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?
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.
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.
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.
OSRS is forked from a build of RuneScape from 2007, actually :)
And the tick based SQL + Java engine was built in 2004 when it migrated from RS classic to RS2.
I'll nominate the following wikis as contenders to rival OSRS in completeness and thoroughness:
https://www.stardewvalleywiki.com/Stardew_Valley_Wiki
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Portal:Main
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.
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.
"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.
Any tales from the trenches to share?
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.
As an example of out of dateness of fandom: https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Version_history claims the latest update to the game is version 3.17, from feb 2022... https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Version_history says its version 3.24.0 from April 23, 2024. They don't even bother scraping the official wiki to update their own. It's actually dead.
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.
For what it's worth, Kagi's !poe bang takes you to poewiki.net.
The Fextralife Twitch thing was so weird to see. Just some random stream with 14k viewers but the chat moved glacially.
their last twitch stream was two years ago, the day before twitch stopped counting iframe embeds in the viewer stats
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.
The most active users split from it and created https://minecraft.wiki/
"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)
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]
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".
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!
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
The problem is that Fandom ends up with better search engine rank than the replacement wiki that the actual community moved on to.
https://libredirect.github.io/
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.
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/
BreezeWiki isn't a mirror, it's an API client. It pulls the content from Fandom via MediaWiki API and renders it.
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).
That’s sounds brilliant.
I typed “memory alpha” on the search page you linked to.
Exception raised in Racket code at response generation time:
json-pointer-value: contract violation
It's better to use https://getindie.wiki/, which sends you to the specific replacement wikis rather than BreezeWiki (though it does support BreezeWiki).
What’s the replacement wiki?
What you move to when you quit Fandom. Super common for games.
Examples:
Fandom: https://noita.fandom.com/wiki/Noita_Wiki
Official: https://noita.wiki.gg/wiki/Noita_Wiki
Fandom: https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki
Official: https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria
Fandom: https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft_Wiki
Official: https://minecraft.wiki/
Two of the three Fandom wiki's above are still ranked higher than the official ones on Google.
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page is ranked above the Fandom version these days.
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?
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.
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."
Not only this, but I've been using Kagi's Redirect feature to redirect fandom results if I see some. For instance for Path of Exile, simply:
^https://pathofexile.fandom.com|https://poewiki.net
Alternatively the Redirector extension can also achieve similar results, without having Kagi, and converting all links, not just search results [1].
That doesn’t solve the problem that most people will find Fandom first when searching for it.
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.
but critically not yet Google).
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
Yes and no. It definitely takes a little time but it’s not all that hard to outrank Fandom.
I work for wiki.gg
You can use one (or both) of these extensions to avoid Fandom:
* https://getindie.wiki/, should redirect you to any not-fandom equivalent
* https://support.wiki.gg/wiki/Wiki.gg_Redirect, is wiki.gg wikis only and will see updates for such wikis more frequently
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.
Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki from Fandom servers.
The IP owners can request a takedown though & they'll usually comply, some game studios have done this
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 feel like most video game wikis would be pretty clearly fair use. Otoh maybe fandom would just feel its not worth fighting about.
Will they allow the bulk overwriting of pages?
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.
Sure, until someone (anyone, since it's a wiki) notices the vandalism and reverts it and reports your account to probably get banned
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.
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.
Google isn't on our side. Google is the bad guy as much as Fandom is. They both ruthlessly extract wealth with no regard for users.
Yep, enormously frustrating. Search 'minecraft granite' and the top result is still Fandom.
EDIT: Hell, even 'Minecraft Wiki' still goes there.
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...?
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.
The SMW developer community seems to be less active now a days, so i suspect SMW is even worse now.
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 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
Thank you so much for this answer!
What compels someone to complain about a free service, and even more write an article about it?
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?
Geez.
It's a simple concept.
You pay for services. Some services are free and funded by ads.
Be thankful for the free shit instead of being salty about having to "pay" with ads.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
One good reason is if they are in the process of enshittifying websites you have been using for decades, like Gamespot, Metacritic, and Giantbomb.
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.
Lyrics are copyrightable literary works, aren't they? I imagine such a service would be quite challenging to host, legally speaking.
You just have to license them. Many sites have.
That makes sense. Might be hard for an freely-editable wiki though.
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.
I think there's a big lesson about not investing your time and effort in anything controlled by venture capital.
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.
Yeah, but exporting data is only solving part of the problem. You can't export community, or reputation, or incoming links etc etc.
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.
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?
what license is fandom content under?
Generally, CC BY-SA https://www.fandom.com/licensing
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
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.
I'm running a pretty big wiki that serves around 2m unique users on around 45 dollars a month.
It's not really that intensive when you pretty much just serve cached html to 99% of the users.
Is it fair to assume the guy who hates ads also doesn't want to pay for access?
Because this road leads back to the AOL days of paid forum access.
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.
Because this road leads back to the AOL days of paid forum access.
And such could be said that without an ad-block that this road leads to a gaping chasm full of forced malcontent and sponsored information.
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.
It’s funny you say that, considering VC funding tends to elicit a “very specific” kind of business model—a kind of “consumer goodwill pump-and-dump.”
Most businesses do not need and should not get vc funding. YC themselves say this: https://youtu.be/D81y-kh11oI
Had to go in and make sure fandom was blocked by my Kagi search filters. We're good now.
