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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#341

Post by mardifoufs »

marxisttemp wrote: post #242
mardifoufs wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nope, I am talking about Jimbo. From that website he founded: > Wales has previously referred to himself as an Objectivist, referring to the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism.

That's interesting. I wonder if that was more due to the fact that everyone on the internet back then seemed to have an obsession with Rand, and he might have moved on since. But maybe he's still like that, I just didn't pick that up from the more recent stuff I read from him. Thanks for the info though!

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#342

Post by hinkley »

iamacyborg wrote: post #338
epiccoleman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did Curse end up making money?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#343

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

Aachen wrote: post #297
rjmunro wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare don't charge per GB/TB. You get unlimited bandwidth even on their free plan. The problem with paying per GB is that it's in the CDN's interest for you to get a DDOS attack so they can charge you for all the bandwidth. It's in Cloudflare's interest to reduce DDOS attacks and unwanted bot traffic because it costs them bandwidth, not you.

> it's in the CDN's interest for you to get a DDOS What kind of conspiracy is this? As if anyone charging for bandwidth hopes to get their infrastructure attacked

Why not? They have the capacity they could absorb nearly any kind of attack without blinking.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#344

Post by ggregoire »

xmprt wrote: post #213

Did you get in touch with Riot Games to be able to host a subdomain of leagueoflegends.com. If so, it's great that they're also behind this

Literally the second sentence of the article:

> We’ve spent the last couple months working with the Riot folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#345

Post by zhobbs »

johnklos wrote: post #247

This illustrates a problem that I wish more people would see. People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to make more money. Who doesn't like more money? They add the thing, and revenue goes up! What they don't see is the effect that comes when fewer people visit the site because they're too annoyed to come back over time. They see and take credit for the small increa…

It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad load is a lever you are probably going to pull.

If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc).

The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#346

Post by YoshiRulz »

Apocryphon wrote: post #208

What are the major Fandom/Wikia alternatives out there right now? Besides Weird Gloop, this thread has also mentioned Miraheze, wiki.gg, Wikidot, and Fextralife. What others?

You have named all the players. Maybe throw ShoutWiki in there, but I recently tried to create a wiki there and it wasn't working—YMMV. There's also NIWA, focused on Nintendo-related IP, but I believe that's more of a webring and doesn't manage hosting for their members.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#347

Post by iamacyborg »

dpbriggs wrote: post #317
ykonstant wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fandom PoE still pollutes the top of Google searches :(

There is an extension which automatically redirects you from Fandom to the new wiki. While that's convenient it probably helps Fandom stay near the top.

It does, if you’re clicking on those fandom links and not subsequently providing any negative signals back to Google it’ll assume that’s where you wanted to go.

It was and remains a worthwhile trade-off to ensure folks got to the right wiki though.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#348

Post by iamacyborg »

paranoidxprod wrote: post #45

A few years ago, Path of Exile migrated from the fandom to a new site. GGG (Path of Exile's company) even decided to host the new wiki on their servers ( https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3292958 )! At this point, the new wiki ranks higher then the old one, but for a time it was an issue. Interesting to see more cases of games wikis leaving Fandom with how horrible the site is, and hopefully this is just…

And we just launched the wiki for PoE2 which GGG are hosting for the community.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#349

Post by Ameo »

A huge congrats to the Weird Gloop team on this, and to the League of Legends community for what's certain to be a huge bump to the availability of high-quality information and community space.

As others have pointed out, the RuneScape Wiki (where Weird Gloop started out) is probably the highest quality gaming wiki on the internet. Not only is its information itself up-to-date and accurate, but it has countless custom features and interactive tools that elevate it from a crowdsourced knowledgebase to a sort of data and analytics hub for the game.

Anyway, this really is terrific news and any wiki that chooses to partner with Weird Gloop is certainly in the best of hands.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#350

Post by iamacyborg »

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...

They tried this on a wiki and the community rightfully went and got their pitchforks out
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