One of the best cases of leaving Fandom that I know of is the Runescape wiki mentioned in the article[0]. The community that ran the fandom wiki had buy-in from the creators of Runescape to assist with the transition, help with funding, and eventually direct integration into their games. In a game as information-dense as Runescape, that updates weekly, the wiki is basically a necessity for folks to play efficiently, or to find out how a new update actually works.
Fandom isn't the only bad wiki site though. Fextralife had (has? I haven't kept up) an issue where they were embedding Twitch streams on each page load, which was boosting viewer counts for whatever streamer they decided to embed on every page.
I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying and hosting, but I also understand that most companies don't have the motivation to do that as it doesn't always directly impact their bottom line and it can take effort to moderate.
> "I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game..."
I played a game where the developer did that. The wiki and all of its painstaking user contributions vanished the day the game reached its end of service and is lost to history forever.
Path of Exile hosts their own wiki now. poewiki.net
> This is the official Path of Exile wiki, maintained by the community and hosted by Grinding Gear Games.
But for duckduckgo if you use the !poe bang... It takes you to the fandom page, even though the fandom page doesn't get updates anymore because there is an official wiki elsewhere.
Ive submitted to DDG a few times that the !poe bang points to an unofficial bad source when an official better source exists, but search engines don't care. The out of date fandom page is still the second result, because people will keep clicking it and it has years of accumulated SEO.
Would love to watch a documentary on the osrs wiki and especially the power transfer from fandom. Such a ridiculously incredible wiki. It makes me wish I never used it, as no other source of information (video game or not) is anywhere near as complete and knowledgeable. Anything you want to know about osrs, it’s in the wiki.
But you know what the weirdest, greatest one of all is? You'll never guess: it's the Transformers wiki: https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Main_Page Some absolute madlad has taken it upon themselves to seemingly caption every single image on the 30,000+ pages with a unique sarcastic quip.
Memory Alpha is so good. I'm not interested in Transformers, but I've always been impressed by tfwiki whenever I've used it to understand some joke from Shortpacked! or Dumbing of Age.
Memory Alpha is good, but I was somewhat disappointed when they moved to Fandom. It used to at least have its own domain (en.memory-alpha.org for the English version); I don't know what hosting and platform they used at the time.
I don't play OSRS, but my partner does, and on more than one occasion they've shown me a page from the wiki and I've felt the exact emotion you're describing. Even a lot of enterprise software tools struggle to produce docs as good as the OSRS wiki's.
Probably related that it pertains to a game built on a 2000 engine. The lack of complexity and repetitiveness is built into the game, which directly correlates to the popularity among the autism community.
It also means the RS Wiki have full control over their fate, in comparison to e.g. what happened with the WoW wiki where it was WoWWiki at Fandom (then Wikia), they split to Wowpedia at Gamepedia which then got bought by Fandom and reeled them back in, and so they had to move out again, so now they're Warcraft Wiki. But they're at a new wiki host (wiki.gg) so who knows, maybe Fandom buys them too and they end up having to do a 4th fork.
This may be tangential, but the interesting thing to me about the Warcraft Wiki is that it serves the lore and API information in great detail and is my go-to resource for those. But when it comes to precise data about the content (e.g. spell data and its coefficients), guides for current content, etc. Wowhead has much more relevant content in greater detail - which is a shame because to me the navigability and discoverability on Wowhead is nowhere near as good as MediaWiki.
My dream is somebody takes the data from Wowhead and ports it into MediaWiki and the community rallies behind keeping that in date, but I know it's a bit of a pipe dream.
My understanding is sites like Wowhead get their reference content in an automated fashion to some extent, pulling it from the Blizzard API and the game data.
Another example I can think of is the Minecraft wiki, which originally was its own thing, but through a series of acquisitions ended up with Gamepedia/Fandom.
"On September 24, 2023, after growing frustrations with the Fandom platform, the wiki completed its process of moving from Fandom and is now hosted independently at minecraft.wiki by Weird Gloop, with the old Fandom wiki now deprecated. The move also re-introduced a skin similar to the one used on Gamepedia, re-enabled anonymous editing, and introduced a new logo."
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website)
"It can take effort to moderate" Hah, I run a database/wiki (kpopping.com) and it's almost four fulltime jobs per week (150ish hours) to moderate and maintain and we've been doing it for eight years.
Oh well, I don't understand the sunk cost phenomenon and do it for things besides money, but most people like being financially rewarded for these kinda herculean efforts. So we get what we deserve. And what google gives us.
> I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying and hosting, but I also understand that most companies don't have the motivation to do that as it doesn't always directly impact their bottom line and it can take effort to moderate.
