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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#171

Post by whstl »

sph wrote: post #84

A thing that bothers me is that Jimmy Wales, a founder of and arguably the face of Wikipedia, is also the founder and president of Fandom, Inc. (2004–present) I respect the work of Mr. Wales immensely, and I cannot explain how he has allowed his creation to become synonymous with ad-ridden borderline unusable gaming wikis.

Jimmy Wales lost my respect with Wikia itself, even before it was acquired.

There was a huge push in Wikipedia in the 2010s to delete content that could be moved into Wikia/Fandom, and a huge amount of quality information was removed. It was clear the goal was to pump views in the money-making website.

Then we only saw Wikia becoming Fandom and getting progressively worse.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#172

Post by zellyn »

Random question: do you work with the new wikis to create some kind of license that prevents Fandom from scraping future changes back into their version of the wikis? Obviously the technical modifications can't translate, but it seems like it wouldn't be that hard for them to slurp most textual/markup changes back in and make it look like their version of the wiki is still alive…

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#173

Post by diggan »

cookmeplox wrote: post #157
diggan wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not. Unless explicitly structured to prevent it, my bet is it will. If it's backed by a for-profit entity, it'll eventually need to turn a profit somehow, and users/visitors are the first to lose their experience at that point. However, if Weird Gloop is a properly registered non-profit with shared ownership between multiple individuals, I'll be much more lik…

We're already turning a profit! And there are no third-party investors (or debt) – it's all controlled by wiki people[1] [1] https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited

Aw, I take that as it is in fact a for-profit company already.

Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#174

Post by xnorswap »

cubefox wrote: post #109
xnorswap wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, despite the poewiki migration being a fairly long time ago now, the fandom wiki still ranks frustratingly highly. The data on it is of course now very outdated and causes confusion for new players. I wonder how much the effect of lots of people having a redirect extension has. If google sees people click on the fandom result and not come back, do they treat it as a good result when in reality people are redirect…

Why can't they replace the old pages with a link to the new page? Or otherwise remove the contents from the old site?

That's considered vandalism of fandom, and probably rightly so.

Could you imagine if someone declared a successor to wikipedia and edited all the pages to redirect?

Sometimes you just have to put the effort into making the new better, and it's a hard long slog especially against a well funded incumbent.

But like all problems in PoE, PoE2 will fix it. ;)

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#175

Post by marxisttemp »

sph wrote: post #84

A thing that bothers me is that Jimmy Wales, a founder of and arguably the face of Wikipedia, is also the founder and president of Fandom, Inc. (2004–present) I respect the work of Mr. Wales immensely, and I cannot explain how he has allowed his creation to become synonymous with ad-ridden borderline unusable gaming wikis.

Jimbo is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, and as such I find it unsurprising that he has created both a wonderful, decentralized, communitarian project as well as a capitalistic nightmare. Libertarians are essentially anarchists who selectively turn their brains off when they see dollar signs.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#176

Post by madeofpalk »

diggan wrote: post #143
mossTechnician wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikia is a great example of enshittification - provide great value to users, then take it away from users and hand it to other businesses (eg advertisers), then take it away from businesses too. Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.

> Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not. Unless explicitly structured to prevent it, my bet is it will. If it's backed by a for-profit entity, it'll eventually need to turn a profit somehow, and users/visitors are the first to lose their experience at that point. However, if Weird Gloop is a properly registered non-profit with shared ownership between multiple individuals, I'll be much more lik…

Can we flip it? Some companies are explicitly structured to guarantee enshittification.

Venture capital/private equity is what causes this. We've been poisoned to believe that websites should exist purely to achieve hyperscale and extract as much money as possible. When you look at the real physical world there are tons of small "mom and pop" businesses that are content with being self sustainable without some special corporate structure to legally require that.

Maybe websites could be the same?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#177

Post by forgotpwd16 »

Should mention the pessimistic possibility that Fandom buys WG and those wikis return under their umbrella. An example being Wowpedia forked off WoWWiki in 2010, moved to Curse's Gamepedia in 2013, which, Gamepedia, Fandom (then Wikia) bought in 2018.

edit: Seems they moved again recently to wiki.gg.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#178

Post by account42 »

jchw wrote: post #103
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…

In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately obvious: - For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out. - You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes…

A lot of things should be solved by having (micro)caching in front of your wiki. Almost all non-logged in requests shouldn't even be hitting PHP at all.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#179

Post by nullindividual »

The Noita wiki moved away from Fandom to noita.wiki.gg due to ads, etc. The Fandom one still exists, of course, but has no community backing and lacks information from the newer updates of the game.

Unfortunately the Fandom wiki is still the first link when searching on DDG :-(

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#180

Post by matt_heimer »

Dwedit wrote: post #129
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…

Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page .

That's up to the site owner.

For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need.

Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.

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