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Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki from Fandom servers. For several communities that decide to cut ties with Fandom, they effectively hav

by chungy 2y ago

Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki from Fandom servers. For several communities that decide to cut ties with Fandom, they effectively have to "fork" the wiki to a new domain and hosting provider, and all the while, search engines will almost always show the Fandom version first. I know it's happened with Doom, Simpsons, Futurama, Minecraft. It also draws would-be contributors to the Fandom site, make changes there, and since they are no longer supervised by the community 'elite', the quality of the Fandom version rapidly declines.

kstrauser 2y ago
Will they allow the bulk overwriting of pages?
- lucb1e 2y ago
  Sure, until someone (anyone, since it's a wiki) notices the vandalism and reverts it and reports your account to probably get banned
- starkparker 2y ago
  From experience, Fandom will block and revert any attempt to do this. They assign employee admins for abandoned wikis who do nothing but revert any attempt to do this.
- jabroni_salad 2y ago
  They have moderators who revert overwrites. However, one thing they don't do is fact check new pages. Some fandom pages are majority junk because the moderators aren't going to boot up the game and see if some new boss that supposedly appears 300 hours in to Terraria's calamity mod is actually real. It just isn't feasible for paid labor to do, and all of the community gardeners who give a shit have moved elsewhere.
b800h 2y ago
Yep, enormously frustrating. Search 'minecraft granite' and the top result is still Fandom. EDIT: Hell, even 'Minecraft Wiki' still goes there.
RheingoldRiver 2y ago
> Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki from Fandom servers. The IP owners can request a takedown though & they'll usually comply, some game studios have done this
- starkparker 2y ago
  No, Fandom does not shut down wikis over takedowns. They will push back on any takedown attempt in order to remove the least amount of offending content as possible, then claim the rest as fair use. Their legal department is willing to bet that the IP owner's legal department does not care enough about the abandoned Fandom wiki to put the time and effort into finishing the job.
  - RheingoldRiver 2y ago
    By IP owner I mean the video game publisher/studio, not wiki admins. In this case they do at least some of the time (I work for wiki.gg and we've had wikis migrate and then get the Fandom one taken down cos the game devs sent a request)
    - starkparker 2y ago
      > By IP owner I mean the video game publisher/studio, not wiki admins So do I; they're one in the same in my case, for a wiki that exited Wikia in 2010. The only thing Fandom even responds to are takedown requests for copyrighted visual artwork. Sincerely, congrats on getting one through, but I think that's the exception and not the rule, and something you might get that standalone indie wiki admins and game publishers don't necessarily have.
      - RheingoldRiver 2y ago
        You can email me more details if you want, but maybe try again now. Make sure you're contacting them from a company email and send a support request that makes it clear you're the rights holder and you want the wiki about your IP taken down
stefan_ 2y ago
I'm not sure why Google hasn't straight up blackholed them. Consider the situation with the Warcraft Wiki: 1) Started in 2004 as independent "WoWWiki", then "moved" in 2007 to Wikia aka Fandom 2) Forked in 2010 due to Fandoms blatant disregard to Wowpedia, under Curse 3) Fandom acquires the Wiki part of Curse and with it Wowpedia in 2018 4) Forked in 2023 as Fandom made the site practically unusable The biggest fuck you of it all? They continued hosting WoWWiki all this time for the sweet SEO, even if it hasn't been relevant for decades. Even when they started owning the new version in 2018, they would not disable the old one - you know, it was still ranking in that Google algorithm! For all these years, there has been a single correct choice for what link to show a Google user searching for relevant content. And yet going on 20 years Google doesn't manage to do it, instead rewarding these utter dickheads.
- owisd 2y ago
  Google is an ad company, listed on Fandom's GDPR notice, they're not going to block a site that is sending them a ton of user data in favour of the official wiki that isn't.
- mostlysimilar 2y ago
  Google isn't on our side. Google is the bad guy as much as Fandom is. They both ruthlessly extract wealth with no regard for users.

by chungy 2y ago

kstrauser 2y ago

Will they allow the bulk overwriting of pages?

lucb1e 2y ago
Sure, until someone (anyone, since it's a wiki) notices the vandalism and reverts it and reports your account to probably get banned
starkparker 2y ago
From experience, Fandom will block and revert any attempt to do this. They assign employee admins for abandoned wikis who do nothing but revert any attempt to do this.
jabroni_salad 2y ago
They have moderators who revert overwrites. However, one thing they don't do is fact check new pages. Some fandom pages are majority junk because the moderators aren't going to boot up the game and see if some new boss that supposedly appears 300 hours in to Terraria's calamity mod is actually real. It just isn't feasible for paid labor to do, and all of the community gardeners who give a shit have moved elsewhere.

b800h 2y ago

Yep, enormously frustrating. Search 'minecraft granite' and the top result is still Fandom. EDIT: Hell, even 'Minecraft Wiki' still goes there.

RheingoldRiver 2y ago

> Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki from Fandom servers. The IP owners can request a takedown though & they'll usually comply, some game studios have done this

starkparker 2y ago
No, Fandom does not shut down wikis over takedowns. They will push back on any takedown attempt in order to remove the least amount of offending content as possible, then claim the rest as fair use. Their legal department is willing to bet that the IP owner's legal department does not care enough about the abandoned Fandom wiki to put the time and effort into finishing the job.
- RheingoldRiver 2y ago
  By IP owner I mean the video game publisher/studio, not wiki admins. In this case they do at least some of the time (I work for wiki.gg and we've had wikis migrate and then get the Fandom one taken down cos the game devs sent a request)
  - starkparker 2y ago
    > By IP owner I mean the video game publisher/studio, not wiki admins So do I; they're one in the same in my case, for a wiki that exited Wikia in 2010. The only thing Fandom even responds to are takedown requests for copyrighted visual artwork. Sincerely, congrats on getting one through, but I think that's the exception and not the rule, and something you might get that standalone indie wiki admins and game publishers don't necessarily have.
    - RheingoldRiver 2y ago
      You can email me more details if you want, but maybe try again now. Make sure you're contacting them from a company email and send a support request that makes it clear you're the rights holder and you want the wiki about your IP taken down

stefan_ 2y ago

I'm not sure why Google hasn't straight up blackholed them. Consider the situation with the Warcraft Wiki: 1) Started in 2004 as independent "WoWWiki", then "moved" in 2007 to Wikia aka Fandom 2) Forked in 2010 due to Fandoms blatant disregard to Wowpedia, under Curse 3) Fandom acquires the Wiki part of Curse and with it Wowpedia in 2018 4) Forked in 2023 as Fandom made the site practically unusable The biggest fuck you of it all? They continued hosting WoWWiki all this time for the sweet SEO, even if it hasn't been relevant for decades. Even when they started owning the new version in 2018, they would not disable the old one - you know, it was still ranking in that Google algorithm! For all these years, there has been a single correct choice for what link to show a Google user searching for relevant content. And yet going on 20 years Google doesn't manage to do it, instead rewarding these utter dickheads.

owisd 2y ago
Google is an ad company, listed on Fandom's GDPR notice, they're not going to block a site that is sending them a ton of user data in favour of the official wiki that isn't.
mostlysimilar 2y ago
Google isn't on our side. Google is the bad guy as much as Fandom is. They both ruthlessly extract wealth with no regard for users.