I'd rather that communities around games remain more independent of the developers to be honest. The incentives of the two are not always aligned and having at least two independent "authorities" helps keep each honest.
Same with Guild Wars game series, where both games had officially hosted wiki sites and the best part - those are directly accessable ingame by using command "/wiki [item name or whatever you are searching]" in chat window. Handy!
Also cool is that the company the community formed (as a distinct entity from Jagex) to manage the Runescape wikis has now also become the host of the Minecraft wiki helping that community to migrate themselves.[1]
>"I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying and hosting..."
I think the next best thing is when a company hosts their own forums where the community and in some cases the devs are active in answering questions. As long as forums are well-moderated then they naturally evolve into an knowledge base. X3:Terran Conflict comes to mind, along with IL-2 Sturmovik, which has good official forums and some excellent unofficial forums.
Same with USEP for the Eldar Scrolls Series, the fandom site is janky and incomplete and often entirely inaccurate. The UESP (powered by mediawiki) is a truly impressive resource.
For last 2 years I'm browsing fanbases wiki's thru breezewiki "proxy" because reading content on fandom interface is beyond any usefulness - displaying unrelated stuff took over the actual content. So I'm glad someone did even such short note on this issue.
I saw few cases where a longstanding wiki project of a particular topic created by fans faced a competition in form of a fresh project created within wikia/fandom that was filled with low quality articles. There even were situations where content was blatantly copied over. Pretty sure that was done only to hijack position of the fanbase project so ads could be displayed on fandom wiki and user tracked.
Luckily there are projects which managed to avoid being sucked into this fandom blackhole, like evawiki for Evangelion franchise or both Guild Wars games wikipedias
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And on as site note, I really don't like this recently introduced font change on general Wikipedia - previously default font is now the "small" size and current default is inconveniently the bigger "standard".
I don’t have any issue with boosting their Twitch rating, actually it is a pretty funny trick, and who cares about Amazon anyway? Messing with their stats is a social good. But it is annoying how slow it makes their site.
Former admin of the Fallout Wiki here, (The Vault/Nukapedia) - the Fandom takeover absolutely decimated the quality of information we worked so hard to curate over the years. For example, we had an explicit “no strategy” rule for our quest related articles. We wanted to provide enough information about the quests without suggesting any “optimal” ways to beat it. Fandom carelessly injected autoplaying videos on said articles with random streamers/youtubers showing you how to best beat the quest. That, coupled with the horrible takeover of styling and structure, I felt Fandom really signed a death warrant for something we were all proud of.
I don’t blame you - there has since been a remerge of content after the Vault forked, so I’ll say there still is valuable information to be found, (I am no longer involved) but the user experience straight up sucks.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone else find it a bit "conflict of interest"-y that Wikipedia often limits creation of niche articles because they have to be 'notable' enough, meanwhile its creator is heavily involved in running for-profit Fandom that just so happens to solve that problem?
Why would that be weird? Personally I would find it convenient.
There would be some issues, e.g. I wouldn't want to see Minecraft recipes when I'm searching for "obsidian". But these seem solvable; niche articles could be flagged and downranked, or they could live in a satellite wiki project, or something else.
I remember seeing niche articles like this and enjoying it.
I am very much on the side of inclusion, but at some point, the number of users who have the ability to check the added information becomes sufficiently small that the articles become nearly impossible to maintain and fact-check. I can understand drawing a notability line somewhere.
If, for instance, Wikipedia allowed articles on every human being, whether well-known or not, they'd likely have a larger problem than they already do with people creating attack articles against other people over extremely local disputes/feuds. With more notable people, they can look for other sources to confirm or deny information about those people.
I'm also a pretty strong inclusionist at heart, but I can see also that if the living-person rules were relaxed, self-aggrandisement would proliferate like crazy. Even under the current, slightly deletionist, status-quo in a 10000 word article about some random academic (1), who is going to fact check all that spew and edit it down? The answer on that page is "no-one, for years"(2). And that's with lots of references, even if they are all his own papers and therefore not secondary sources.
Now what would the millions of articles about every TikTok influencer look like?
And then the same goes for products and companies. Every scam Kickstarter and onanistic startup would get a massive screed.
And then it all sits and rots forever once the academic retires, the influencer gets a real job, the Kickstarter vanishes and the startup folds, because no one else cares. But someone has to go around and fix the links and update templates and generally expend effort indefinitely.
On top of all that, while the article creator is still around, because the article is actually an advert, any attempt to edit it into a more encyclopaedic article is disproportionately likely to cause drama that burns up volunteer time and effort.
(2): Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.
> Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.
That cuts both ways. IMO Wikipedia has lost a lot of contributors by banning fun and disallowing the topics that people found interesting.
