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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

• backspace_ 2y ago
  I have frequently said to myself, "you know what Fandom needs? More ads" If I'm looking for a specific piece of info that ends up being on a fandom wiki, it's quite a turn off.
  • pytness 2y ago
    Also, the site is really slow. The only thing that the site manages to turn on is the computer fans.
  • chongli 2y ago
    It gets a lot better with an ad blocker and other annoyance-blockers. The deeper question is whether or not you think it’s worth it. I think many people visit Fandom pages only briefly from a SERP and then take off, like Wikipedia but specific to a game. If that’s the way you use Fandom then it’s probably not worth it. What makes it worth it is if there’s a page specific to a game you like and you spend a good amount of time there reading stuff. That’s a long tail thing though.
  • cozzyd 2y ago
    Whenever my phone accidentally opens fandom with Chrome rather than Firefox mobile (with uBO), I wonder how the hell anybody browses the internet on their phone without an ad blocker...
  • AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
    Most of the time I don't notice it because I use Firefox w/ uB0 on all platforms. But recently I've been playing some games on Steam and trying to use Steam's browser overlay to cache some guides. Its browser seems to be a chrome fork and does not support any kind of adblocker, unfortunately, and so I've been exposed to just how bad Fandom wikis are without one.
  • rchaud 2y ago
    That's just par for the course for any online service these days, though. It's not like Netflix, Hulu Spotify are keeping their prices flat.
• blendergeek 2y ago
  Can wikis on weird gloop use their own domain names? I feel like that is the best way to ensure that they can leave and that the host can't keep a zombie version of the wiki that hogs Google search position.
  • gu5 2y ago
    Currently, every wiki they host is on its own domain (besides the meta one)
  • DandyDev 2y ago
    To they can. See the Minecraft wiki for example: https://minecraft.wiki https://minecraft.wiki
  • aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
    From the article > (hint: it’s all about the domain). If we ever start going down the same path as Fandom, everyone can just leave! I would love to see other wiki platforms start to do this, because I think it’s the only way you really solve the problem. So yes, the wikis have their own domains for this exact reason.
    • blendergeek 2y ago
      I missed the "(hint: it's all about the domain)" or more precisely, I didn't get the hint. I guess I need some things spelled out for me.
• robjwells 2y ago
  > [This post] (and many others) have done a much better job than I could, explaining from a reader’s perspective why Fandom is bad place to host a wiki, The linked post (at j3s.sh) appears blank to me, so if others have the same problem here’s an archive link: https://archive.ph/kwt1b https://archive.ph/kwt1b
  • ryukoposting 2y ago
    Thanks, I had the same problem.
  • compootr 2y ago
    Yeah, the site is down (502 status)
  • j3s 2y ago
    oop, my bad. it got oomkilled somehow - should be back up now :3 original post is at https://j3s.sh/thought/stop-using-fandom.html https://j3s.sh/thought/stop-using-fandom.html
    • m463 2y ago
      nope.
• tombert 2y ago
  Fandom is one of my least favorite things now. The site ends up having more ads than the average porn or piracy website, it manages to slow down my relatively beefy laptops without even trying. I love the idea of fan wikis, but Fandom is basically the worst possible implementation of that idea.
  • cbm-vic-20 2y ago
    The "fan" in "Fandom" means the fan in your computer.
    • setopt 2y ago
      And the “dom” refers to how it completely dominates that fan.
      • aylons 2y ago
        The dom comes from some of the tame ads...
      • preciousoo 2y ago
        Or how they use every square pixel of the dom
    • razodactyl 2y ago
      ...I like you. I'm gonna keep you around... hahaha
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • GJim 2y ago
    What are these 'ads' of which you speak?
    • ta1243 2y ago
      Assuming you're not on an adblocker, what's really odd is every page has a video about the subject. Not an advert, just a video that you aren't interested in. I don't get it. If I'm looking up a specific year in the star trek universe, say 2381, to see what happened, why would I want 14 minute video on "a history of star trek". Then why would I want it again when I check the next year
• EcommerceFlow 2y ago
  Google giving Fandom powerful rankings bothers me too, since their intrusive ads clearly go against Google ranking factors. Still, I'm glad for some competition. However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?
  • DrillShopper 2y ago
    I assume that Fandom pays Google for that placement
    • abound 2y ago
      Theoretically, you can't pay for placement on Google without it being labelled an ad. Practically, you can pay SEO experts to help you keep your rankings up.
    • niam 2y ago
      If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.
      • rightbyte 2y ago
        How so? Fandom seems to have Google ads. We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher. Google's search ranking is black box. Edit: I guess at great effort you could scrape thousands of sites, not if they remove or add Google ads, and track their rating. I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
        • niam 2y ago
          > We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher This to me is a different argument, though admittedly reasonable to arrive at through the language of "paying Google for placement". > I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking. I mean, yes. Though I should hope I needn't preamble any statement about <company> with how cynical I am about their intentions... It's not relevant here because I'm not arguing on the grounds that 'Google would be ethical and kawaii if they didn't accept payment for organic search ranking'--I'm saying that from a business standpoint it wouldn't make sense.
• Nadya 2y ago
  Crazy seeing a weird gloop post in the morning on HN. Cook is very passionate about wikis - as is the rest of the team - and the RS wiki has long been regarded as one of the best gaming wikis on the internet; no contest. If you run a wiki - talk to Weird Gloop. The blog isn't bullshit and they genuinely want to help. I think it's awesome that they're helping more wikis move away from Fandom after the success of the Minecraft wiki moving. They also are running a wiki for Andrew Gower's upcoming game as well. I really hope I hear about other wikis making the move in the near future. Fandom deserves to die out. The RS Wiki is the single website I've whitelisted in my ad blocker. And despite needing ads to cover costs - they made sure to ask the community first about adding them and what alternatives to funding might be possible. It was really a last resort and they are obsessive about making sure the ads are non-intrusive, single banner, not in primary real estate, and not harming the wiki experience. If any ads cause problems they completely pause running ads until the ad host resolves the issue. Although I'm usually signed in - so never see ads anyway as they only show for users who aren't signed in.
