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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#91

Post by munificent »

bombcar wrote: post #83
candiddevmike wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factorio and Rimworld have amazing wikis as well. And they're both maintained by the developers AFAIK...

The Dwarf Fortress wiki https://dwarffortresswiki.org is perhaps the most impressive I've seen, as it maintains namespaces to maintain (and update!) information about particular versions, because many players end up staying on a version for various reasons.

I wish the Minecraft wiki did that. I don't tend to play the latest version because I feel like it got overly complex and I get analysis paralysis if I play the latest version.

But being on an old version makes navigating the wiki hard. I'm never sure if some content applies to me. Sometimes they say which version a feature was introduced in, but if a mechanic changes, they often just document the latest behavior.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#92

Post by zoeysmithe »

burkaman wrote: post #25

If you're wondering what happened to Fandom, just look at who runs it now. > In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom. > In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) It's hard to imagine a worse leadership team than private equity + StubHub.

Can we stop it with the "bad apples CEO" thing. These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do. They're not exceptions. Theyre the norm.

The reality is that ads and such are (probably) the only effective way to go and founders will sell to capital groups for profit. Over and over. Look at image hosting, which is a similar case. We went from ad laden tinypic's and such to ad-free imgur and now imgur is ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.

We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#93

Post by layer8 »

teddyh wrote: post #82
hombre_fatal wrote: post #54

Everyone complains about Fandom, but it's the only reason 99% of the communities on its site have a wiki. Take a random game like https://endlesslegend.fandom.com/wiki/Endless_Legend_Wiki That game is 10 years old and its wiki was built in the height of its popularity when it had people to build it. The developer moved on, the community moved on. If its wiki weren't on Fandom, then its wiki would depend on some rando…

If there actuallt exists a community, they can scare up somebody to host some infrastructure the community depends on. Otherwise the community is dead, and it’s archive.org you should be thanking.

Archive.org is awfully slow, and more importantly, the archived pages are not indexed by Google, hence aren’t discoverable.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#94

Post by citricsquid »

oreally wrote: post #70
citricsquid wrote: post #38

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. sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?

More than a decade has passed since then so I am stretching my memory. At peak we were serving in the region of 10 million page views per day which made us one of the most popular websites on the internet (Minecraft was a phenomenon and every Minecraft player needed the wiki). We were probably the highest traffic Wiki after Wikipedia. Nowadays Cloudflare could absorb most traffic because of the highly cacheable nature of it, but at the time, Cloudflare didn't exist, and every request hit our servers.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#95

Post by sph »

bombcar wrote: post #83
candiddevmike wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factorio and Rimworld have amazing wikis as well. And they're both maintained by the developers AFAIK...

The Dwarf Fortress wiki https://dwarffortresswiki.org is perhaps the most impressive I've seen, as it maintains namespaces to maintain (and update!) information about particular versions, because many players end up staying on a version for various reasons.

The good ol' Mediawiki look of the DF wiki reminds me of the underrated, and oft maligned Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup wiki: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Crawl_Wiki

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#96

Post by ziddoap »

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…

>It's not even accurate at times.

I am aware of a few game communities that purposefully poison the fandom version of the wiki with inaccuracies that are non-obvious and time-consuming to verify (so they aren't just auto-reverted).

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#97

Post by baud147258 »

dcchambers wrote: post #72

I love this post. I also LOVE wikis. I have railed against Fandom for years and I have often shared my view on this in the past[^1]. It's an absolute blight on so many beloved game communities at this point. I like this approach much more than the games that have decided to move to another managed/hosted service like https://wiki.gg - which has a very real change of becoming the "next" Fandom. Truly independent wikis…

I skimmed the post linked at [^1], but I have a doubt about that:

> Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia

Are you sure about this? Since Fandom got acquired by private equity in 2018, I don't think Wikipedia has any stake in Fandom anymore

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#98

Post by pjc50 »

oreally wrote: post #70
citricsquid wrote: post #38

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. sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?

Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#99

Post by noman-land »

asl98 wrote: post #71

What are people's thoughts on putting wikis on web3 infrastructure

Do it. The costs shouldn't be borne by a single entity, they should be spread across the community of users. Onboarding and lag are two big hurdles to overcome, as you will inevitably have to put editing behind a transaction.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#100

Post by sph »

card_zero wrote: post #64

Slightly 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-pro…

Given that Jimmy Wales is president of Fandom, I don't know if that's a good idea for WMF to get involved.
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