My comment is more of a tangent along people/products but certainly I agree in that I don't see why the wider Wikimedia group of sites including things like Wikibooks needed to completely evict "fun" content, even if I personally don't think it should be in some language's Wikipedia itself.
Not least, you can crosslink between Wikimedia sites, so you could just link to [[fans:Digimon:Whatevermon]] and have the content "nearby" in digital terms without drawing it under the same notability and sourcing guidelines as an article on benzene, say.
Which as you say would keep the (often very, perhaps to a fault) keen contributor to the fandom in the Wikimedia tent and might encourage them to contribute to Wikipedia and related sites as well.
Then again, the auxiliary Wikimedia sites are pretty neglected by the parent foundation which has more important things on its mind much of the time, mostly fundraising and finding novel ways to spend that money.
It's not really about what you would find convenient. It's about what Wikimedia wants to spend its limited resources on. It has decided it wants to spend its resources on something it believes to be a reasonable subset of general knowledge and information. Where to draw that line is highly subjective, but they have to try to find a good balance.
Items can be referenced using their in-game names because there's no risk of conflict and custom templates can be created and tailored per game. Guess which one of these displays more info:
Keeping the information up-to-date is a big task for a fast-moving game. Imagine editing the card every time the dev changes the hp of the tank. The Factorio blog describes the benefits of this better than I can:
> Together with scripts, templates allow us to partially automate updating the wiki to the newest version, and alongside access to the game's source code, it is possible for me to update the wiki to a new version within a few minutes
The blog post has a lot of other interesting stuff in there as well:
A whole lot of work goes into making game wikis pleasant. I'm sure you could duplicate this all on Wikipedia as well, but that's a lot of additional work and communities already struggle to keep their Fandom wiki's up-to-date. The old Factorio wiki does not even have an article for the tank which has been in the game for years:
I was going to say "it would be like documenting every chess opening move", but I looked it up and the article exists, so I guess I've just argued against myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings
In disambiguation issues alone, it would be a nightmare if wikipedia hosted niche-topic content within the same namespacing as everything else. What would be good is not wikipedia being more lax, it's WMF providing the same service that Miraheze does; and here, I think, is where the conflict of interest really gets in the way
Circling back to my original point, wherever we draw the line on notability and inclusion vs exclusion, there are going to be people on either side unhappy about the location of the line.
It's probably easier for all parties to let the Minecraft community draw their own line on their own wiki(s) (which is exactly what happens).
"No solution will make everybody happy" is kinda of a poor argument though, as it will always be true whatever happens. In the end it comes down to who the service is for, and the younger generation probably doesn't see it as theirs.
I get the feeling Wikipedia will slowly become culturally irrelevant and end up in the same place as the encyclopedias, as an established and mostly frozen dataset that we'll want to keep running but won't look at 99% of the time
This is an ongoing debate between inclusionists and deletionists and it is far from settled even though the deletionists would have you believe the war is over.
I mean, no matter where you fall philosophically, Wikipedia does take resources to host, including storage costs, and they're always strapped for cash.
If they could be assured of never needing to reduce pages to not run out of money, I would have no logical objection to having a page for everything, but as someone who's donated quite a bit to them, they are most assuredly not in that position.
If the day comes that their hosting costs match or exceed their available funds, I'd much rather know that what is there is all the most important information, and not a glut of random pages that no one ever looks at.
I don’t even really understand why things have to be notable for Wikipedia. If people wanted to maintain all of the Runescape articles in Wikipedia (as mentioned by nouser76)… why not? Why not have Wikipedia literally be the central place for all information for all these different things?
There are many places on Wikipedia that explain exactly why.
The short answer is, because it costs time and effort, and a little bit of money, to maintain all those articles, and they cause more problems than they are worth.
Amongst other things, looking out for vandalism and misinformation. Also managing categories, infoboxes etc as they get updated. There's quite a lot. Just look at the history of any article.
The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-confidence as either no one is monitoring for changes, or due to information wars between parties with conflicting interest.
I've personally been approached to build tech to monitor and revert changes matching keywords using residential proxy systems as a service for low-stakes clients (and declined).
> The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-confidence
Can you suggest some alternate approaches that you think would actually work? How would you approach removing the notability requirement without immediately opening the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of additional sketchy articles about niche topics that don't have enough interest to be vetted by more than one person per year?
I've been advocating this for years, but I think a lot of problems on the internet could be solved with a universal, decentralized, anonymous reputation system. A user or entity maintain a private cryptographic key. Each service is given a different sub-key which anonymizes the entity for each service, if they choose. A myriad of voting systems could be employed depending on the needs of each service, via other site users, site admins or both.