  • mdiesel 2y ago
    There's also a channel on the rs wiki's discord for reporting bad ads, which Cook responds to very quickly (single digit minutes from the interactions I've seen).
  • card_zero 2y ago
    If they're non-tracking ads (related to the content of the wiki, instead of the content of the visitor), I could almost like them.
• dcow 2y ago
  The Runescape wiki is simply amazing. It’s one of the most well built fit for purpose pieces of quality software+content that I have ever come across. It’s clean and crisp visually and well organized at the IA level despite being exactly the type of content problem that resists such attempts by nature. What a solid community. The software doesn't fell clunky, it’s fast and responsive and still feels modern. I can only assume that’s a testament to the quality of mediawiki. I’m glad that it’s getting the attention it deserves.
  • Waterluvian 2y ago
    > I can only assume that’s a testament to the quality of mediawiki. I was curious about this so I poked around both and I think I disagree. Both load very fast for me and are snappy and look pretty nice. The one difference is that the Runescape wiki has a single ad in the sidebar or at the bottom, below the content footer. While the Fandom wikis have 3+ ads, far larger, one of which covers content until interacted with (like being closed). For me, Fandom's ad approach absolutely falls within "offensively bad," while the Runescape ad approach reminds me of early 2000s, "here's an ad to pay the bills. We've tried to keep it well out of your way." So I'd opine that it has less to do with the quality of mediawiki, and more about how much money both Wiki hosts are seeking to gain from the existence of these resources.
    • Nadya 2y ago
      Try editing anything on a Fandom wiki and that's where the real differences in experience comes from. Fandom makes it extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to do something as simple as access the page of an image asset.
      • Waterluvian 2y ago
        Woof. Yeah, you're right. That was not great.
    • wodenokoto 2y ago
      Fandom runs on media wiki too.
• stonethrowaway 2y ago
  I’m one of the folks whose fans go wild. Are they running crypto?
  • gsck 2y ago
    Dont give them any ideas
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• burkaman 2y ago
  If you're wondering what happened to Fandom, just look at who runs it now. > In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom. > In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) It's hard to imagine a worse leadership team than private equity + StubHub.
  • zoeysmithe 2y ago
    Can we stop it with the "bad apples CEO" thing. These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do. They're not exceptions. Theyre the norm. The reality is that ads and such are (probably) the only effective way to go and founders will sell to capital groups for profit. Over and over. Look at image hosting, which is a similar case. We went from ad laden tinypic's and such to ad-free imgur and now imgur is ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit. We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.
    • yakz 2y ago
      They are objectively bad for some definitions of bad. What do you want for them? Universal respect? Just because taking something good and making it shitty is one way to make money doesn't mean that it is the only way to make money.
      • rideontime 2y ago
        I think the point is that if we want this to stop happening, we have to address the cause of the problem, not just complain about its effects.
        • red-iron-pine 2y ago
          to put a finer point on it: capitalism. "then the MBAs got involved" is a cop-out, it's a systemic issue.
• thoma4s 2y ago
  Very happy to see the downfall of fandom, on mobile there are times when the whole screen is covered by multiple ads, not to mention the lag...
• nness 2y ago
  Out of curiosity, how does weirdgloop pay for wiki hosting? The amount of traffic certainly wouldn't be low... what is stopping them from having to abandon these wikis in the future due to cost pressure?
  • onei 2y ago
    There's a recent rough breakdown of costs and funding in [1]. In short, most funding is from ads. I don't think that takes into account funding for the newer Minecraft or LoL wikis, but it'll either be funded by ads or the game devs. [1]: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-03-09#General_financial_discussion https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-03-...
    • nness 2y ago
      That's interesting to know... and quite a trap. Interesting to watch and see how they scale this across communities.
• erikig 2y ago
  With so many communities interacting on Discord, and given that platform's ephemeral nature, I'd recommend having a module that can summarize highlighted chats and import or append them into the wiki as a stub that needs expansion. Most of the updates I've made on Fandom were of this nature.
• citricsquid 2y ago
  As the person ultimately responsible for the Minecraft Wiki ending up in the hands of Fandom, it is great to see what Weird Gloop (and similar) are achieving. At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run and so it didn't feel too much like selling out, because we needed money to survive[1]. 15 years later, the internet is a different place, and with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective. If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years). [1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.
  • jagermo 2y ago
    holy crap that minecraft wiki is fast now. I actually stopped going to fandom because it was so slow.
  • stonemetal12 2y ago
    Thanks (seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing. Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with instead starting from scratch.
    • beAbU 2y ago
      I can't imagine that this would have happened, like ever. The wiki was basically essential reading prior to starting to play Minecraft, especially in the early days. I think most the crafting recipes were documented by the developers themselves during those days. If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.
      • 2y ago
• jdoss 2y ago
  I play a lot of Path of Exile and one of the best quality of life improvements I did this summer was adding the Fandom Path of Exile wiki URL to my Kagi deny list so it never shows up in search. The official one that is maintained and kept up to date by the game developer poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki was always third or forth on my searches.
  • xnorswap 2y ago
    Yes, despite the poewiki migration being a fairly long time ago now, the fandom wiki still ranks frustratingly highly. The data on it is of course now very outdated and causes confusion for new players. I wonder how much the effect of lots of people having a redirect extension has. If google sees people click on the fandom result and not come back, do they treat it as a good result when in reality people are redirecting to poewiki via the extension? The situation improves every league, particularly since now there are quite a lot of items, skill gems or skill tree node passives/notables missing from the fandom wiki. It's much better than in the past when you could outright search "<skill> poewiki" and not have the poewiki result anywhere. But it still feels like there's a long way to go, and it's a shame because it further increases the knowledge gap between experienced players who might know to seek out the poewiki, and new players (or very casual players) who might not. It hints also at the power of the "old web" and it's historic power over google rankings.
    • cubefox 2y ago
      Why can't they replace the old pages with a link to the new page? Or otherwise remove the contents from the old site?
      • yifanl 2y ago
        Usually attempts to advertise migration efforts on high visibility wikis away from Fandom will be deleted by Fandom staff.
