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.
Helping wikis move away from Fandom
61–70 of 503 posts
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#62Fandom 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…
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away, I was following so many instances of out dated info in games I was playing due to not realizing that the wiki was no longer maintained since the active contributors had moved elsewhere and updates/patches to the game had rendered the info moot.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#63These 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".
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#64Slightly 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.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#65As 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…
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
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#66I’m one of the folks whose fans go wild. Are they running crypto?
Dont give them any ideas
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#67Out 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-...
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#68Fandom 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.
laughs in ublock origin
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.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#69MediaWiki 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.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#70As 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.
sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?