These differing voting systems (stars, points, etc) could be normalized through some standardized process into a final reputation score. Other services could then either consider the aggregate score, or only focus on ratings from particular other services, which could be grouped into service types for convenience. Ratings are cryptographically backed and could be fuzzed to increase anonymity. Scores would also be weighted by the relative reputation of other entities. Participating services would also themselves need to maintain a high reputation for their scoring to have much weight in the aggregate.
Services could use these scores to wall of certain site features to entities without sufficient reputation, or even wholesale deny read/write access. Obviously there are particulars to work out to prevent brigading, etc. but there is a balance to strike such that farmed accounts could still quickly be punished the moment they begin spamming/astroturfing. Perhaps a flag/vouch system similar to HN could be employed. Voting rings could also be detected, though with limits given that each vote comes from an anonymized sub-key.
This system would even protect against a future where the majority of content on the web will likely be aided or entirely produced by LLMs or AI. I welcome such synthetic content, but only if it matches or surpasses the general quality of human posts on the internet (which is much worse than one might think). On top of this, users could themselves use these scores as a way to filter out content which is signed with a reputation score below some threshold.
I imagine some kind of hierarchical web, where some services are harder to gain write access to than others, allowing users to gain reputation in low-stakes environments with some level of decentralized moderation, but without compromising the integrity of higher-stakes information.
Each piece of information on the internet should be signed with some sort of introspectable reputation score, and this kind of system would make it possible without compromising privacy and security of users in any political environment.
It's been frustrating watching articles for stuff I cared about in the 2000's get deleted because the mere passage or time has rendered the topics non-notable
It's not always clear but notability is not temporary[0] under English Wikipedia's guidelines. Standards of what makes something notable have shifted over the years and sometimes the different is hard to tease out.
I am a user of both Wikipedia and Fandom, Vampire Survivors Wiki[1] in particular. I would very much prefer to read niche articles on Wikipedia.
I can understand strict rules about reliable sources, independent point of view, or fighting SEO/spam. Still, satellite wikis could exist. Or Portals could serve as some workaround to the notability rule. Or something else.
Wikipedia is by nerds and largely for nerds, I'm sure allowing nerdy topics there would help everyone in the long run.
It's not simply about there being a notability policy. Wikipedia was famous for having a conflict between "deletionists" and "inclusionists" who had disagreements on what these policies should be and how they should be interpreted. Deletionists are generally considered to have won because Wales and the circle around him sided with them.
It goes hand in hand with Wikipedia's stricter source requirements. You would need to source all the information from books and news articles (from a select choice of reliable sites decided by wikipedia editors). Essentially Wikipedia's definition of notable is 3 reliable sources writing about the topic. So it's really more about reliability (or, what Wikipedia admins consider reliable) than notability.
Partly unrelated, but I wonder how Wikipedia's source requirements will move in the future as:
- more "reputable" news sources AI generate their articles
- traditional publications are facing existential threats as their revenue source is drying out ("Google Zero"), and we can't expect their number to grow in the future
- more experts and analysts are gatekeeping their work under subscription paywalls and alternative services. Paid mailing lists for instance won't be a valid and verifiable source
It feels like at some point Wikipedia could be basically frozen if they can't adapt to the new landscape, but from the outside it doesn't look like an organization that can sensibly move on and change core parts in a pragmatic way.
> meanwhile its creator is heavily involved in running for-profit Fandom that just so happens to solve that problem?
My understanding is that the series of events was - stuff kept getting rejected from wikipedia, so jimmy and some other people made wikicities (now fandom). I dont think its coincidence that jimmy saw a business oportunity, but wikipedia rejecting stuff came first, and jimmy does not control wikipedia processes.
I'm all for criticizing Jimmy for his involvement in Fandom but I also don't think Wikipedia needs to be given even more power as the de-facto source of truth for everything. Instead we should work towards having more independent websites.
No. Before the internet the encyclopedia didn't have over 10,000 articles about The Simpsons and it's reasonable that that would be outside the scope of Wikipedia as well. Just because someone profits from a situation doesn't make it improper.
Not at all. Once you start permitting large amounts of fiction in Wikipedia then what’s to stop any sort of fiction being included? Why not just have articles full of lies? Fundamentally fiction is lies. Just because a large group of people enjoy indulging the lies doesn’t mean it should be included in an encyclopaedia. I say this as a lover of fiction and video games.
There's plenty of fiction on Wikipedia already; fictionality is orthogonal to notability; and it's possible to describe what occurs within a work of fiction without asserting that it occurs in the real world.
I don’t think that fictionality is orthogonal to notability. I do think that something that occurs in fiction is inherently less notable than the equivalent event occurring in real life no matter how popular the work of fiction.
I agree on the second point but fundamentally extensively in depth information about the inner workings of a fictional piece are best acquired from the work itself. Not gleaned from an encyclopaedia.