        • duskwuff 2y ago
• xcode42 2y ago
  By the way, you can replace the fandom in the url with breezewiki and get a much more pleasant experience without ads. it's not that much of a difference on desktop, and the layout might debatably be uglier, but it's a godsend on mobile where the search bar doesn't even work half the time for me.
  • layer8 2y ago
    Does anyone know of an iOS Safari extension that allows to freely configure such substitutions?
• paranoidxprod 2y ago
  A few years ago, Path of Exile migrated from the fandom to a new site. GGG (Path of Exile's company) even decided to host the new wiki on their servers (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3292958 https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3292958)! At this point, the new wiki ranks higher then the old one, but for a time it was an issue. Interesting to see more cases of games wikis leaving Fandom with how horrible the site is, and hopefully this is just the beginning of a trend.
  • ykonstant 2y ago
    Fandom PoE still pollutes the top of Google searches :(
    • paranoidxprod 2y ago
      Just tested a bunch and it seems like `path of exile [skill/currency]` usually ranks the Fandom higher while `poe [skill/currency]` ranks the new wiki higher which is why I never noticed (I actually never noticed because I block the PoE Fandom and pin the new wiki on Kagi)
      • ykonstant 2y ago
        That's good info.
        • RheingoldRiver 2y ago
          You may also want to install: https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/
    • dpbriggs 2y ago
      There is an extension which automatically redirects you from Fandom to the new wiki. While that's convenient it probably helps Fandom stay near the top.
      • 2y ago
• duxup 2y ago
  These are hosted by weirdgloop.org ... but as far as I can tell without a common known good domain it's hard to know if you're looking at a "good" wiki or "bad".
  • sph 2y ago
    I mean.. you can use your eyes to tell if it's a good wiki or not.
    • duxup 2y ago
      I feel like there's a lot of value when searching when you see a known good domain / would help unseat fandom a great deal.
  • jabroni_salad 2y ago
    There is a browser extension called Indie Wiki Buddy that keeps track of who the best wiki for each game is. And for the ones that do insist on using fandom, it can redirect to breezewiki which is a lite and respectful rehoster. https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/
    • duxup 2y ago
      Very cool, thank you.
  • maverwa 2y ago
    I'd say if you cannot tell what its hosted at, its "good". If it shouts "fandom" in your face, its "bad". Easy!
• AlienRobot 2y ago
  I'm happy that people are creating alternatives, but personally I never had a problem with Fandom. Yes, they will monetize the content, but they'll also manage it because it makes them money. Content on fandom is probably going to still be available 10 years later. It's the same with DeviantArt, it's worse now than it has ever been, but artwork uploaded 10 years ago is still available, and it will probably still be available 10 years later. You could also say this about Youtube, Google, and many other platforms. I hope the emerging alternatives prove to be successful, but so far I still don't see a reliable alternative for Youtube, Google, or DeviantArt (or even Twitter, Reddit, etc.). In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a replacement win in the long run. Maybe I'm just too young.
  • YoshiRulz 2y ago
    Most of the platforms you mention are "replacements" which have "won" over a long term—Google unseated AltaVista and Yahoo!, Reddit outlived Digg and SlashDot, and microblogging like Twitter started as blogs. And of course, Fandom "replaced" other, less bad wiki farms by virtue of buying them.
    • AlienRobot 2y ago
      But I don't personally remember any of that happening. I wasn't using Reddit when Digg was still around, just like I didn't join Facebook when MySpace was still relevant. The first time I used Yahoo! was after its search engine because Bing with a different label.
• michaelsbradley 2y ago
  Fextralife Wikis are an alternative: https://www.wiki.fextralife.com/ https://www.wiki.fextralife.com/ Comments sections on wikis there for e.g. FromSoftware games can tend toward rebarbativity, and the ads can be annoying, but in my recent experience the information troves compiled for big games such as Elden Ring are an indispensable resource.
  • kimbernator 2y ago
    It's not fresh in my memory, but I recall being extremely annoyed at the Elden Ring wiki around the release of the game; not for lack of being filled out, but the site was just not fun to use. Truth be told, it appears that Weird Gloop/mediawiki has a bit of a monopoly on wiki platforms that don't suck.
  • sigh_again 2y ago
    fextralife has the exact same behavior as Fandom: autoplaying their Twitch streams to farm views and displaying ads, at times hiding it in invisible iframes, or making it so small you can't find it, leading to Twitch making rules against embedding autoplays, ads everywhere, shitty AI generated stubs for half the articles, botting and automatically piling on criticism, and fundamentally, it's just plain wrong, everywhere. The initial Dark Souls wikidot was excellent. Fextralife bullied and threatened them into closing down. At this point, people don't move on because of habit, but the quality for the Elden Ring wiki is dramatically bad. Information is outdated, poorly maintained, actual fixes are being reverted by their own, paid editors, other wikis are suspiciously often the target of attacks and deleted content.
    • sph 2y ago
      I loved the Dark Souls wikidot. Sad to see the Elden Ring "official" wiki is the Fextralife one.
    • michaelsbradley 2y ago
      On a scale of 0 – Good, I would score my overall experience with fextralife as "not great", especially when viewing it on my phone. I don't know the history and controversies re: other sites, I only started reading fextra wikis in 2022/23. But I haven't experienced problems with information in the guides. Off the top of my head: for Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Hollow Knight, I don't recall a single time when the info was flat out wrong. In the case of comments pointing out something incorrect or incomplete, it had already been fixed by the time of my reading.
• hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Everyone complains about Fandom, but it's the only reason 99% of the communities on its site have a wiki. Take a random game like https://endlesslegend.fandom.com/wiki/Endless_Legend_Wiki https://endlesslegend.fandom.com/wiki/Endless_Legend_Wiki That game is 10 years old and its wiki was built in the height of its popularity when it had people to build it. The developer moved on, the community moved on. If its wiki weren't on Fandom, then its wiki would depend on some random person paying the bill for eternity for a game they themself moved on from long ago. Yeah, it has ads, but someone has to pay the bill. I'll take the ad-ridden wiki that exists over the idealized one that went offline seven years ago when the interest died out. This becomes a metaphor for the internet in general.
  • teddyh 2y ago
    If there actuallt exists a community, they can scare up somebody to host some infrastructure the community depends on. Otherwise the community is dead, and it’s archive.org you should be thanking.
