Helping wikis move away from Fandom • Hacker News Board

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#181

Post by rbits » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:42 PM UTC

otterpro wrote: post #136

The only wiki in Fandom I actually go to is the Vim Tips Wiki ( https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki ). But how did Vim get in a Fandom in the first place? I hate going to Vim Wiki, even though they have good tips not found anywhere, due to all the things that were mentioned in the article. 50-70% of screen real-estate is filled with ads or distractions. I hope that vim will get its own wiki instead.

Check out BreezeWiki (https://breezewiki.com/). It lets you view any fandom wiki with a much better UI. The Indie Wiki Buddy extension also lets you automatically redirect fandom to BreezeWiki (https://getindie.wiki/)

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#182

Post by zellyn » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:43 PM UTC

Sadly, Fandom still has a lot of search mojo. For instance, when searching for "minecraft redstone filter bedrock" I get a link to the Fandom minecraft wiki rather than minecraft.wiki. Hopefully over time, that corrects itself.

Also, the Google search results page for that search made me pine for the good old days of Google being 10 real links…

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#183

Post by sammy2255 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:43 PM UTC

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…

[flagged]

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#184

Post by aDyslecticCrow » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:43 PM UTC

blendergeek wrote: post #3

Can wikis on weird gloop use their own domain names? I feel like that is the best way to ensure that they can leave and that the host can't keep a zombie version of the wiki that hogs Google search position.

From the article

> (hint: it’s all about the domain). If we ever start going down the same path as Fandom, everyone can just leave! I would love to see other wiki platforms start to do this, because I think it’s the only way you really solve the problem.

So yes, the wikis have their own domains for this exact reason.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#185

Post by owyn » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:45 PM UTC

languagehacker wrote: post #74

Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that…

Former Wikia engineer here too! I also thought there was a lot of potential there. We even invested in some RDF and structured data and NLP projects (second screen, sentiment analysis on comments for detecting flame wars, etc), but for various reasons they just didn't work out beyond hackathons and demos. I think there were a lot of well meaning engineers who wanted to make stuff like that work. Part of the problem is mediawiki itself. A page is literally just text using an awful hacked together xml parser and some regexes to emit HTML. It might look like a database sometimes when it is rendered (and there is Wikidata) but there is no actual structure to it, just a pile of templates made of other templates that people have to tediously wrangle by hand. That it eventually turns into some HTML that you can view is almost an accident.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#186

Post by rbits » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #177

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.

With Weird Gloop they have agreements that the community can move the wiki away from Weird Gloop if that happens. For example this one is not legally binding yet, but once the minecraft wiki had a legal entity it will be: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#187

Post by burkaman » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

anthonymartinez wrote: post #130

zoeysmithe wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I'm with you for the most part but we definitely need to hold PE and the Ticketmasters of the world more accountable- there's no escaping modern capitalism but better markets are definitely possible.

Yes, when I said "what happened" I was referring to how quickly the site changed for the worse and how extreme the decline was, not just the fact that it has ads. Most sites do follow the pattern described in the parent because they can't escape the need to make money, the transition is usually very gradual and they often stop at the point of sustainability, rather than pushing to the absolute maximum of short-term audience-destroying profit.

@zoeysmithe I'm sorry for the mass downvotes though, I think you are basically right. I still think it's worth noting private equity ownership because while we can't really choose what economic system we're in, we can often choose to work with people who care about more than just profit.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#188

Post by yamazakiwi » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

Dwedit wrote: post #134

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.

Fandom is perfectly usable with adblockers and the "Cleaner Fandom" userscript. But only with those extensions!

I don't use it out of principle.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#189

Post by Imustaskforhelp » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:47 PM UTC

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

How is it making money?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#190

Post by teddyh » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:47 PM UTC

ARandumGuy wrote: post #126

teddyh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few , and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.

It's clearly enough of an impact for Google to spend effort killing uBlock on Chrome, and (attempting) to block it on Youtube. Obviously Google is huge, and even a small percentage of users is still a lot of money on the table.

We can only draw the obvious conclusion: Namely that Google plans to introduce a lot more ads once they have an iron grip on the consumer. If Google did that before Google destroyed ad blockers, regular people would indeed start to use ad blockers.