5 ms·

Wikis are great, but it feels like outside of Wikipedia they've been dying. I wish bashhackers was still with us, and regret even more that there's not other la

• rcarmo 2y ago
  My blog is actually a wiki, and has been going for 23 years. There are quite a few other old farts^W^Wvintage bloggers out there with similar setups.
• crooked-v 2y ago
  I feel like that's been helped along culturally by fandom.com buying out various independent wikis and then shittifying them to the point of unusability.
  • TkTech 2y ago
    There's an ongoing mini-revolution against Fandom, with the wikis that have the manpower moving away to other platforms like wiki.gg, WeirdGloop, or just self-hosted. Minecraft, WoW, Runescape, LoL, etc.
    • j3s 2y ago
      yep! i recommend indie wiki buddy for discovering these sorts of community-led wikis. the extension recognizes when you’re on fandom and recommends equivalent community wikis instead fandom will not take down old wikis (that’d be bad for SEO), so the fandom content persists even after a full community migration. just one of the many shitty things that company does.
      • shnock 2y ago
        This? https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/ Thank you from a long-time hater of Fandom and PE-driven enshittification and lover of community-driven knowledge work
    • doublepg23 2y ago
      I'm glad https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page survived Fandom.
      • diggan 2y ago
        If only we could have something similar but official for Starfield. For some very stupid reason, Bethesda decided to launch official modding support with Starfield while their wiki is "temporarily down for maintenance". But it's been like that for at least 1 year, so seems unlikely to ever come back, and who the fuck takes down something so vital for a feature you're shipping in a major game anyways, without letting a read-only copy remain online at least?
    • Kye 2y ago
      The moved-out Minecraft wiki is finally starting to get competitive in search with Fandom. At least on DuckDuckGo. I used to have to dig for it.
  • KPGv2 2y ago
    Ugh, that explains why the Miraculous Ladybug wiki is so godawful.
  • emodendroket 2y ago
    I guess that doesn't help but it feels like our cultural moment doesn't have the same kind of spirit that made people want to make a Wiki.
  • brutal_chaos_ 2y ago
    How is fandom shitty now? I'm asking from a newer user perspective. What did standalone wikis do better? My initial guess is ads, but is there more to it?
    • naravara 2y ago
      The pages are basically unreadable on mobile.
    • krige 2y ago
      Ads, awful layout on desktop, beyond awful on mobile, slow server responses. On the flipside more wikis are actually moving OFF Fandom lately, for instance to wiki.gg
    • blharr 2y ago
      Adding autoplay videos that are tangentially related to the wiki page. Said videos take about 10 seconds to show up and will cause the screen to scroll to a different point from where you are currently reading Their privacy policy is exhaustive, and you opt in by default to sharing your data with Google and 7 other analytics providers UI noise like "share to Instagram/YouTube/LinkedIn" that probably 0.1% of people even consider using When you're on a specific game wiki, you care only about that wiki content, but fandom places a Fandom navigation bar and side menu Their default email strategy sent almost daily updates for random posts on (unrelated) FANDOM community when I made a couple comments on a specific wiki a decade ago.
      • WorldMaker 2y ago
        Also, on mobile the video ads plus Fandom navigation bar now take up a sticky combined 50% or more of the viewport until you find the close button. Also, Fandom got its start by taking advantage of the easy, permissive nature of CC licenses of major early wikis, including much of Fandom started as chunks of even Wikipedia itself that got excised for "relevance" or other "non-encylopedia" factors. Even in some of the cases where communities have decided to leave Fandom, Fandom believes it remains their right to scrape the community's new site and not need to include links back to the "real" home, so Fandom itself becomes an SEO disaster for the community. Even communities that had hoped to protect themselves from such situations by choosing a more restrictive CC license with the NC (Non Commercial) clause have been struggling with revoking Fandom's access to their content against Fandom's legal team saying that Fandom's commercial waver to the content was both retroactive and in perpetuity, and those wikis would have known that at the time.
  • anthk 2y ago
    Install Libredirect for Firefox/Chrome compatible browsers and set the Fandom redirection to something else.
• ghxst 2y ago
  Wiki's are still doing well in the gaming space I think (https://oldschool.runescape.wiki https://oldschool.runescape.wiki to name one, has a dedicated community of thousands of players behind it). I agree with you in general though, the GitHub wikis really don't feel the same.
  • jsheard 2y ago
    There are a lot of gaming wikis but unfortunately a lot of them are hosted by Fandom, and it's hard for independent alternatives to compete with Fandoms SEO.
    • chii 2y ago
      i wish there's more alternative to fandom. I think one of the best alternative (that is still free) is actually github pages. The problem is that the contribution model is not trivially solvable via permissioning - the owner of the github page has to approve (the PR changes). Ideally, what would be best is if there's a set of github action that would automerge changes from a list of approved contributors (who would first fork the page, make the edits and submit a PR). This set of github action would need to be a turn-key setup, without needing much technical knowledge (so that the laymen can do it).
      • bawolff 2y ago
        Between miraheze, weirdgloop and wiki.gg it seems like there are quite a few alternatives to fandom. What is missing?
        • rogers12 2y ago
          Search engines rank crappy inactive fandom wikis above official wiki.gg wikis.
      • BlueTemplar 2y ago
        [flagged]
    • 2y ago
• rr808 2y ago
  The last few jobs I had all ran confluence for docs. I dont know why its so slow but does the main things you want. Any tips on docs that integrate with support tickets and maybe some AI would be great.