And the saddest part is, even if all notable games migrate away from Fandom within the next year or two, how enormous will the pile of money be that those VCs and private equity firm managed to accumulate by burning it all down?
Investors don't give a shit about making sustainable products or really anything valuable to society, as long as they can fleece unwitting consumers for massive eyeball money for a short time.
LibRedirect has an automatic Fandom redirect option, so if someone sends you a fandom link, or you otherwise click one without realizing it, you won't wind up on fandom. You still give the analytics that you clicked a fandom link to whoever served you the link though.
It's better to use https://getindie.wiki/, which sends you to the specific replacement wikis rather than BreezeWiki (though it does support BreezeWiki).
Doesn’t it just redirect to BreezeWiki? BreezeWiki is just a Fandom mirror as far as I am aware. So while you won’t see Fandoms ads, the content is still on Fandom. Though, it is still better than the actual website by a lot… and the other redirects it offers are pretty great as well.
https://breezewiki.com/
Yeah. LibRedirect is a nice generalist tool, but for wikis you are better off with Indie Wiki Buddy[1] which is a community led tool to point to the best avaialble wiki, or breeze if there isn't one. You def want this because some communities have made it a point to poison the fandom pages (see Terraria which is full of fake items and crafting recipes now).
The (Old School) Runescape wiki mentioned in the article (https://runescape.wiki/ and https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/) is higher up than the Fandom one on all search engines I'm aware of. The Minecraft wiki (https://minecraft.wiki/) also generally beats out the Fandom one (on Bing, Yandex, ... - but critically not yet Google).
Definitely takes a lot of effort, but can be done.
My takeaway from the recent Google search engine ranking documentation leak was that they very heavily uprank big brand names. A page on reddit with various short comments (many of them useful I'm sure) is going to always outrank a random individual's blog with a well-researched article about the same topic. Same for Quora, Facebook, and the other websites with big moderation teams and where we all know what to expect.
There is something to be said for it as well: the quality of a reddit discussion or quora answers will probably be more consistent than if you serve up random other pages (those may be content farms, ad farms, unresearched opinions...). Other pages on the web may be better, or may be worse. I'm guessing that Google figures/found they look better if they don't serve up (m)any bad results but rather pretend that big brands are the internet now, sticking to an average (mediocre-ish) quality
Perhaps that's why Google likes big brand Wikia better than this new domain
I'll take this chance to plug Kagi Search (a paid search engine), that I recently switched to, and have been loving. It's nice to actually be able to say "Hey, this site is trash, don't show it/de-rank it for me."
That's fair, but it'll keep individuals from ending up clicking to so many junk sites. And the more people using search engines that allow them to fight back against enshittification, the better.
There isn't one, there are hundreds. Given that you end up on a small fandom wiki, you have no idea where 'the better community' is. You go to your search engine of choice and start clicking random wikis hoping at least one other one has decent info (most are useless).
As a concrete example, Path of Exile moved to https://www.poewiki.net/ (which is a single MediaWiki instance not associated with a larger network). The content is quite good but it took probably 18 months for it to start reliably appearing in google search results.
In many cases, it is not a big deal to just open a few links and figure it out. Fandom's content is usually too crap and incomplete. I have been mostly avoiding fandom and fextralife because of content reasons, and I had no idea of all the drama around them.
So people looking for a wiki with a quick search end up clicking on the fandom link, being bombarded with ads as well as potentially outdated or incorrect information, instead of clicking on the wiki that doesn't have those issues. In turn, that gives fandom more ad views and potential clicks, perpetuating the problem.
So search engines continue to serve the SEO-riddled landgrab garbage over the valuable resource, new visitors to the community continue to get served bad information and deterred from involving themselves further, the maintainers of the real wiki have to waste spare time figuring out how to deal with this nonsense over maintaining the resource, and Fandom continues to pollute the informational commons to its own gain and everyone else's detriment.
Not that I'm a fan of ads, but I find it interesting that this post specifically complains that the ads aren't targeted enough ("my ad was for furniture - ah yes, just what i wanted" / "i do not have a dog" / "i don't need sunscreen") when I would expect the post's author also probably objects to being profiled by ad networks.
It would be less curious if the post was saying something around like "I object to fandom monetizing at all", but also that also probably feels like a less sensible thing to say.
The third option that seems to always get overlooked for some reason is that you can target by the content of the page rather than by stalking the user. Someone looking at a ex. Star Wars wiki page is much more likely to be interested in buying sci-fi stuff than furniture.
I think it's funny that we're constantly reckoning with the issues that venture capital causes to various things in tech on a website that's funded and maintained by a venture capital fund.
It can't be all bad, right? More and more, it seems like VC is the only way you can go in tech unless you have a really specific business model.
