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.
I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years.
Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.
Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page.
Even better, you can get a captcha before you're allowed to see 404 Not Found.
[delayed]
I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s, back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today, it isn't.
Every time I wind up on some garbage Fandom page I reminisce about the good old days of Wikia. I remember many a fun night trawling through pages while playing Fallout or Skyrim or whatever - all the information you could ever need, right there at your fingertips. It's an ethos you don't see so much on the modern net.
Wikia is a great example of enshittification - provide great value to users, then take it away from users and hand it to other businesses (eg advertisers), then take it away from businesses too.
Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.
> Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.
Unless explicitly structured to prevent it, my bet is it will. If it's backed by a for-profit entity, it'll eventually need to turn a profit somehow, and users/visitors are the first to lose their experience at that point.
However, if Weird Gloop is a properly registered non-profit with shared ownership between multiple individuals, I'll be much more likely to bet it won't suffer the same fate.
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.
You and your team made(a good portion of) my childhood. I remember spending nights studying all the potion recipes and enchantment odds. Thanks for all you did
> with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective.
sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?
Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!
> Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth.
If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option.
Otherwise, if you like the experience of not paying per GB/TB, go for a dedicated server with unmetered connection that has the same price every month, regardless.
More than a decade has passed since then so I am stretching my memory. At peak we were serving in the region of 10 million page views per day which made us one of the most popular websites on the internet (Minecraft was a phenomenon and every Minecraft player needed the wiki). We were probably the highest traffic Wiki after Wikipedia. Nowadays Cloudflare could absorb most traffic because of the highly cacheable nature of it, but at the time, Cloudflare didn't exist, and every request hit our servers.
Ten years ago bandwidth was expensive. Still is, even if not as much. A simple VPS gets overwhelmed, but a simple VPS behind cloudflare can do quite well.
s/cloudflare/a CDN/If you can run your application on Cloudflare Pages / Workers with Cloudflare's storage/DB things, it really gets dirt cheap (if not free) and very fast. And even without that, Cloudflare's caching CDN is very good, very cheap and very easy.
In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately obvious:
- For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out.
- You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation.
- Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages.
Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on.
The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs.
If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money.
One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic...
At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...
holy crap that minecraft wiki is fast now. I actually stopped going to fandom because it was so slow.
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)
It's hard to imagine a worse leadership team than private equity + StubHub.
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.
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.
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.
to put a finer point on it: capitalism.
"then the MBAs got involved" is a cop-out, it's a systemic issue.
I'm with you for the most part but we definitely need to hold PE and the Ticketmasters of the world more accountable- there's no escaping modern capitalism but better markets are definitely possible.
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".
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.
The "fan" in "Fandom" means the fan in your computer.
And the “dom” refers to how it completely dominates that fan.
The dom comes from some of the tame ads...
...I like you. I'm gonna keep you around... hahaha
Just a week or two ago my chrome plugins got temporarily disabled for some reason, and I didn't notice for a day or two... until I happened to check a fandom wiki. Then for about five seconds I thought I'd somehow installed All The Viruses.
And ironically, I already hated fandom before I'd seen it without an ad blocker! Just for the large sidebars and ugly flyouts and whatnot. It really feels like a contender for worst site on the internet.
Fandom is perfectly usable with adblockers and the "Cleaner Fandom" userscript. But only with those extensions!
It's not even accurate at times. I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it. I've seen several that have chunks of straight wrong information.
Usually it's stuff where the fan seems to have picked up on something implied in a story, but missed where it is clearly stated that isn't the case ... but then they go and write on fandom and make lots of assumptions from there and fill in other gaps with guesses.
>It's not even accurate at times.
I am aware of a few game communities purposefully poison the fandom version of the wiki with inaccuracies that are non-obvious and time-consuming to verify (so they aren't just auto-reverted).
Same here.
Prior to my discovery that fandom was bad and a lot of wikis were moving away, I was following so many instances of out dated info in games I was playing due to not realizing that the wiki was no longer maintained since the active contributors had moved elsewhere and updates/patches to the game had rendered the info moot.
> I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it. I've seen several that have chunks of straight wrong information.
It's a not-so-open secret that a lot of wikia wikis are not only vandalised but encouraged to be vandalised as to make people move off them.
I can understand the urge and frustration level.
Just wish there was a more centralized / good alternative to promote rather than just wrecking fandom.
> I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it.
As someone who once edited those wikis, I certainly hope they did. Who wants to work for free to enrich some private equity firm?
agreed. the good thing is, it teaches a new generation why adblockers are great.
What are these 'ads' of which you speak?
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
As I understand things, video ads produce more $$$ - the advertiser pays more per view, and per click; and the click-through rate is higher. I've heard claims of video ads making 5x more.
I assume the irrelevant video is included to give Fandom more video ad space to sell.
For some reason you're assuming the owners of the website have your interests at heart, and not the interest of their bank account.
Sure, but how does serving me a 15 minute video help their bank account?
If it were a youtube style video advert I could understand it.
Putting autoplaying videos on every page farms their view count and gets the algorithm to show it to more people, which drives ad revenue. It's quite similar to how Fextralife embeds twitch streams to farm viewer counts.
You watch it, and Google Ads records a veeery long "user is present on website" time, which is a boost in SEO - Google ranks how long people spend on a website, hence the "trend" of endless waffling around in stuff as basic as cooking recipes, or inline videos that entice the user to spend time on the website. Even if all of it (nowadays including videos) is AI-generated slop. But if the user immediately finds the information and goes back or closes the tab, then the site will get punished for being actually efficient and useful.
