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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#331

Post by dcchambers »

bawolff wrote: post #321
baud147258 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed the post linked at [^1], but I have a doubt about that: > Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia Are you sure about this? Since Fandom got acquired by private equity in 2018, I don't think Wikipedia has any stake in Fandom anymore

They never had a stake at any point. The connection is that 2 of the main people involved originally (jimmy & angela) had a lot of ties to wikimedia, but they were doing wikicities/wikia/fandom as their own thing, not as part of wikimedia. Also long ago there was some minor connections. They briefly shared an office like 15 years ago i think, and they tried to jointly develop a wysiwyg editor back in like 2012 (wikim…

To be fair I think you could argue we're actively witnessing a cautionary tale about one founder having large interests in both a nonprofit and a related for-profit company with the ongoing Wordpress.org/Automattic/WPEngine drama.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#332

Post by jchw »

bawolff wrote: post #316
jchw wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 get…

Varnish caching really only helps if the majority of your traffic is logged out requests. Its the sort of thing that is really useful at a high scale but matters much less at a low scale. Application level caching (memcached/redis/apcu) is super important even at a small scale. Most of the time (unless complex extensions are involved or your wiki pages are very simple) mediawiki should be io-bound on converting wikit…

Most of MediaWiki seems to avoid too much trouble with contention in the database, but I was seeing it prior to enabling application-level caching. It seemed to be a combination of factors primarily driven by expensive tasks in the background. Particularly complex pages can cause some of those background tasks to become rather explosive.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#333

Post by paradox460 »

In my opinion, the best approach to videogame wikis is what valve did with the TF2 wiki. They saw that it was a great community resource, and so they took it under their wing, gave it hosting and a subdomain, and then left it alone. The wiki maintains full editorial control, which lets it remain a useful resource

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#334

Post by starkparker »

bawolff wrote: post #318
starkparker wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, managing edge and object caches (and caching for anonymous viewers vs. logged-in editors with separate frontend and backend caches) while mitigating the effects of cache misses, minimizing the impacts of the job queue when many pages are changed at once, optimizing image storage, thumbnailing, and caching, figuring out when to use a wikitext template vs. a Scribunto/Lua module vs. a MediaWiki extension…

Everything is hard at scale. You have to be pretty big scale before some of that stuff starts to matter (some of course matters at smaller scales)

While that's not wrong, the wiki loop of frequent or constant, unpredictably cascading content updates, with or without auth and sometimes with a parallel structured data component + cache and job queue maintenance + image storage + database updates and maintenance becomes a significant burden relatively fast compared to a typical CMS.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#335

Post by YoshiRulz »

AlienRobot wrote: post #50

I'm happy that people are creating alternatives, but personally I never had a problem with Fandom. Yes, they will monetize the content, but they'll also manage it because it makes them money. Content on fandom is probably going to still be available 10 years later. It's the same with DeviantArt, it's worse now than it has ever been, but artwork uploaded 10 years ago is still available, and it will probably still be a…

Most of the platforms you mention are "replacements" which have "won" over a long term—Google unseated AltaVista and Yahoo!, Reddit outlived Digg and SlashDot, and microblogging like Twitter started as blogs. And of course, Fandom "replaced" other, less bad wiki farms by virtue of buying them.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#336

Post by echelon »

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…

Their growth people emailed me again and again and tried to do the same with StrategyWiki decades ago.

Here's one of their emails:

> [Redacted] mentioned that your site was very cool - and that you're heading off to college. As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame) and we are trying to become THE resource for all gamers

> I was wondering if you'd consider moving over to wikia now that you're going to might have less time with your studies. As an incentive I can point to a few things that might make the move easier

> 1. We have cool new software - gaming.wikia.com lets users do more blog-like contributions in addition to wiki editing - new social networking tools on the wiki - see our test server at http://sports.box8.tpa.wikia-inc.com/index.php?title=User:[R...

> 2. We could also hire you to help moderate the strategy wiki and other wikis if you need some beer and pizza money :-)

> 3. or we could offer to pay all the hosting costs and share some of the ad impressions/revenue with u

> If nothing else, I'd love to chat by phone and get to know you better.

> Let me know if that'd be ok :-)

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#337

Post by barbecue_sauce »

sigh_again wrote: post #77
michaelsbradley wrote: post #51

Fextralife Wikis are an alternative: https://www.wiki.fextralife.com/ Comments sections on wikis there for e.g. FromSoftware games can tend toward rebarbativity, and the ads can be annoying, but in my recent experience the information troves compiled for big games such as Elden Ring are an indispensable resource.

fextralife has the exact same behavior as Fandom: autoplaying their Twitch streams to farm views and displaying ads, at times hiding it in invisible iframes, or making it so small you can't find it, leading to Twitch making rules against embedding autoplays, ads everywhere, shitty AI generated stubs for half the articles, botting and automatically piling on criticism, and fundamentally, it's just plain wrong, everywh…

Is darksouls.wikidot.com not the initial Dark Souls wikidot page? Was there something else that was closed down?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#338

Post by iamacyborg »

epiccoleman wrote: post #122
ryukoposting wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s, back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today, it isn't.

Every time I wind up on some garbage Fandom page I reminisce about the good old days of Wikia. I remember many a fun night trawling through pages while playing Fallout or Skyrim or whatever - all the information you could ever need, right there at your fingertips. It's an ethos you don't see so much on the modern net.

It’s funny that people are now looking back at wikia fondly because at the time most folks thought it was full of ads and shit. To the point where Curse/Gamepedia managed to get serious market share by not screwing with the community in the same way at the time.

Funny how they somehow managed to make it worse.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#339

Post by mardifoufs »

dianliang233 wrote: post #251
mardifoufs wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Woah, I didn't know that what jagex has paid for basically only covers the infrastructure. It's crazy considering how central the wiki is (because the game is very far from "self documenting"). Thanks for the info!

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#340

Post by hinkley »

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 of the things on my todo list is to spend some solid time thinking about load-shedding, and in particular tools and methods for small or hobbyist projects to practice it. Like what do you turn off on the site when it's the 15th of the month and you're already at 80% of your SaaS budget?

Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?

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