Yay for the Minecraft wiki migration! I was so annoyed by having to use Wikia while creating a minecraft scavenger hunt for my partner when wanting to do things with redstone or light level spawnproofing.
Opening the wiki now on the domain they host themselves, it is also very noticeably faster to click around. Sounds like a big win for the Minecraft community and kudos on doing such a large migration! Having tried to migrate Telegram groups to Signal, among a group of people studying IT security no less, it became very clear to me how hard it is to migrate communities
Miraheze is the main replacement to Fandom -- it's an ad-free, community-owned, nonprofit supported entirely by donations, grants and volunteers. We've been operating free wikis on MediaWiki for about 9 years now, supported through different organizations, but right now we're the fastest and most stable we've ever been. Like all OSS efforts, we can always use more technical volunteers. I'm Chair and Acting President of the WikiTide Foundation, the parent of Miraheze, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about the service. Our users are generally more anti-Fandom than this article is, in my experience.
For paid offerings, with a little more freedom than a wiki farm host can allow, WikiTeq, MyWikis, and WikiWorks are all good offerings in the MediaWiki space. I currently work for WikiTeq, but they're all pretty good, and the owners are on friendly terms with each other, with a lot of them coming in through the Wikimedia community or staff.
Can I ask what your stack is? I used to volunteer at another nonprofit wiki (not a host, just a single wiki). I had a lot of trouble trying to manage the MediaWiki LAMP stack, especially when you have to add things like Varnish with proper integration or Parsoid (I think back in the day it was a separate, standalone server that needed root). MediaWiki Updates weren't easy either. Is it still that difficult these days, or is there some readily-available containerized version now?
Cloudways for a while had a managed MediaWiki VM offering, but they discontinued that I think. Are there standard best practices for hosting MediaWiki these days, or is that part of your secret sauce...?
The stack at Miraheze is all open source, and almost entirely available free on GitHub. The overview is here: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Tech:Home We do a few things that aren't recommended, like running WMF's own CentralAuth, which you definitely wouldn't want to do if you were hosting one or two wikis, as well as upgrading with every new MW release.
Generally I would go with Canasta, a Docker image that's collectively maintained by a few MediaWiki companies. Canasta upgrades with every LTS release, which is a much easier pace for maintainers. https://github.com/CanastaWiki/Canasta
Not affiliated with Miraheze, but with an independent self-hosted wiki.
Parsoid got ported to PHP and made a core feature in 2019 and no longer requires being run as a separate Node.js service. The Visual Editor (which most people ran Parsoid to get) just works out of the box now.
Update difficulty scales about evenly with the number of third-party extensions you rely on, especially if CirrusSearch or Semantic MediaWiki are among them. But if you stick to stock and to the LTS version line, it's relatively painless since 1.19 compared to before it.
Between general PHP performance improvements and php-fpm compatibility, it's frankly overkill to run anything beyond the official mediawiki:lts-fpm Docker image[1] while applying whatever PHP config changes you need for your use cases to the Dockerfile. Throw in SQLite improvements and even bare-metal admin isn't much of a hassle these days compared to the bad old days of juggling PHP versions and extensions, configuring Varnish, running Parsoid, patching Mediawiki extensions and skins, and doing MySQL/MariaDB/Postgres upgrades.
A handful of well-supported responsive Mediawiki skins also means the stupid mobile-domain tricks aren't necessary anymore for most users to have a decent experience.
Glad to hear! It was indeed VisualEditor we were trying to get working back then, along with Semantic MediaWiki :( It was the 2nd most difficult software I ever had to work with in my career (#1 being Drupal). Sounds like it's improved a lot since then.
I'll have to check back in with that wiki I used to help with and see what they're doing these days...
SMW is such a powerful tool, but it's designed like its target audience is mind readers who can divine what it needs to function. It either installs without issue or fails so cryptically that support is impossible. In pursuit of being a generic tool, the end-user docs and help are still so allergic to examples for its esoteric query syntax or use cases for property design that SMW effectively doesn't even exist for non-admins. Its extension-specific database changes are still their own hassle to upgrade separate from MW's. And the closest thing to an active support community is a Sourceforge email list.
Cargo's still easier to work with and its query syntax is a lot more SQL-like, even with the reduced feature set.
I would recommend Cargo instead of SMW, Cargo lets you use an RDB more directly, and you can do much more powerful things as a result. Cargo has been a better option than SMW since about 2018 or so imo
The problem with wikis is similar to the problem with forums... it's not that they do not work really well, they do, but it's that the cost of running a single wiki or forum in terms of operational overhead and hosting costs is significant.
