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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#251

Post by dianliang233 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #243
Ukv wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeirdGloop is supposedly profitable despite having only a single, non-intrusive banner ad. It's perfectly possible to run forums/wikis/etc. on even just the free tier of Cloudflare/Oracle OCI. The issue is that Wikia/Fandom, Reddit, etc. subsumed most other alternatives by offering what was for a long time a legitimately convenient and decent-quality service, but now that communities are too locked in to move (due to…

For the RuneScape wiki at least, they seem to have a paid agreement with jagex to maintain the wiki. Which makes a lot of sense, the game devs probably want to have a good wiki for their own game (especially for a game like RuneScape). Not sure if that's the case for the other wikis they host, though.

That is correct. However the jagex funding is not really enough[1] so they added ads. The League wiki seems to be also under this model, but I suppose they got a better deal. The Minecraft Wiki doesn't have any ads at all, and it's just been feeding off by the runescape wikis.

[1]: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#252

Post by giantrobot »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #69

MediaWiki is actually pretty easy to set up on a web server, speaking as someone who's now done it twice. You plop the files into htdocs, make sure PHP is set up, set up vanity URLs if you want to , and then… well, that's it. The final step is to go to the site, fill in the setup form, download the settings file it gives you and upload it. It doesn't even need an external database, it can use SQLite; if email setup i…

Making MediaWiki survive non-trivial amounts of traffic is much harder than simply setting it up. It's not an impossible task for sure but there's no one click performance setting.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#253

Post by rightbyte »

niam wrote: post #235
rightbyte wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Ok sure I might have misunderstood you. I agree that Fandom is most likely not writing checks or paying directly in other means to Google for increased search rank.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#254

Post by why_at »

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…

One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.

For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.

It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#255

Post by starkparker »

Destiner wrote: post #246

I love when somebody disrupts a hidden market like that. Fandom had terrible UXs for years, but nobody seemed to care enough to make an alternative. I'd assume most users are not engineers/founders, so the opportunity was hidden for a while. In hindsight it makes total sense.

There have been several competitors formed in response to or predating Wikia/Fandom over the years, particularly Gamepedia/Curse Media (which Fandom acquired). Fandom also acquired other game-focused community knowledge resources, like GameFAQs and Giant Bomb.

There's also now wiki.gg, which focuses on official wikis run by game developers and was launched after the Gamepedia acquisition by Gamepedia's founder and a former Fandom president. Several wikis are on independent MediaWiki farms like Miraheze or ShoutWiki, and numerous others self-host entirely independently.

This Weird Gloop effort seems to be more like wiki.gg, but for community-run wikis rather than gamedev-run wikis — bespoke relationships with communities that want to migrate or relaunch, rather than open sign-ups to a platform like Miraheze or ShoutWiki.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#256

Post by christianqchung »

why_at wrote: post #254
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…

One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it. For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha th…

I don't really know how exploratory most games are compared to old Minecraft. Some games like Stardew Valley have certain things that are much easier to do because of third party wikis but I don't think the same is true of a lot of games in the same way it was for Minecraft.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#258

Post by theamk »

eviks wrote: post #202
theamk wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare dropped captchas back in 2022 [0], now it's just a checkbox that you check and it lets you it (or does not). And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this: I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare; but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas wh…

but there are more user-friendly captchas than the hydrants, which on average could be better that a total block on the tablets?

total block on _old_ tablets - Android 4.4 specifically, and I am sure many people on HN would be horrified to see those anywhere close to internet. New tablets are fine.

As for "more user-friendly captchas" - I have seen some of those (like AliExpress' slider) but I doubt they will work as well as hydrants. And with new AI startups (1) slurping all the data on the web and (2) writing realistic-looking spam messages, I am sure anti-bot measures would be more important than ever.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#259

Post by csmcg »

sph wrote: post #95
bombcar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I haven't played DCSS regularly since probably v0.24 or v0.25, so things may have changed - but if I recall correctly, it was not kept up to date very well, character guides are flat-out wrong, etc...

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#260

Post by pwdisswordfishz »

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...

Imagining?

https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-launches-new-creator-to...

https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/15vxs2x...

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