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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#31

Post by Waterluvian »

Nadya wrote: post #22
Waterluvian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#33

Post by formerly_proven »

tombert wrote: post #6

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.

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)

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#34

Post by sickofparadox »

formerly_proven wrote: post #33
tombert wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#35

Post by ta1243 »

homebrewer wrote: post #24
ta1243 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#36

Post by nness »

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?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#37

Post by erikig »

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#38

Post by citricsquid »

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#39

Post by matheusmoreira »

duxup wrote: post #29
tombert wrote: post #6

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.

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…

> 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?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#40

Post by fenomas »

tombert wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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