The WoW wiki is also leaving Fandom. In my experience the Fandom wiki will stay always above the new wiki in google, making this move pointless.
Yume 2kki, [doom wiki] and zelda wiki are all at 2nd in the google results. Strangely they don't seem to mention them moving on the front page. I think I heard fandom tries to stop people from moving and takes down messages like that, so that might be why they're still on top.
Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
11–20 of 210 posts
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#12The WoW wiki is also leaving Fandom. In my experience the Fandom wiki will stay always above the new wiki in google, making this move pointless.
The Path of Exile wiki moved off fandom to https://www.poewiki.net and has been very successful. If I google "path of exile wiki" it's the top result for me (in an anonymous window). The creators of PoE even agreed to host the new wiki. The move to the new wiki was heavily supported by the subreddit for PoE, often pointing people that posted links to the fandom version to the new version. I remember there being guides to on how to block fandom with ublock, how to add the new wiki as a search provider in Firefox, etc.
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
The doom wiki moved like 10 years ago and it's still below.
Doom fandom wiki is still active, i didn't even know they moved until just now.
This is part of the problem. The community "moves" but the old wiki isn't down, and it picks up contributors from sheer SEO rank.
UESP predates Fandom and was extremely fleshed out, and is frankly superior to the Fandom version at every point in history. But even with the "head start," UESP has really suffered due to the existence of Fandom, for no reason other than artificial SEO dominance.
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
While you have a point, this move is still in the right direction. This move gives people to power to choose. At least I don't have to use BreezeWiki for minecraft again.
I use adblock rules and the site looks perfectly fine. Every few months I have to add something new, but all in all, I don't have a problem with viewing wikis hosted by Fandom. OTOH, I refuse to edit wikis in Fandom, because it feels like I'm not doing it for the community but for the Fandom company, which I don't care for.
Adblock is and always has been a band-aid, and pulling a “see no evil” doesn’t mean the ads no longer exist, as such it is reasonable to expect that any random user will be subjected to it unless otherwise stated.
My problem with the ad soup that is Fandom is that the community that is providing the content and inhabiting the space is not the one benefiting from the placement of the ads. This creates a perverse incentive for Fandom to maximize ad revenue at all costs. A publisher who is also the steward of the community will typically be more selective with what ads and where to put them.
I find it tragic that after the heyday of self hosted software like forums, we entered what I fully believe will become a dark age for the internet where content is walled away by the larger providers who have every incentive to extract value from users and hoard their data, both given and created, to maximize their own interests.
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#15The WoW wiki is also leaving Fandom. In my experience the Fandom wiki will stay always above the new wiki in google, making this move pointless.
It's totally possible to beat the old wiki on Google! We did it for runescape.wiki, which was the most popular wiki on Fandom before we left in 2018.
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#16The RuneScape Wiki and OldSchool RuneScape Wiki left Fandom in 2018, for similar reasons: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia
I think the move has been really successful. They've managed to add lots of exciting game-specific features to the wiki, like tracking requirements for a quest, or historical item prices. It also didn't seem to take long for the new wiki results to rank above the Wikia/Fandom results on search engines.
Good luck to the Minecraft wiki and its contributors!
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#17The WoW wiki is also leaving Fandom. In my experience the Fandom wiki will stay always above the new wiki in google, making this move pointless.
Given how infamously hostile Fandom wikis are to users, most people who have visited any Fandom hosted wiki in the past will understand this. The top position, which I do want to point out does change, doesn’t always mean people will immediately click on it. This automatic behavior of indiscriminately clicking the top result is being disrupted in part due to how many ads google is stuffing on the top now that look li…
> People are beginning to be much more choosy with what site they click through to.
I would love to believe you (especially as someone who exclusively uses Kagi now); but do you have statistical data on this, as it pertains to the median usage of Google results?
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#18The WoW wiki is also leaving Fandom. In my experience the Fandom wiki will stay always above the new wiki in google, making this move pointless.
Given how infamously hostile Fandom wikis are to users, most people who have visited any Fandom hosted wiki in the past will understand this. The top position, which I do want to point out does change, doesn’t always mean people will immediately click on it. This automatic behavior of indiscriminately clicking the top result is being disrupted in part due to how many ads google is stuffing on the top now that look li…
[deleted]
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#19Good. Fantom is a plague. And unlike Pinterest, it actually contains stuff I'd be interested in. These ad-traps can't die soon enough.
Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
#20Here's a good summary of controversy surrounding Fandom and why fandoms tend to leave: https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-... And it doesn't even really touch on how Fandom, sometimes, refuses to delete the old wiki for traffic purposes, and leaves it up as a "zombie" wiki that smothers the new wiki due to SEO, or the more serious conflicts between some admins and contributors in some other s…
The side-by-side view in that article is the key user experience reason to leave. The Fandom wiki sites tend to be slow and covered in ads. I avoid them if possible. I'm glad to see more and more groups take their wikis back.
The Runescape wikis left Fandom a few years ago. The improvement to quality and features has been massive. I'm not sure how much traffic the Minecraft wiki gets, but the Runescape wikis got over a billion page views in 2021 [1]. These are not insignificant losses for Fandom.