SEO has ruined the Internet.
I have blocked the domain on my browser; this helps with mindless clicking on fandom sites appearing on top of Google searches while the communities have moved on to other wikis.
In a nutshell
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page
vs
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki
(Though UESP has had banner ads for a while now)
Love the UESP, probably my favorite wiki.
laughs in ublock origin
Ublock doesn't block the AI generated FAQs without manually stepping in, and it certainly won't block all the bad info as the more dedicated and knowledgeable fans move to other wikis.
I use ublock now too, but it's this really annoying feedback loop; people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers, and making the website worse and more likely for them to install an ad blocker etc...
I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.
> people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers
I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few, and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.
It's clearly enough of an impact for Google to spend effort killing uBlock on Chrome, and (attempting) to block it on Youtube. Obviously Google is huge, and even a small percentage of users is still a lot of money on the table.
Some sites have a message like "hey, we can't serve you ads, you must be using an ad blocker, stop that and absorb the advertising as is your duty because we need the money". But maybe that's just desperation and they aren't losing much to ad blockers anyway.
Many people believe that the loss is great, especially web site owners, which would certainly explain such messages. But lived experience shows at least me that most people don’t even know what an ad blocker is.
The feedback loop doesn't work like that. You are implying there is some target revenue that the website aims to hit, and if it fails to meet that target it adds more ads.
But that's just nonsense, if a website can get more revenue from more ads, they are gonna put more ads right away, they aren't gonna wait until their revenue drops under some magic number before they do.
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.
I didn't think I could Fandom being worse than it already is, but imagining it stuffed with AI-generated slop...
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.
A data moat of user provided wiki contents? The thing that this article is advocating for the users themselves to own over the hosting site??
Somehow I don't think that is the solution.
The licensing on that stuff is complicated, and I haven't looked at it in a while. It does allow you to take your toys and leave, but for those that don't, it would be simple enough to prevent ethical AI scrapers from extracting that content. That's all I mean by data moat in this context.
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)! 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.
Fandom PoE still pollutes the top of Google searches :(
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.
I have seen cookmeplox, one of the admins of the Runescape wiki, round these parts. Thank you for your work, as a gamer and new Runescape addict. For an MMORPG as massive as OSRS, having a good wiki is crucial and probably the reason why it's seen a resurgence over the past few years.
Factorio and Rimworld have amazing wikis as well. And they're both maintained by the developers AFAIK...
The Dwarf Fortress wiki https://dwarffortresswiki.org is perhaps the most impressive I've seen, as it maintains namespaces to maintain (and update!) information about particular versions, because many players end up staying on a version for various reasons.
I wish the Minecraft wiki did that. I don't tend to play the latest version because I feel like it got overly complex and I get analysis paralysis if I play the latest version.
But being on an old version makes navigating the wiki hard. I'm never sure if some content applies to me. Sometimes they say which version a feature was introduced in, but if a mechanic changes, they often just document the latest behavior.
The good ol' Mediawiki look of the DF wiki reminds me of the underrated, and oft maligned Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup wiki: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Crawl_Wiki
> 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.
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.
Woof. Yeah, you're right. That was not great.
Fandom runs on media wiki too.
> [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
Thanks, I had the same problem.
Yeah, the site is down (502 status)
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.
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.
To they can. See the Minecraft wiki for example: https://minecraft.wiki
Currently, every wiki they host is on its own domain (besides the meta one)
The only wiki in Fandom I actually go to is the 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.
> 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
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.
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?
I assume that Fandom pays Google for that placement
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.
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.
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.
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 - 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+Wik...
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Also, the site is really slow. The only thing that the site manages to turn on is the computer fans.
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). 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.
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.
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.
Why can't they replace the old pages with a link to the new page? Or otherwise remove the contents from the old site?
Usually attempts to advertise migration efforts on high visibility wikis away from Fandom will be deleted by Fandom staff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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-...
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'
They should promise not to become wikimedia board members. That is the main thing that allows fandom to be so bad.
There's a browser extension that provides links to Fandom alternatives on various topics: https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy
Slightly ad hoc funding (which is probably sensible, spread it around):
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.
Given that Jimmy Wales is president of Fandom, I don't know if that's a good idea for WMF to get involved.
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.
> 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.
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.
Does anyone know of an iOS Safari extension that allows to freely configure such substitutions?
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.
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.
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".
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.
Very cool, thank you.
I'd say if you cannot tell what its hosted at, its "good". If it shouts "fandom" in your face, its "bad". Easy!
I mean.. you can use your eyes to tell if it's a good wiki or not.
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.
Does anyone predict Discord might end up going down the same path?
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...
What are people's thoughts on putting wikis on web3 infrastructure
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.
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
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.
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.
Archive.org is awfully slow, and more importantly, the archived pages are not indexed by Google, hence aren’t discoverable.
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.
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.
I’m one of the folks whose fans go wild. Are they running crypto?
Dont give them any ideas
Fextralife Wikis are an alternative:
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.
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.
I loved the Dark Souls wikidot. Sad to see the Elden Ring "official" wiki is the Fextralife one.
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.
Every page has a live chat and video stream. The content tends to be better, but it's not mechanically much better than Fandom.
It also highlights an important difference between why wikis can be useful. If I want information about Elden Ring as a game, Fextralife is pretty good (with some ublock filters to kill the stupid chat), but it does that at the expense of information about Elden Ring as a fictional world. That's not usually why I'm looking up Elden Ring information, but it sometimes is.
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.