrounding Fandom and why fandoms tend to leave: https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-wikis.html https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-... And it doesn't even really touch on how Fandom, sometimes, refuses to delete the old wiki for traffic purposes, and leaves it up as a "zombie" wiki that smothers the new wiki due to SEO, or the more serious conflicts between some admins and contributors in some other specific fandoms.

mcmoor 3y ago
Anyone who tries to worship Jimmy Wales for Wikipedia should know that if he really have his way, he'd turn it into this horrible mess of Fandom, which he also founded. Luckily the volunteers rightfully take Wikipedia from him. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork
- ravetcofx 3y ago
  Surprise surprise the rich aren't our friends
- rendall 3y ago
  There have been shenanigans where articles describing fictional lore have been taken down or merged with other articles due to being against Wikipedia policy ("Wikipedia is not a game manual"). e.g. see endless discussion on the Dungeons and Dragons Plane article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Drago... For instance, under that policy, this article was taken down https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&oldid=1086521358 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&o... and "merged" (with loss of information) to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#Plane_of_Shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#P... I saw a comment accusing Wales of enforcing this policy in order to direct traffic to Fandom. I thought when I read it that the accusation was uncalled for, but given Fandom's intransigence about taking old wikis down and the money-grubbing quality of its UX, I have wondered. Whatever the merits of this policy, it is applied inconsistently or not at all to topics not likely to be in Fandom.

matthews2 3y ago

The RuneScape Wiki and OldSchool RuneScape Wiki left Fandom in 2018, for similar reasons: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia I think the move has been really successful. They've managed to add lots of exciting game-specific features to the wiki, like tracking requirements for a quest, or historical item prices. It also didn't seem to take long for the new wiki results to rank above the Wikia/Fandom results on search engines. Good luck to the Minecraft wiki and its contributors!

subtra3t 3y ago
The Terraria wiki also left fandom a while back and they were able to implement things like special biome themes that they would never have been able to in fandom.
tech234a 3y ago
Minecraft Wiki moved to the same host as the RuneScape Wikis

gherkinnn 3y ago

Good. Fantom is a plague. And unlike Pinterest, it actually contains stuff I'd be interested in. These ad-traps can't die soon enough.

msm_ 3y ago

>Our new host has better built out infrastructure that makes the site load significantly faster than Fandom, especially in different parts of the world and with slower internet connections I'm reading this over the ultra-slow[1] airplane satellite wifi. The wiki loaded reasonably quickly. I don't even want to try opening any fandom wiki (it probably wouldn't load at all). Congrats! I had to search for this information a bit, but looks like the new wiki is powered by MediaWiki. I wonder if there's a market for fandom alternative that would offer easy to onboard instances to various groups (so they don't get locked into fandom early). [1] Because I bought the cheapest plan, of course.