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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#191

Post by snowwrestler »

rideontime wrote: post #123
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…

I didn't think I could Fandom being worse than it already is, but imagining it stuffed with AI-generated slop...

It’s worth remembering that there was AI before generative AI, and there are applications of AI that don’t produce slop, like knowledge graphs and natural language search. Some of that might be called just “machine learning” now.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#192

Post by CM30 »

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…

Yeah the more dedicated fans have usually gone off to the independent wiki instead, leaving the Fandom one a hellscape of rumours and outdated information. Just compare the versions of Nintendo wikis in the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance and their Fandom equivalents for example, and the quality difference is like night and day.

Same goes with just about every wiki that has a counterpart that's not on Fandom.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#193

Post by misode »

sammy2255 wrote: post #183
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]

The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#194

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

What is weird gloop doing exactly ?

Is it hosting it on cloudflare / using cloudflare workers or what exactly (because I heard cloudflare being mentioned here)

I am all ears because hosting a static site is basically free thanks to github pages / cloudflare pages , but having a site which changes a lot (a wiki can have changes be applied to at an insane rate , though I am not sure if we could use something like git as a wiki I think wikis also allow messages between users ) but is still static can cost a arm and leg

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#195

Post by dianliang233 »

layer8 wrote: post #79

> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. It’s very useful, however, to have a place where that’s possible, even if that’s currently Fandom. Many wikis wouldn’t exist without that non-barrier to entry. Those that gain traction can then decide to move elsewhere.

That would be Miraheze [1]. Community funded wiki farm. However it's had some instability such as internal conflict and server issues, but it's better than all the alternatives.

[1]: https://miraheze.org/

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#196

Post by [deleted] »

Svip wrote: post #142
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…

I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years. Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular…

[deleted]

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#197

Post by mossTechnician »

zellyn wrote: post #169
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.

The article explicitly covers this question. Looks like they're setting up explicit legal(?) agreements. One key point is the domain name: minecraft.wiki, for example, not a subdomain of something owned by Weird Gloop. So the wiki can leave if it wants to.

Does that mean that to the users of these wikis, the switching costs[1] of the backend would basically be zero (one day they might just end up on a different server with the same content), while on the administrators' side the switching costs are at a reasonable minimum?

[1] a variable in whether something can be enshittified, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#History_and_d...

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#198

Post by snowwrestler »

DrillShopper wrote: post #21
EcommerceFlow wrote: post #12

Google giving Fandom powerful rankings bothers me too, since their intrusive ads clearly go against Google ranking factors. Still, I'm glad for some competition. However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?

I assume that Fandom pays Google for that placement

They don’t need to. Fandom benefits from being an old and popular site. Google manually adjusts their ranking to prioritize such sites, because they think those sites are what the “average” searcher expects to see come up when they search certain topics.

Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#199

Post by cinntaile »

diggan wrote: post #173
cookmeplox wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it started that way, I'd say it's less likely to end up "bad". Compared to non-profit websites that get sold to ad businesses.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#200

Post by beAbU »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #58
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…

Thanks (seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing. Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with instead starting from scratch.

I can't imagine that this would have happened, like ever. The wiki was basically essential reading prior to starting to play Minecraft, especially in the early days. I think most the crafting recipes were documented by the developers themselves during those days.

If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.

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