Even better, you can have it automatically rewrite the search result, e.g.:
^https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/(.*)|https://minecraft.wiki/w/$1
That's sick! Thanks for the help kind internet stranger!
Moreso than just the visual assault from going to a Fandom page, these things have got to have an impact on global battery life.
Having a couple Fandom pages open in tabs can drive my laptop fan crazy and turn my phone into a griddle.
Going to commercial web sites without an ad blocker is a terrible experience. Avoid it if you can.
Having a couple Fandom pages open in tabs can drive my laptop fan crazy and turn my phone into a griddle.
It's all the FanCoin it's mining in situ
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.
I actually find it appalling that browser don't have a proper 'do not autoplay video at all' setting.
Some do, Google Chrome - non Chromium version - does not, because Google/Alphabet owns Youtube.
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.
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.
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.
browse a fandom wiki without an ad blocker
you lost me here... Why would you do that?
Most don't, particularly if they're on phones.
Surely it's pretty easy to understand.
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.
If you do happen to land on a fandom wiki, replace "fandom" with "antifandom" in the url for a better experience.
The web search lies in the heart of the problem for me.
Pages with ads will rank higher because of Google. It decides what is seen and what is not seen. It will definitely like pages with ads more.
Google does not have to care about quality, as it does not have competition. Yet.
Google search drowned other smaller communities.
The Internet is run by ads. The search is run by ads. Why do we wonder that our content has ads? Now we observe how much a user can tolerate.
I found it easy to stop using Fandom, because their information sucks. It's always out of date, and grossly incomplete.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Are you actually charging for your expertise?
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.
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 was directly involved with forking the Path of Exile wiki if anyone has any q’s about process.
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.
can't upvote this hard enough
And tvtropes is still holding strong, pretty much launched at the same time as.
On interested, here's a 2005 - archived copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20051110015311/http://tvtropes.or...
The problem isn't Fandom, per se, but the ad-driven model for the internet.
Please use capital letters I beg you
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 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?
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.
The only useful information in the article is
download Indie Wiki Buddy
Seems like a nice plugin.
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.
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 see what you're saying, but in practice, not really?
It would be weird for wikipedia to host, for example, every minecraft crafting recipe.
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.
(1): One I saw recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Sornette
(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.
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.
Wikimedia spends the vast majority of its resources on stuff that has a lot less to do with traditional-Wikipedia than a Fandom competitor would.
The Wikimedia Foundation has not decided this, the community of editors has, through years of debate and eventual consensus.
You mean something like Wikia?
Perhaps - but still managed by the foundation and not run as a for profit project.
Game wiki's often have custom UIs that are designed to make browsing game data a better experience. I'll be using Factorio as an example:
https://wiki.factorio.com/
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:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Tank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FactorioKeeping 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:
The blog post has a lot of other interesting stuff in there as well:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-233
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:
https://factorio.fandom.com/wiki/Combat
Out of date info is wrong info.
Did you purposefully pick one of the items that has an in-game naming conflict and a disambiguation line?
Being focused to a single game means there's only a few conflicts, but it's not zero.
Every project needs a scope.
An encyclopedia excluding exhaustive videogame information is reasonable.
If you don't, you end up with 20 articles for real life fish species, and 20000 articles for fish species in videogames.
Especially since we are talking about an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is cognizant of its biases and tries to counter them.
why?
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
Every single one of those chess openings has multiple books written about it. The most popular openings have hundreds of books about them.
Not to mention courses, articles, blog posts, discussion and youtube videos
If we're going by volume written about, minecraft isn't lacking any. Try to find more about red stone or mining techniques.
The main difference would be history, the split between books and online resources, and how the older generation sees it.
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 a list of notable chess moves though, not an exhaustive list of all possible chess moves
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
The same reason I would not fault a print encyclopedia publisher for not including video game strategy guides?
Limited page count?
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.
See also https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism
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.
What does it mean to "maintain" an article as something distinct from posting and updating it?
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.
It would be quite bloated if Wikipedia had 1000 Runescape articles about different minutia I guess.
But I'd like if Wikipedia had 'subwikis' with that kind of stuff.
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).
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 would argue that quite some "fandom" content gathers more views than many "notable" pages on Wikipedia.
That said, I think there is a distinction between fact and made up.
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.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notabilit...
I understand this to be the case, but in practice the distinction is mostly immaterial. Topics are notable for a decade, then not notable the next.
No, that's a real stretch. Jimmy Wales is barely involved in Wikipedia, and certainly has no say in editorial policy like that.
The notability policy predates the creation of Wikicities significantly.
Then why does his face show up at the top of every page asking for money at the end of every year?
I think you're probably smart enough to answer that one.
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.
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.
[1]: https://vampire-survivors.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_Survivors_...
Hey there, the other admin of the Vampire Survivors Wiki here. What do you think of moving this wiki to wiki.gg?
To clarify, I’m not an admin or editor, just a reader. In any case, as a reader, wiki.gg looks good to me and better than fandom.
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.
Notability criterion is important.
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.
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.
He and the employees of his organization obviously had an outsized influence on it.
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.
Where's the conflict of interest in having two different products for two different purposes?
You realise Wikipedia is not for Monster Hunter character builds right? A video game Wiki is different than Wikipedia.
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.
I have had this exact thought and am deeply irritated by it
Worth noting that "the creator" of wikipedia doesn't run wikipedia.