    • layer8 2y ago
      Archive.org is awfully slow, and more importantly, the archived pages are not indexed by Google, hence aren’t discoverable.
    • hombre_fatal 2y ago
      They can, but they didn't 99% of the time. And archive.org is not a replacement for a website, not even a Fandom wiki. It's horrible to use and you're lucky if it indexes a quarter of what you want, especially on a property as big as a wiki. And it's read-only. On Fandom I can still log in and make improvements.
  • Ukv 2y ago
    WeirdGloop is supposedly profitable despite having only a single, non-intrusive banner ad. It's perfectly possible to run forums/wikis/etc. on even just the free tier of Cloudflare/Oracle OCI. The issue is that Wikia/Fandom, Reddit, etc. subsumed most other alternatives by offering what was for a long time a legitimately convenient and decent-quality service, but now that communities are too locked in to move (due to intentional measures like changing forking policy, and the community having to fight against network effect/SEO) they enshittify to squeeze out profit. Result is a worse site than if Fandom/etc. had never existed. Relatively optimistic about movement towards structures that resist this kind of exploitation.
• kps 2y ago
  There's a browser extension that provides links to Fandom alternatives on various topics: https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy
• for1nner 2y ago
  It's hard running and managing wikis, and anyone/org/group that does so outside of the auspices of fandom or similar trash-aggregation hosts should be celebrated. Love this for weirdgloop. On a related note, shoutout to liquipedia[1], which has been a great experience for so long (a number of years I refuse to recognize as it would prove I'm old), and I have always feared the possibility of it moving to or becoming a fandom. [1]https://liquipedia.net/ https://liquipedia.net/
  • broodbucket 2y ago
    Can't see it ever happening, it's obviously not a service driven by revenue. The Dota2 non-esports wiki recently migrated from Fandom to Liquipedia too
• card_zero 2y ago
  Slightly ad hoc funding (which is probably sensible, spread it around): https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited Some donations, some ads, and contracts (one so far) with companies that benefit. It all looks very Wikipedia-like. I wonder if the WMF could be persuaded to throw some of their massive pile of cash in this direction, in the public interest? But then Weird Gloop would probably have to be a non-profit.
  • sph 2y ago
    Given that Jimmy Wales is president of Fandom, I don't know if that's a good idea for WMF to get involved.
    • card_zero 2y ago
      Ha! I didn't know that. I'm unclear on whether he actually has any influence at WMF or just serves as a fluffy mascot, but yeah, maybe not such a good idea.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago
  MediaWiki is actually pretty easy to set up on a web server, speaking as someone who's now done it twice. You plop the files into htdocs, make sure PHP is set up, set up vanity URLs if you want to, and then… well, that's it. The final step is to go to the site, fill in the setup form, download the settings file it gives you and upload it. It doesn't even need an external database, it can use SQLite; if email setup is annoying, it doesn't even need that. And it's the most powerful and flexible wiki software out there: if there's something you want a wiki to do, MediaWiki can do it, but it also isn't too bloated out of the box, so you can just install plugins as and when you need them. Thoroughly recommend it.
  • giantrobot 2y ago
    Making MediaWiki survive non-trivial amounts of traffic is much harder than simply setting it up. It's not an impossible task for sure but there's no one click performance setting.
    • starkparker 2y ago
      Specifically, managing edge and object caches (and caching for anonymous viewers vs. logged-in editors with separate frontend and backend caches) while mitigating the effects of cache misses, minimizing the impacts of the job queue when many pages are changed at once, optimizing image storage, thumbnailing, and caching, figuring out when to use a wikitext template vs. a Scribunto/Lua module vs. a MediaWiki extension in PHP (and if Scribunto, which Lua runtime to use), figuring out which structured data backend to use and how to tune it, figuring out whether to rely on API bots (expensive on the backend) vs. cache scrapers (expensive on the frontend) vs. database dump bots (no cost to the live site but already outdated before they're finished dumping) for automated content maintenance jobs, tuning rate limiting, and loadbalancing it all. At especially large scales, spinning the API and job queues off altogether into microservices and insulating the live site from the performance impact of logging this whole rat's nest.
      • bawolff 2y ago
        Everything is hard at scale. You have to be pretty big scale before some of that stuff starts to matter (some of course matters at smaller scales)
• asl98 2y ago
  What are people's thoughts on putting wikis on web3 infrastructure
  • noman-land 2y ago
    Do it. The costs shouldn't be borne by a single entity, they should be spread across the community of users. Onboarding and lag are two big hurdles to overcome, as you will inevitably have to put editing behind a transaction.
• dcchambers 2y ago
  I love this post. I also LOVE wikis. I have railed against Fandom for years and I have often shared my view on this in the past[^1]. It's an absolute blight on so many beloved game communities at this point. I like this approach much more than the games that have decided to move to another managed/hosted service like https://wiki.gg https://wiki.gg - which has a very real change of becoming the "next" Fandom. Truly independent wikis are the best. [^1]: https://publish.obsidian.md/dakota/Hobbies/Gaming/Gaming+Wikis https://publish.obsidian.md/dakota/Hobbies/Gaming/Gaming+Wik...
  • baud147258 2y ago
    I skimmed the post linked at [^1], but I have a doubt about that: > Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia Are you sure about this? Since Fandom got acquired by private equity in 2018, I don't think Wikipedia has any stake in Fandom anymore
    • dcchambers 2y ago
      You're right, that's incorrect on my part. Fandom (well, Wikia) was founded and run by Jimmy Wales for a long time, but there is no official connection with the Wikipedia project/Wikimedia foundation. I will fix that.
    • bawolff 2y ago
      They never had a stake at any point. The connection is that 2 of the main people involved originally (jimmy & angela) had a lot of ties to wikimedia, but they were doing wikicities/wikia/fandom as their own thing, not as part of wikimedia. Also long ago there was some minor connections. They briefly shared an office like 15 years ago i think, and they tried to jointly develop a wysiwyg editor back in like 2012 (wikimedia did most of the work i think, but wikia leant a few devs to the project at one point) which eventually became the mediawiki visual editor. Anyways totally separare orgs.
