Helping wikis move away from Fandom • Hacker News Board

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#301

Post by Washuu » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 5:56 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…

Hey Criticsquid!~ \(￣︶￣*\)) It's Azxiana[1].

I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them.

[1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#302

Post by gazook89 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #285

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.

Could you say a bit more about that? Normally I think "have to support people stuck on old versions" is something that happens when you're selling enterprise software to insurance companies. This is the first I've heard of it in games.

DF had a massive update probably a decade or more ago that changed the game from 2D to 3D (still represented as 2D z-levels though). With such a change, obviously some people would want to stick with the old version. There have been numerous large updates since then (the game has been in development for 22 years) and with each you get some people that just don’t want to update, either because it might ruin their current games or they prefer to avoid new features etc.

Another example is the various Dungeon and Dragons wikis that allow you to toggle between versions, since it has existed for 50 years now.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#303

Post by mossTechnician » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

Nadya wrote: post #239

mossTechnician wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is very reassuring. Usually, I assume agreements between different groups will inordinately benefit one party, but this particular agreement sounds like it creates a more level playing field.

And besides, it's not like non-profits are exempt from restructuring and becoming worse. There is no silver bullet.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#304

Post by marxisttemp » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

booleandilemma wrote: post #292

marxisttemp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are they turning their brains off or on?

Depends on whether you think it’s possible for property to be used as a means of curtailing individual liberty, or whether individual liberty is fundamentally rooted in private property. I believe the former, and as such I find libertarianism to be ideologically inconsistent.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#305

Post by Washuu » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 6:04 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 Gamepedia/Wikia/Fandom engineer, I left not too long after Fandom bought out Gamepedia/Curse. You left at a good time. The upper management had no idea what they were doing and were entirely disinterested in the company. Talking with the CEO felt like talking with someone that had no idea what they were doing there.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#306

Post by Reason077 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 6:05 PM UTC

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #287

ChadNauseam wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

publicly traded companies are not "required" to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors, that is just what the owners usually decide to tell the company to do. The owners of a privately traded company could decide to, and the owners of a publicly traded company could decide not to. For example, zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other s…

"that is just what the owners usually decide to tell the company to do" Because the entire system encourages it. The market rewards growth FAR more than it rewards a consistent dividend payout. (See: companies growing 40% YoY command a significfantly higher earnings multiple than those growing 10% YOY). So imo this is a like saying "people could decide to just invest money and then not seek the best returns possible.…

Elon Musk is another CEO in total control. Although Tesla is a public company and therefore has a board, it’s stacked with Elon’s allies/appointees and answers to him, not the other way around. Despite Elon not being a majority owner of Tesla stock.

And when he took over Twitter in 2022, he immediately dissolved the board and fired the executives who were on it.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#307

Post by blendergeek » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 6:07 PM UTC

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #184

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.

I missed the "(hint: it's all about the domain)" or more precisely, I didn't get the hint. I guess I need some things spelled out for me.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#308

Post by Ukv » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 6:08 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #278

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…

WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active games and communities in the world. I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game. You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that. The problem is that there's rarely the will because it's a hobby endeavor for tiny communities, and until you last as long as the…

> WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active games and communities in the world

Most of the costs are those that scale up/down by activity - MediaWiki itself is free/open-source and the wiki's content is contributed for free by volunteers.

Also, keep in mind I'm not saying that each wiki needs to be individually self-hosted. Can be a host the size of WeirdGloop but made up of smaller game wikis, for instance.

> I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game.

Prospects for long term information accessibility are pretty terrible on sites aggressively squeezing out all the profit they can. See Reddit eliminating archives and third party clients and then cutting off all search engines that don't pay, or mass deletions of user content by sites like Photobucket/Imgur/etc.

> You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that.

With significant difficulty, fighting against both Fandom's policies and SEO/network effects. The OP lists "wiki communities need to be able to freely leave their host" as the primary rule for "How to not turn into Fandom 2.0".

> You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest

Hence ability and willingness to pass on the torch is critical - so that the information doesn't die with one person or company.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#309

Post by bawolff » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 6:14 PM UTC

tredre3 wrote: post #201

misode wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage

Mediawiki is trivial to cache, though. For all intent and purposes most hits will be cache hits, and thus "static" content. I'm also shocked at the tens of thousands per month, it can't possibly be hosting alone. It has to be that the maintainer had a generous salary or something.

Not everyone is a professional web hoster with requisite knowledge on how to setup caching properly.

Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully.

MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#310

Post by bawolff » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 6:16 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #204

misode wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage

I have no idea how it works, but given that the read:write ratio is probably 100:1 or more, certainly it could just serve static, prerendered pages straight from the filesystem or something like memcached?

[Im a mediawiki dev]. Typically people use varnish for that use case. MediaWiki does support serving logged out views from a filesystem cache, but varnish is generally a better idea. There are also some caches out of memcached (mediawiki has "parser cache" in memcached which is the part of the page that stays constant between all users. Typically people use varnish on top of that for the entire page for logged out users)

Sometimes people add things to their sites that are incompatible with caching, which will make hosting costs go way up.