Dynamic user generated content is going to do two things:
1) it's going to result in you needing a database and a web server, capable of a few concurrent users (in addition to bots and guests) but likely sized to handle your spikes in traffic... i.e. over-sized, let's ballpark at $50 per month (people will argue some specifics, but in general this is indicative)
2) it's going to result in you needing to stay up to date, moderate new users, and manage spam... i.e. it requires a disproportionate time investment
and the content is likely crappy, you were just having shits and giggles and nerding out on some small thing that you got excited about... not quite worth those costs.
the solution then is a multi-tenant platform that distributes the ops, cost and moderation problem evenly across many sites, so perhaps the $ cost to you is $1 per month, and time is hardly anything.
but now you've got a different problem, now there's a central entity that "owns" the platform and likely helped itself to a license allowing it to use all of the content, monetise away and profit of the fandom of others.
there are anarchic platforms to counter this, but they're small and cannot be the destination for people to migrate to, and so we're stuck with either the high overhead, costs, and burnout of individual sites, or these crappy platforms taking their users for granted.
though now I wonder... what license is fandom content under? can an independent entity scrape it and start over?
Hosting cost is actually super affordable, even for large and successful wikis. The guy who admins the independent Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki has mentioned it’s only single digits a month and they’re doing tens of millions of pageviews.
> can an independent entity scrape it and start over?
Sure. The difficult part is migrating the community and competing in search results. Fandom can and does fight efforts to direct people from fandom-hosted wikis to elsewhere. See this other sub-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40711726
That's going to host a gigantic wiki even with something as bloated as Mediawiki running on PHP, at least if you have a remotely sensible setup with (micro)caching for anonymous users.
There was this site called LyricWiki[0] (lyrics.wikia.com) that was one of the larger wiki sites a few years back. Things went downhill quickly once wikia became fandom. Making new articles and editing was blocked in 2019 and the whole thing was wiped in 2020. It was the largest lyrics site for many smaller languages and as a result it seems lots of lyrics / information has been permanently lost. It also had artist pages which at times contained better information than the actual wikipedia page.
I'd like to hear if by change someone had archived lyricwiki before its shutdown. I've looked in to it a couple of times but AFAIK the only pages that were preserved are the ones found in wayback machine. There is a dump of various wikia pages in archive.org but IIRC lyrics wikia is missing from that.
The dude who made LyricWiki basically had a successful acquisition to Wikia, which is great because the legal trouble that wiki had was needless and profligate. This is one case where the creator had the best outcomes by parting ways with his creation.
Ars Technica did the same for a long while, autoplaying video. Many news sites do the same as well. I've been bitten by those before. You click the link to an article, video starts autoplaying, and I'm waiting for a video about the article, only to get a video that is completely unrelated.
I actually find it appalling that browser don't have a proper 'do not autoplay video at all' setting.
Browser features to block autoplay do work. (most default to allow muted videos) Videos won't play unless they're started by javascript triggered by a small handful of user generated events. i.e. if the .play() is further down the call-stack than an .onClick()
There's this thing called "click laundering" though. Where the website will take any qualifying event you trigger anywhere on the page and make it play the video. (I did it myself to make a gimmicky webpage work before)
It's aggravating, but I think there's browser addons to fix it.
> I don't know how you'd define non-trivial javascript in a way that couldn't be circumvented.
One approach would be to start out with the interpreter only with extreme throttling. Then to remove the throttling and enable the JIT you'd need explicit permissions.
The big problem with this is that quite a few things that start out principled and radical wind up controlled by (venture) capital retroactively through mergers and acquisitions. For instance, Napster still actually exists as a minor corporate brand and product line. You can literally subscribe to Napster today if you have $11 kicking around.
If you're an admin of something like a game wiki, then whether it's currently controlled by VC or not, think about how you could back up, export and migrate the data.
Yes and the solution is the same as with email or your blog: own the domain. Domains are cheap enough that almost anyone should be able to afford one for their hobby.
If the host doesn't let you bring your own domain, find a better one or self-host.
I dunno much about the indie wiki scene in general, but I discovered www.wiki.gg when the Helldivers 2 wiki moved* there, and it's really a breath of fresh air. One banner ad at the top of the page, one at the bottom. And that's page, not screen, you can scroll away from it and it won't follow you. I hear it's better for wiki admins, too, though I don't know the details. Quite a few pretty high-profile wikis seem to have relocated there.
* Okay, most of the editors moved there, and apparently the ones that stayed on Fandom have developed a siege mentality and started banning anyone who mentions the new wiki on their Discord. It's very strange. Fandom is worse in every possible way, where's the loyalty coming from?
There are dozens of tools to block ads on all platforms and nearly all of the internet is a cesspool of ads. I don't know how anyone can browse it without an ad blocker. Not really an interesting topic to spend most of the blog talking about.