      • dcchambers 2y ago
        To be fair I think you could argue we're actively witnessing a cautionary tale about one founder having large interests in both a nonprofit and a related for-profit company with the ongoing Wordpress.org/Automattic/WPEngine drama.
• languagehacker 2y ago
  Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.
  • rideontime 2y ago
    I didn't think I could Fandom being worse than it already is, but imagining it stuffed with AI-generated slop...
    • languagehacker 2y ago
      Sure, but think about something as low stakes as, "Does such-and-such a character from my favorite TV show have any siblings" vs. "Is it safe to consume XYZ" Even with the great structured and semi-structured data that Wikis can provide with this like infoboxes and other sort of templates, there were definitely limitations to the tech nearly ten years ago. My experience back then is one of the reasons I'm super skeptical of the long-term value of the AI / LLM trend we're going through right now.
      • sushid 2y ago
        Aren't those types of prompts the MOST likely to generate hallucinations?
        • Sebguer 2y ago
          Not in the contexts that the author is talking about, when you have the canonical answers in your data set and know roughly where to look for them.
    • 2y ago
• layer8 2y ago
  > I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. It’s very useful, however, to have a place where that’s possible, even if that’s currently Fandom. Many wikis wouldn’t exist without that non-barrier to entry. Those that gain traction can then decide to move elsewhere.
  • dianliang233 2y ago
    That would be Miraheze [1]. Community funded wiki farm. However it's had some instability such as internal conflict and server issues, but it's better than all the alternatives. [1]: https://miraheze.org/ https://miraheze.org/
• Aardwolf 2y ago
  I found Wikia a great product name which evoked the feeling 'this topic may be too obscure for Wikipedia, but here you can make an entire Wiki about it!', and I never understood why it was changed to 'Fandom'
  • zhobbs 2y ago
    There are advertisers who specifically want to reach fans (gamers, tv/movie fans, etc), the name change was to make that ad sale conversation stronger: https://about.fandom.com/mediakit https://about.fandom.com/mediakit
  • iamacyborg 2y ago
    It’s particularly dumb given it was literally entering the lexicon as a generic term in a lot of instances.
• sph 2y ago
  A thing that bothers me is that Jimmy Wales, a founder of and arguably the face of Wikipedia, is also the founder and president of Fandom, Inc. (2004–present) I respect the work of Mr. Wales immensely, and I cannot explain how he has allowed his creation to become synonymous with ad-ridden borderline unusable gaming wikis.
  • whstl 2y ago
    Jimmy Wales lost my respect with Wikia itself, even before it was acquired. There was a huge push in Wikipedia in the 2010s to delete content that could be moved into Wikia/Fandom, and a huge amount of quality information was removed. It was clear the goal was to pump views in the money-making website. Then we only saw Wikia becoming Fandom and getting progressively worse.
  • marxisttemp 2y ago
    Jimbo is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, and as such I find it unsurprising that he has created both a wonderful, decentralized, communitarian project as well as a capitalistic nightmare. Libertarians are essentially anarchists who selectively turn their brains off when they see dollar signs.
    • mardifoufs 2y ago
      I think you're talking about the other wikipedia founder, no? Jimbo might have some libertarian tendencies too but they haven't been super visible in the way he directed the wiki. But yeah, his involvement with wikia is a huge stain
      • marxisttemp 2y ago
        Nope, I am talking about Jimbo. From that website he founded: > Wales has previously referred to himself as an Objectivist, referring to the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism.
        • 2y ago
• yakk0 2y ago
  It think it's been changed, but I believe the Transformers wiki on Fandom started out as a copy of the superior [TFWiki](https://tfwiki.net https://tfwiki.net). TFWiki has been referenced by many official creators and Hasbro designers themselves and has proven to be a great resource. I have no idea what their infrastructure or backup plans are, but I dread the day they go down.
• bityard 2y ago
  Does anyone predict Discord might end up going down the same path?
• renewiltord 2y ago
  Would be cool to know what extensions you’re using on MediaWiki and how you’ve set it up to maximize performance. These wikis seem really quick to respond.
  • cookmeplox 2y ago
    Thanks! I've been meaning to write up a post that talks about some of the specific tricks we're using. A couple big ones: - Heavy use of Cloudflare Workers to cache ~95% of logged-out pageviews, with a particular focus on doing a lot of edge-side modifications to minimize cache fragmentation - Using the MediaWiki jobrunners to repopulate the parser cache before pageviews are requested, so even when pageviews hit the server, there's a high chance that the core contents have already been computed somewhere - I realized that MediaWiki latency is usually dominated by I/O wait time. For example, some pageviews require thousands of synchronous database/redis cache reads, so the difference between 0.5ms lookup and 0.1ms lookup adds up. So we colocated more of those caches on the same physical machines as the webservers that were reading them, which on average dropped latency by ~40%
    • starkparker 2y ago
      Is there a RSS feed on the WG blog? I couldn't track one down, and it looks like a Jekyll site, so I'm not sure if there is one. I don't want to miss that post.
      • cookmeplox 2y ago
        https://weirdgloop.org/feed.xml https://weirdgloop.org/feed.xml should do it
    • renewiltord 2y ago
      Would love to read that post. Thank you for these tips. I’ll subscribe to your feed and wait for it.
• rightbyte 2y ago
  There is something fundamental here. It used to be the case that you could form communities around commercial entities. But nowadays it seems to be too many short term profit vultures roaming around looking for targets, to not end up selling out the community. Efficient market I guess.
• evanfarrar 2y ago
  They should promise not to become wikimedia board members. That is the main thing that allows fandom to be so bad.
  • mrweasel 2y ago
    How so? I mean I don't disagree, but more out of concern for what they'd do to Wikipedia is given the chance.
• tjbiddle 2y ago
  Decided to give OSRS (Old School RuneScape) another try after more than a decade break from the game. Without their wiki, I don't think I would've continued to play; it's open constantly - incredibly easy to use, very well up to date, and just an all around wonderful resource. Above and beyond what used to exist.
