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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#231

Post by cookmeplox »

renewiltord wrote: post #116

Would be cool to know what extensions you’re using on MediaWiki and how you’ve set it up to maximize performance. These wikis seem really quick to respond.

Thanks! I've been meaning to write up a post that talks about some of the specific tricks we're using. A couple big ones:

- Heavy use of Cloudflare Workers to cache ~95% of logged-out pageviews, with a particular focus on doing a lot of edge-side modifications to minimize cache fragmentation

- Using the MediaWiki jobrunners to repopulate the parser cache before pageviews are requested, so even when pageviews hit the server, there's a high chance that the core contents have already been computed somewhere

- I realized that MediaWiki latency is usually dominated by I/O wait time. For example, some pageviews require thousands of synchronous database/redis cache reads, so the difference between 0.5ms lookup and 0.1ms lookup adds up. So we colocated more of those caches on the same physical machines as the webservers that were reading them, which on average dropped latency by ~40%

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#232

Post by Svip »

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…

A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place, because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps the spam down, yes, but also new users away.

Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#233

Post by robotnikman »

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.

At least it is a private company though, meaning they are are required to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors. They have much more control over where the company goes and how it operates.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#234

Post by jchw »

account42 wrote: post #178
jchw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience this hasn't been necessary yet on anything I've ran. I know WMF wikis run Varnish or something, but personally I'm trying to keep costs and complexity minimal. To that end, more caching isn't always desirable, because RAM is especially premium on low-end boxen. When tuned well, read-only requests on MediaWiki are not a huge problem. The real issue is actually just keeping the FPM worker pool from getting starved, but when it is starved, it's not because of read-only requests, but usually because of database contention preventing requests from finishing. (And to that end, enabling application-level caching usually will help a lot here, since it can save having to hit the DB at all.) PHP itself is plenty fast enough to serve a decent number of requests per second on a low end box. I won't put a number on it since it is obviously significantly workload-dependent but it would suffice to say that my concerns with optimizing PHP software usually tilt towards memory usage and database performance rather than the actual speed of PHP. (Which, in my experience, has also improved quite a lot just by virtue of PHP itself improving. I think the JIT work has great potential to push it further, too.)

The calculus on this probably changes dramatically as the RPS scales up, though. Not doing work will always be better than doing work in the long run. It's just that it's a memory/time trade-off and I wouldn't take it for granted that it always gives you the most cost-effective end result.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#235

Post by niam »

rightbyte wrote: post #118
niam wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.

How so? Fandom seems to have Google ads. We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher. Google's search ranking is black box. Edit: I guess at great effort you could scrape thousands of sites, not if they remove or add Google ads, and track their rating. I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.

> We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher

This to me is a different argument, though admittedly reasonable to arrive at through the language of "paying Google for placement".

> I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.

I mean, yes. Though I should hope I needn't preamble any statement about with how cynical I am about their intentions... It's not relevant here because I'm not arguing on the grounds that 'Google would be ethical and kawaii if they didn't accept payment for organic search ranking'--I'm saying that from a business standpoint it wouldn't make sense.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#236

Post by duskwuff »

yifanl wrote: post #132
cubefox wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Usually attempts to advertise migration efforts on high visibility wikis away from Fandom will be deleted by Fandom staff.

And they will remove rights from wiki admins who take steps to advertise alternate resources.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#237

Post by ceroxylon »

The same thing is happening to older forums, if you browse without an ad blocker you get ads that try to trigger every emotion all at once, all of them larger than the actual content.

Three cheers for weird gloop, JES, and everyone else fighting the good fight.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#238

Post by thereddaikon »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #165
yakz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are objectively bad for some definitions of bad. What do you want for them? Universal respect? Just because taking something good and making it shitty is one way to make money doesn't mean that it is the only way to make money.

This person is trying to clarify that the problem isn't specific to Fandom, it is a general problem with our system of capitalism and will never go away until we change our system of economic incentives. Basically, sell everything of value to make a quick buck is the guiding principle of our economy at present. It's the best way to get rich even though it ultimately makes society way worse off long term. We have to s…

Can we stop this capitalism boogeyman thing? Market economies don't force people to conduct business this way. We've had our current system for a long time and while corporate raiding has always existed the current epidemic is very recent. Its the result of a complex confluence of market, legal, regulatory and competitive forces that make it an ideal move for many businesses.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#239

Post by Nadya »

mossTechnician wrote: post #197
zellyn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To my understanding wikis can take all their data, host it themselves, point the domain to their new hosting, and the move would be entirely invisible to end users if done properly and the quality of the hosting infrastructure wasn't considerably worse.

Observant users might notice the removal of any Weird Gloop branding but otherwise the only way people would know if the wiki itself announces the move or performance of the wiki becomes noticeably worse.

And Weird Gloop won't do what Fandom does and keep a zombie copy of your wiki online. So you won't be competing with Weird Gloop wiki traffic to reclaim your traffic. In fact, the obligations they agree to forbid it.

Reading the Minecraft.wiki Memorandum: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...

Upon termination by either party, Weird Gloop is obligated to:

- Cease operating any version of the Minecraft Wiki

- Transfer ownership of the minecraft.wiki domain to the community members

- Provide dumps of Minecraft Wiki databases and image repositories, and any of Weird Gloop's MediaWiki configuration that is specific to Minecraft Wiki

- Assist in transferring to the community members any domain-adjacent assets or accounts that cannot reasonably be acquired without Weird Gloop's cooperation

- This does not include any of Weird Gloop's core MediaWiki code, Cloudflare configuration, or accounts/relationships related to advertising or sponsorships

This sort of agreement means Weird Gloop is incentivized to not become so shit that wiki would want to leave (and take their ad revenue with them) because they've tried to make leaving Weird Gloop as easy as possible.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#240

Post by mardifoufs »

marxisttemp wrote: post #175
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.

I think you're talking about the other wikipedia founder, no? Jimbo might have some libertarian tendencies too but they haven't been super visible in the way he directed the wiki. But yeah, his involvement with wikia is a huge stain
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