Most "websites" monetize in the exact same way, minus the McDonalds-specific thing mentioned here.
There is no alternative business model. The volume and frequency of ads will increase as well, due to Google slashing premiums over the years. The days when the PlentyOfFish guy could bring in millions in AdSense revenue in a single month are long gone.
High-traffic websites will still make more with ads than they will with paid subscriptions. If your website has 1 million users/month and no moat, you'd be doing very well to convert even 0.1% (1,000) of them into paying subscribers. Even that would put you at what, $10k / month? Would that stop you, the site owner, from double-dipping and running ads on paid subscriber accounts? "All the other companies are doing it!"
If it were me, yes, yes it would, because those subs are paying to not see ads.
If we're talking about a wiki, then there's no point in paying for the subscription if you still get access to all the content AND the ads. Plus for that kind of website that's pretty much entirely static text and images $10k a month should be more than enough to cover the cost of hosting.
I use ablocker but even with adblocker, Fandom's UI is so cluttered, that it is actually bloatware. It ranks high on Google and it is apparently one of the most visited websites in the world, undeservedly so.
I had a similar experience this morning. I made the huge mistake of opening Famdom on my phone, and it took me a few minutes of blankly staring at the screen to realize this is actually a legit site. The amount of ads they managed to pack on a 4.7 inch screen was mesmerising.
The problem is i got stuck at that game and searched for a quick solution. Then google straight up made me end up in that pile of ads. I hope people will start realizing what that website is and hopefully migrate their wikis to a better place, although it probably won’t happen.
Whether I use it or not, it's the first 50 search results: until that changes, fandom is going to keep getting used. It's basically the w3schools for game info: a takeover by people who actually care and then uplifting it to something that's actually good (like what happened with w3schools) is a far better road to victory than getting people to stop using fandom - there are too many people, and too few search engines.
I really wish Memory Alpha would migrate off of Fandom the way some others have. It's a ridiculously complete and thorough resource, but it's taken significant tuning of my uBlock Matrix rules to make it usable, especially on mobile.
I enjoyed this. However, if the author is reading I was pretty sure the ASCII sun was in fact an ASCII hole, if you know what I mean. Not that I disapproved, it rather fit the site you were reviewing which is in fact a steaming pile of stfu8.
There is a browser extension called "Indie Wiki Buddy" [1] that automatically redirects from a Fandom page to the equivalent community-run wiki. It also optionally replaces links in search results.
Surely there's a way to build a wiki on top of GitHub? That automatically converts wiki changes to PRs for example. So that arbitrary wikis can be built open source and leverage github's free hosting
I liked it a lot back when it was named wikia. It was really awesome for niche communities as well as for the most detailed info imaginable on any game I was playing at the time (a use case gamefaqs used to solve).
I also really liked the name wikia, it was like a wiki for anything too detailed for wikipedia.
But today, yeah...
P.S. I never knew it was founded by the same founder as wikipedia!
I worked there when it was Wikia. I'm disappointed that the APIs have been hobbled, that the name became something so honestly lame, and that you can't even view images with mobile ad blocking on. It really is about moats and enshittification, which is sad because the communities put a lot of hard work into their content.
It doesn't have to be a choice between numerous giant advertisements for non-gaming items or having a paywall, so I'm not sure why you are saying this as if those are the only two solutions.
The user-hostile shit-down-your-throat user experience.
Watching something that you loved and was genuinely useful and important in your life being utterly destroyed by this garbage is pretty motivating to "complaining" and "writing articles".
What compelled you to comment about the compulsion?
I think people have a unique edge here to counter your argument because most of the work that goes into fandom wikis are from unpaid volunteers, and they have every right to move somewhere esle.
"Paying" with ads and having the experience utterly ruined, highjacked in fact, by those ads, are distinct things. You already understand this unless you're an adtech executive, but you're picking nits because you don't want to engage with the point.
It is simple concept - just because part of your business plan is to give out some stuff for free and then lock the users, it does not make you uncriticizable.
There is no reason to be thankful to Fandom in particular.
So what you are saying is it is not actually a free service but a commercial venture that you are paying for with your attention if you don't use an ad blocker? Doesn't that contradict your original comment?
The problem here isn't necessarily being a free service and being run on a few ads, the problem is loading 15 to 20 advertisements, as well as the path of enshittification.
Fandom isn't the only bad wiki site though. Fextralife had (has? I haven't kept up) an issue where they were embedding Twitch streams on each page load, which was boosting viewer counts for whatever streamer they decided to embed on every page.
I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying and hosting, but I also understand that most companies don't have the motivation to do that as it doesn't always directly impact their bottom line and it can take effort to moderate.
[0]: https://runescape.wiki