• otterpro 2y ago
  The only wiki in Fandom I actually go to is the Vim Tips Wiki (https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki). But how did Vim get in a Fandom in the first place? I hate going to Vim Wiki, even though they have good tips not found anywhere, due to all the things that were mentioned in the article. 50-70% of screen real-estate is filled with ads or distractions. I hope that vim will get its own wiki instead.
  • linux2647 2y ago
    > But how did Vim get in a Fandom in the first place? It was created back when Fandom was Wikia, back when it was a good place to host a wiki
  • rbits 2y ago
    Check out BreezeWiki (https://breezewiki.com/ https://breezewiki.com/). It lets you view any fandom wiki with a much better UI. The Indie Wiki Buddy extension also lets you automatically redirect fandom to BreezeWiki (https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/)
• marxisttemp 2y ago
  First thing I thought of seeing the title was the wonderful Old School RuneScape wiki! Whenever I have to use a Fandom wiki I think longingly of the OSRS wiki. I would love if the GTA wiki migrated to you.
• vman81 2y ago
  Hey, as long as they don't have those dark pattern cookie consent forms, I'm a happy camper. The EU should really have specified that accept all/decline all should be a top level choice instead of "Accept all" with the alternative being "learn more" leading to submenus for every one of the 891 "partners".
  • thih9 2y ago
    That is already the case: > The GDPR is specific that consent must be as 'easy to withdraw as to give', meaning that a reject-all button must be as easy to access in terms of clicks and visibility as an 'accept all' button. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#EU_cookie_directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#EU_cookie_directiv...
    • jabroni_salad 2y ago
      what is required is not the same as what happens in practice. Visit any wiki.gg site and see what they're doing.
      • jampekka 2y ago
        The law is not enforced. The non-enforcement is largely by design/lobby though.
        • thih9 2y ago
          This law hasn't been enforced here but it's not like it has never been enforced; major websites like Google, Facebook and others were forced to add "reject all": https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/21/23035289/google-reject-all-cookie-button-eu-privacy-data-laws https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/21/23035289/google-reject-al...
          • jampekka 2y ago
            It took EU enforcement eight years to enforce obvious violations of the law for a few companies. The illegal nags are still rampant. And e.g. Meta (and many newspapers) already has a new obviously illegal tracking scheme with the "pay to not track". The intended effect of GDPR would have been easily gotten with legally binding do-not-track and similar automated means. Very few people want to be tracked, but most of them are against their true consent.
• zellyn 2y ago
  Random question: do you work with the new wikis to create some kind of license that prevents Fandom from scraping future changes back into their version of the wikis? Obviously the technical modifications can't translate, but it seems like it wouldn't be that hard for them to slurp most textual/markup changes back in and make it look like their version of the wiki is still alive…
  • onei 2y ago
    When RuneScape and Old School RuneScape Wikis forked, the license was changed from CC-By-SA to CC-BY-SA-NC. As a result, all new changes come under the new license. To copy changes back to Fandom, they'd need to update their license to match and as I understand it so forfeit some of their ability to use so much advertising. I'm not sure if that license update was also applied to Minecraft or LoL, but it's a possibility. The only use of CC-BY-SA-NC on Fandom I can recall is Memory Alpha (Star Trek Wiki) which was acquired with that license. There were some extra hoops to jump through to be able to advertise there - I think they granted themselves the ability to do so through Terms of Use that override the license.
• forgotpwd16 2y ago
  Should mention the pessimistic possibility that Fandom buys WG and those wikis return under their umbrella. An example being Wowpedia forked off WoWWiki in 2010, moved to Curse's Gamepedia in 2013, which, Gamepedia, Fandom (then Wikia) bought in 2018. edit: Seems they moved again recently to wiki.gg.
  • rbits 2y ago
    With Weird Gloop they have agreements that the community can move the wiki away from Weird Gloop if that happens. For example this one is not legally binding yet, but once the minecraft wiki had a legal entity it will be: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_with_Weird_Gloop https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...
  • Washuu 2y ago
    The reason behind Fandom buying Gamepedia/Curse is both a blessing and a curse(HAH!) that would require a specific set of circumstances to happen again.[1] Basically during 2018 Curse's owners, Twitch and Amazon, wanted more head count for Twitch and to cut out anything that was not part of Twitch's main mission. The decision at the time from the Twitch CEO was to completely shut down Curse and fire everyone by the end of 2018 even though Curse was a cash positive subsidiary. That would mean turning off every single wiki with no transfer to anywhere else. It would all just be gone. So the director of Curse at the time worked his ass off find a buyer for the company. The final options came down to The Verge, Wikia, and one other that I forgot. Essentially Wikia was the only one that could promise to meet all of the buyout terms and a two year transition period of employee benefits for current employees. I'm not going to call Wikia a savior here, but without any company offering to buy Curse a lot of wikis and jobs may have been lost that December. [1]I signed some NDA about this, but it has been many years and I don't care.
    • forgotpwd16 2y ago
      Ok, that adds a new perspective to what appeared happened (basically Wikia simply buying off a competitor).
• nullindividual 2y ago
  The Noita wiki moved away from Fandom to noita.wiki.gg due to ads, etc. The Fandom one still exists, of course, but has no community backing and lacks information from the newer updates of the game. Unfortunately the Fandom wiki is still the first link when searching on DDG :-(
• zellyn 2y ago
  Sadly, Fandom still has a lot of search mojo. For instance, when searching for "minecraft redstone filter bedrock" I get a link to the Fandom minecraft wiki rather than minecraft.wiki. Hopefully over time, that corrects itself. Also, the Google search results page for that search made me pine for the good old days of Google being 10 real links…
• Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
  What is weird gloop doing exactly ? Is it hosting it on cloudflare / using cloudflare workers or what exactly (because I heard cloudflare being mentioned here) I am all ears because hosting a static site is basically free thanks to github pages / cloudflare pages , but having a site which changes a lot (a wiki can have changes be applied to at an insane rate , though I am not sure if we could use something like git as a wiki I think wikis also allow messages between users ) but is still static can cost a arm and leg
  • Capricorn2481 2y ago
    > but having a site which changes a lot but is still static can cost a arm and leg How so? Seems like it would be trivial in PHP
• thurnderbong 2y ago
  [dead]
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  The ads and videos on fandom are out of control. I get these distractions on top and bottom with a tiny sliver of content in the middle, basically.