  • mrweasel 2y ago
    Doesn't Jira and Confluence just integrate seamlessly? Unless you want some particular feature? Both systems are able to link to each other. I worked for a company where Jira was configured to take a support ticket, and then link it to a knowledge base article in Confluence based on namespace and topic I think.
• drewcoo 2y ago
  The whole wiki notion is decentralized and free . . . everyone adding things as needed. That conflicts with things like known governments and corporations: authoritarian, if not also bureaucratic. The attempts to control wikis make people much less likely to contribute.
• jjmarr 2y ago
  It's tricky, as a lot of what makes Wikipedia good is an accumulation of policies and practices that force you to use its features. You can't just install MediaWiki or Confluence and expect it to be good. As an example, orphan articles (ones not linked from any other pages) [1] are categorized and tagged on Wikipedia. There are many editors that spend their time trying to find places to link to orphaned articles, which improves discoverability of that information. The best programming language-specific Wiki I've found is cppreference.com. They have a very nice stylistic approach to dealing with the different C++ standards. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Orphan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Orphan
  • bawolff 2y ago
    There is a saying you can't solve a social problem with a technical solution. Wikis are mostly just a thin technical layer to let people create their own solutions to social problems.
    • wruza 2y ago
      That saying said, people often wrongly call technical problems social, being blind to obvious technical flaws that drive users into various directions. They attribute it to some inherent user property when in reality it’s a technical nuance of a system that does it. Most problems include a user behavior, but most user behaviors include the shape of some existing solution.
      • diggan 2y ago
        I think I understand what you mean, but it would be really helpful to make sure I understand if you could make a practical and specific example of what you mean? Has there been a case with Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Community where this specifically has happen?
        • wruza 2y ago
          I think this can only be seen by an insider-enough, and I am not that much of a wikipedia guy. An example that probably everyone can understand is youtube. Content creators are often begging for like/subscribe and even present graphs that show that only 10% of their regular viewers are subscribed. This seems like a social problem to some, but in reality it’s a technical problem because if you like/subscribe, your feed will drown in “similar” videos of much lower quality and that will haunt you for weeks. And there’s a whole set of other ui/ux issues even if you decide to subscribe. So many people avoid interacting with videos too much because of that. I know youtube is a beaten horse, but it is a textbook example of what I mean. I could theorize about what’s wrong with wikis, but wiki guys see it much better. My key thought here is “check twice that it’s not technical before calling it social”, but it may not be the case here.
• zahlman 2y ago
  >it feels like outside of Wikipedia they've been dying My understanding is that Wikipedia has been in decline (in terms of user activity) since 2007 (much as Stack Overflow has since 2014).
  • 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
    When it first started, there were great swaths of stuff that could be written. Some huge fraction of history, art, science, etc now all have pages with some level of detail. To continue ongoing maintenance for current events is going to take significantly less activity.
    • Gigachad 2y ago
      And the stuff that isn’t already on Wikipedia generally has too few primary sources to be allowed to be created. So the ongoing edits would be primarily updates to existing content rather than new stuff.
      • zahlman 2y ago
        Has too few secondary sources, you mean. As they say, "Wikipedia is a tertiary source". (It doesn't help that Wikipedians abuse the "reliable sources" policy constantly to advance their own political agendas.)
  • bawolff 2y ago
    I think it was declining, but somewhat stabilized around 2015.
• bawolff 2y ago
  > (or even a newer take on the original WikiWikiWeb) I think that would be http://fed.wiki/view/welcome-visitors http://fed.wiki/view/welcome-visitors (the author of wikiwikiweb's new thing)
• smallmancontrov 2y ago
  osdev.org is still one of the greats, but in general you're right, they seem to be getting rarer for new projects.
• zaik 2y ago
  The Arch wiki is still going strong...
• justinator 2y ago
  The Fell Running Wiki is excellent. https://fellrnr.com https://fellrnr.com If you don't know what Fell Running is, you probably would have little use for it and it wouldn't ever be on your radar -- as would be most things outside the pale of pop culture or your own version of the Roman Empire.
• fl0id 2y ago
  Also Wikis rot too
• mattlondon 2y ago
  I think the default media wiki implementation suffers from there being no nice "page of contents" - Wikipedia is the same but many articles have a lot of manually curated "see also" or "other foos from bar" type table of links that helps a lot, but without it, it feels to me like the default discoverability and search on media wiki are terrible. So if you are setting up your own wiki then you need to spend a lot of effort to create and maintain the ToC/landing page and build those interconnections up, and just hope Google indexes everything so you can search etc (... and if you have an internal wiki at work then you are basically screwed because Google won't index that). Otherwise you write your articles and they "disappear" and are not readily found. At least that was my experience of working with media wiki and dokuwiki - the sites always felt "empty" even if you had teams of people contributing articles, because it was hard to see what was there in a meaningful way. And so they always felt moribund and abandoned even if they actually weren't. Patiently waiting for someone to create an overhauled UX. Potentially one that does some sort of clever LLM-powered hierarchy so people can browse and peruse page hierarchies sliced-and-diced by some sort of topic/area-of-interest. So say I enter "engines" or something as my area of I treat, the LLM auto-categorises the pages into a sensible hierarchy that I can view, then I change my term to e.g. "steam engines" and it recalculates the hierarchy and shows something sensible for that etc.
• senko 2y ago
  Notion is basically a wiki too, and seems pretty popular in startups. If you squint a bit, Obsidian as well.
• Kiro 2y ago
  I presume you're not a gamer. In many games I play you pretty much need to have the wiki open on the second monitor.