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I've always wondered why a wiki needs to monetize so hard. Most of their content easily cacheable and produced by volunteers, plus the technology hasn't really changed in 20 years. The whole site could probably be maintained by a single dev and a few admins. It seems natural that these sites are going to eventually be replaced because of this. Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.
I've always wondered why a wiki needs to monetize so hard. Most of their content easily cacheable and produced by volunteers, plus the technology hasn't really changed in 20 years. The whole site could probably be maintained by a single dev and a few admins. It seems natural that these sites are going to eventually be replaced because of this. Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.
I run Weird Gloop (the group hosting the Minecraft/RuneScape wikis) and your view is generally correct. The content is extremely cacheable and the infrastructure costs have extremely strong economies-of-scale. The labor costs are a bit less obvious, but past a certain baseline (of, say, having enough people for a reasonable oncall rotation), the marginal labor cost of hosting additional wikis is quite low.
Excellent. I hope to see more games following suit away from the bloated messes of fandom/fextralife. At times they feel unusable on mobile. And I don't think a single user has wanted to see the embedded twitch streams when they're just trying to get some information quickly.
• https://starfield.fandom.com
• https://starfield.wiki.fextralife.com
• https://www.ign.com/wikis/starfield (this is the honorable mention)
None of them are complete, and all have vastly different ideas on how it should work and look. Want to know what the best shield generator is? Some wikis will have their own page on them, others just have it stuffed into a table called "starship components", maybe divided by category.
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Whats interesting is that Ward Cunningham saw all these problems YEARS ago, and started pushing for a federated wiki experience. Doesn't seem to have caught on outside a very small niche circle, sadly. IMO because the various wikis that implement the federated wiki are lacking a lot of features that other wiki engines provide
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I remember in 2009 or 2010, when I first came across Minecraft. It was not hugely popular yet, but it already had quite an active community. I played quite a few hours of the game, both alone and together with a couple of friends. One day, after a couple of weeks or something, I learned about a crafting wiki that told you how to craft different items. At the time, at least for me, it was not clear how you figure out…
Never having played Minecraft: does this game not come with a manual? (even if it's in PDF form or the like?)
There's also a "recipe book", which tells you how to craft[1] items. More recipes get added as you collect the ingredients needed to make them.
However, these systems were only added in 2017. (For contrast, the game started development in 2009 and reached 1.0 in 2011.) Before that, how to progress was a lot less clear. It was assumed you had someone teaching you how to play, that you watched videos of other people playing, or that you read the wiki.
[1]: The process of combining the items you've collected, by slotting them into a 3×3 grid in a specific pattern (the "recipe"), to make new, more useful items.
UESP is the gold standard for wikis. https://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page
A history recap for those who do not know:
2013: Minecraft Wiki migrates from a self-hosted solution to Gamepedia run by Curse. This was a good decision at the time, because Curse was pretty trusted in the community; Minecraft modding centers around CurseForge the way Skyrim does around Nexus.
2016: Twitch buys Curse. The Curse Launcher is rebranded as the Twitch Launcher and turned into a desktop Twitch client that also does Minecraft modding. The wikis are initially unaffected. This sucks.
2018: Twitch starts breaking up Curse, and sells off Gamepedia to Fandom. This also sucks because Fandom starts inserting more ads, but the ads are manageable compared to Fandom proper.
2020: Gamepedia wikis are migrated over to Fandom proper, for SEO. Overnight the site becomes completely unusable. This sucks much worse, and actually manages to damage Twitch's brand (because a lot of people think they're involved, due to it still being called the Twitch Launcher) and they shutter the launcher and sell off CurseForge (the modding part) to Overwolf.
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Bethesda enjoyers are blessed with this wonderful wiki. And action RPG fans have fextralife - another solid gold standard for wikis. It's a great time to be a fan. https://fextralife.com/
Fextralife is worse than fandom, by far. The forced twitch view botting along with the horrendous site layout make it one of the worst wiki sites that exist.
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Kagi makes it easy to essentially delist entire domains. So nice for when you find a content farm or for sites like pinterest. They even provide a list of the most blocked domains: https://kagi.com/stats (Click "Domain Insights")
It's probably safer to lower this one's ranking, rather than absolutely block it. There's more than a handful of things for which fandom.com is the correct result—the only actively-maintained wiki. Trust the search engine to do the signal/noise calculations for you. You are no longer on Google. Kagi is your agent, not your adversary.
Only sites I block on my Kagi are sites that outright trick or lie to the user; keyword content farms, pinterest, and StackOverflow cloners
Excellent. I hope to see more games following suit away from the bloated messes of fandom/fextralife. At times they feel unusable on mobile. And I don't think a single user has wanted to see the embedded twitch streams when they're just trying to get some information quickly.
> And I don't think a single user has wanted to see the embedded twitch streams when they're just trying to get some information quickly. The embedded Twitch stream is there purely as a way to artificially boost viewer counts on their channel. Almost every time a new game comes out, you can go to its Twitch page and see Fextralife at the top with tens of thousands of viewers, with a dead chat because almost nobody is…