• gregjw 2y ago
  Weird Gloop have been doing a great job with the Old School Runescape Wiki for a while now, happy to see them extending that elsewhere.
• Apocryphon 2y ago
  What are the major Fandom/Wikia alternatives out there right now? Besides Weird Gloop, this thread has also mentioned Miraheze, wiki.gg, Wikidot, and Fextralife. What others?
  • YoshiRulz 2y ago
    You have named all the players. Maybe throw ShoutWiki in there, but I recently tried to create a wiki there and it wasn't working—YMMV. There's also NIWA, focused on Nintendo-related IP, but I believe that's more of a webring and doesn't manage hosting for their members.
  • iamacyborg 2y ago
    Self hosting is also relatively uncomplicated.
• xmprt 2y ago
  Did you get in touch with Riot Games to be able to host a subdomain of leagueoflegends.com. If so, it's great that they're also behind this
  • ggregoire 2y ago
    Literally the second sentence of the article: > We’ve spent the last couple months working with the Riot folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom
• scoofy 2y ago
  Just a shameless plug for https://golfcourse.wiki https://golfcourse.wiki If you’re into golf, help try to build the most thorough list of courses in the world, accessible to all.
• dpedu 2y ago
  I was a user of one of the Fandom wikis this group took over. Moving the information to a better platform is fine. What wasn't fine is how they made every single page on the existing Fandom wiki redirect to a meme page that didn't explain what was happening. This was particularly disruptive because it made every single google result for "<game name> <topic>" invalid as it redirected to this useless page. Fandom has better SEO and the replacement wiki was so new it didn't appear in google results for several weeks. It was extremely annoying.
• ceroxylon 2y ago
  The same thing is happening to older forums, if you browse without an ad blocker you get ads that try to trigger every emotion all at once, all of them larger than the actual content. Three cheers for weird gloop, JES, and everyone else fighting the good fight.
• Destiner 2y ago
  I love when somebody disrupts a hidden market like that. Fandom had terrible UXs for years, but nobody seemed to care enough to make an alternative. I'd assume most users are not engineers/founders, so the opportunity was hidden for a while. In hindsight it makes total sense.
  • starkparker 2y ago
    There have been several competitors formed in response to or predating Wikia/Fandom over the years, particularly Gamepedia/Curse Media (which Fandom acquired). Fandom also acquired other game-focused community knowledge resources, like GameFAQs and Giant Bomb. There's also now wiki.gg, which focuses on official wikis run by game developers and was launched after the Gamepedia acquisition by Gamepedia's founder and a former Fandom president. Several wikis are on independent MediaWiki farms like Miraheze or ShoutWiki, and numerous others self-host entirely independently. This Weird Gloop effort seems to be more like wiki.gg, but for community-run wikis rather than gamedev-run wikis — bespoke relationships with communities that want to migrate or relaunch, rather than open sign-ups to a platform like Miraheze or ShoutWiki.
  • ogurechny 2y ago
    Ehm. This is nothing new. https://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forked_wikis https://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forked_wikis https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Wiki:Departure_from_Wikia https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Wiki:Departure_from_Wikia https://www.niwanetwork.org/ https://www.niwanetwork.org/ etc.
• johnklos 2y ago
  This illustrates a problem that I wish more people would see. People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to make more money. Who doesn't like more money? They add the thing, and revenue goes up! What they don't see is the effect that comes when fewer people visit the site because they're too annoyed to come back over time. They see and take credit for the small increase, but of course they don't take credit for the gradual decline afterwards, a decline that often enough leaves the site making the same or less money than it did before the craptastic ads. If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
  • jjcm 2y ago
    It's the classic question of "how much of our brand did we sell to achieve this bump in revenue?". Selling your brand is a very real thing, and I wish more people would take it into account. Brand health correlates with long term health.
  • xahrepap 2y ago
    I’ve wondered about this wrt public transportation. They keep raising prices, making it less affordable for people. Eventually basically no one is riding, so they … raise prices. It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.
    • hendersonreed 2y ago
      I've had this thought about public transit quite often. We're all very familiar with induced demand when it comes to widening highways and other car-centric infrastructure. Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes.
      • danudey 2y ago
        > Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes. Good systems do; most systems don't, for lots of reasons. 1. Public transit is for poor people, and poor people don't fund re-election campaigns 2. Subsidizing public transit is spending the public's money, and the public has spent decades being told that "socialism" is going to take away their freedom and choice; in this case, the government is going to put more of YOUR tax dollars into public transit and then TAKE AWAY your cars. It becomes a vicious cycle: 1. Transit is under-funded (or the funding is maintained but not increased to match rising ridership and costs) 2. Service has to get cut in areas with low ridership (e.g. areas with a lot of retirement communities get cuts to route frequency) 3. People get mad because now their buses run less often so they have to leave earlier or later than they wanted to 4. Why are we paying these people when they're just giving us worse and worse service? In the end you wind up with a scenario where people are voting no to additional transit funding, and pointing to the direct results of under-funding as their explanation - look how bad service is, why would we give them more money? [0] [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-referendum-voters-say-no-to-new-metro-vancouver-tax-transit-improvements-1.3134857 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-refe...
• dartos 2y ago
  Thank god. Fandom is the most unusable website I have ever landed on.
• lofaszvanitt 2y ago
  The most important aspect of any kind of community thing, if that involves adverts and other income options for the party that owns the platform, is to give back to the contributors.
• lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  I've noticed how many wikis for games I look up are on fandom and, probably because of my experience with web development, I take special note of the fact that they're always at game-name.fandom.com (I'm also a bit disappointed, like when I bought Chrono Trigger on Steam and looked up why the cat wouldn't follow me). I don't think I've ever seen a wiki with their branding/style that is not also on their domain. Perhaps some exist which use their software but I've never heard of such a vendor then also demanding a new style to be used, though I guess that's possible. Anyway, I've always doubted it to be an accident that seemingly all of their wikis are hosted on the same domain[1]. Glad to see someone doing good work about that, even if it's just incidental while they solve a different problem. Seeing the official LoL wiki on leagueoflegends.com suggests they don't intend to do the same sort of -- admittedly presumed -- widespread tracking. Regardless, it sounds like the wiki maintainers prefer working with Weird Gloop rather than Fandom and I don't otherwise have a lot of sympathy for Fandom. I have no specific bone to pick with them but I also can't help but feel glad for people who are finding other wiki software vendors. (It's also kind of interesting to see the Minecraft wiki at minecraft.wiki instead of something like wiki.minecraft.com. I guess it's a community project, just noting that Microsoft/Mojang don't seem interested in maintaining it(?). Maybe the community prefers it that way and they're respecting that.) 1: Turns out it definitely is not an accident: https://support.fandom.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021258554-I-want-to-change-a-wiki-s-name-or-URL https://support.fandom.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021258554-I-... > We can only change the first part of your wiki's URL (i.e. example.fandom.com) - we do not support wikis outside of fandom.com.
• bakugo 2y ago
  > For starters: on average, moving away from Fandom doubles the number of people editing Glad to hear I'm not the only one who actively avoids contributing to Fandom wikis because it's effectively doing unpaid labor for a corporation that only cares about making as much money as possible off of said unpaid labor.
• paradox460 2y ago
  In my opinion, the best approach to videogame wikis is what valve did with the TF2 wiki. They saw that it was a great community resource, and so they took it under their wing, gave it hosting and a subdomain, and then left it alone. The wiki maintains full editorial control, which lets it remain a useful resource
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Valve is in a unique position. Private company which makes infinite cash from their store. Plenty of freedom for little community outlays which can be impossible to approve when you have to justify finance numbers to the street.
  • HDThoreaun 2y ago
    That's what seems to be happening here. Riot games paid for the wiki to be moved from fandom and hosted by weird glop but governance seems unchanged.
• Ameo 2y ago
  A huge congrats to the Weird Gloop team on this, and to the League of Legends community for what's certain to be a huge bump to the availability of high-quality information and community space. As others have pointed out, the RuneScape Wiki (where Weird Gloop started out) is probably the highest quality gaming wiki on the internet. Not only is its information itself up-to-date and accurate, but it has countless custom features and interactive tools that elevate it from a crowdsourced knowledgebase to a sort of data and analytics hub for the game. Anyway, this really is terrific news and any wiki that chooses to partner with Weird Gloop is certainly in the best of hands.
• 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Not sure how expensive this is to offer, but I would love if more wikis were encouraged to offer a bulk export option. Monthly db dumps or similar. I am sure many sites get wasteful spider traffic which could be avoided if the structured content were available. Maybe host them on Internet archive the way stack overflow did. Also, if the exports were significantly better documented that Wikipedia”s. I could not make heads or tails of the hundreds of options Wikipedia presents, all seemingly without any unifying resource describing the differences.
• mvdtnz 2y ago
  And of course "Weird Gloop" super duper promises not to enshittify, even though they are a free product that will eventually need advertiser funding. Bottom line is, this will keep happening until internet users realise that this model breeds this outcome. If you want nice things you must be willing to pay.
• m463 2y ago
  can someone explain why weirdgloop is better/more secure long-term?
• lrae 2y ago
  In theory, great, but nobody here is doing it out of the goodness of their heart either. But, smart on the publishers to take (even more) control of the "community projects" this way.
• permo-w 2y ago
  does fandom prevent their wikis from mass-linking to the new wiki at the top of their pages?
  • dianliang233 2y ago
    Yes. They consider it a violation of their "forking policy"[1]. Fun(?) fact – Fandom put even more restrictions right after Minecraft Wiki moved[2]. Now it doesn't even allow wikis to put a banner on their main page saying that there's a forking discussion unless they contact Fandom support and get permission. [1]: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy [2]: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy?diff=3757052 https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy?diff=375705...
• RajT88 2y ago
  The author does miss out on the idea that Fandom only runs shitty wikis. They own TVGuide now.
• morjom 2y ago
  The Oldschool Runescape and Guild Wars wikis are still some of the best wikis I've experienced. Both of them are even implemented into the game. In GW1&2 you can just type /wiki <insert subject> and it'll open a browser tab to the wikipage. In OSRS there's a button next to the minimap that you click on first and then on the subject and it opens the wikipage for it. I wish Warframe would move to a osrswiki model. A theorycraft heavy game almost requires a good, performant wiki. Somewhat recently Wowpedia moved away from fandom to wiki.gg, dunno yet if it'll be another fandom, we'll see.
  • debesyla 2y ago
    What I super love about Guild Wars 2 wiki is that it embraces the API that the game has - enter your personal API code and get personalized Achievement, Item progress and etc. tracking. Super cool! Oh, and, yeah, I probabbly have "/wiki et" as a muscle memory now - it's so fast and easy to check in-game events using this chat command.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• ggm 2y ago
  The travelling mobile sim guide is/was useful. Maybe esim has made it redundant
• sharpshadow 2y ago
  Path of Exile was so keen to host the community Wiki[0] back in the days because Fandom just sucks. 0. https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki
• mdbauman 2y ago
  The sidebar link on the Minecraft wiki taught me about the extension "Indie Wiki Buddy," https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/ which among other things prioritizes non-Fandom search results.
• tylervigen 2y ago
  I've always wished that more games would self-host a wiki. Gamers love wikis with detailed data about the game, and I hate it when I go to play a game which has poor wiki coverage. This can happen with small titles that don't have a big enough player base, titles where the player base didn't "align" on one wiki, or with games where the information is inconsistent across game versions/platforms (Don't Starve is notorious for this). But the biggest issue is competing, hard-to-use, user-unfriendly wikis - and this would be solved if more game studios were willing to self-host a wiki.
  • JayNeely 2y ago
    I'm working with a game studio that's self-hosting their most recent game (Cyber Knights: Flashpoint)'s wiki for the first time: https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ It's going well content-wise, but it's insane how hard it's been to get it ranking in search results at all, much less outrank Fandom.
• hackjunior 2y ago
  Yes
• nemesis1637 2y ago
  Hoping OP will still see this on a 9 day old post. I just had time to read this. How do I know who owns/controls a wiki on Fandom? Or is that not the right question?