Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 503 posts

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#381

Post by theoldways »

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.

This actually used to be the norm: you'd release slowly, and support old versions for years (which still isn't that long, all things considered). It wasn't until relatively recently that six months became some sort of unconscionable amount of time to support software, because it's friendlier to the companies and developers writing it, instead of the users using it.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#382

Post by mattmanser »

zhobbs wrote: post #345
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 (go…

Google search has totally craptastic'd out.

Same with Amazon, it's now just sponsored spam. I just don't get why they think it's a good idea.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#383

Post by cyrnel »

dcow wrote: post #18

The Runescape wiki is simply amazing. It’s one of the most well built fit for purpose pieces of quality software+content that I have ever come across. It’s clean and crisp visually and well organized at the IA level despite being exactly the type of content problem that resists such attempts by nature. What a solid community. The software doesn't fell clunky, it’s fast and responsive and still feels modern. I can onl…

It's more a testament to the devs. I kept up with the RuneScape wiki Discord server for a bit and there were flamegraphs flying left and right. You can see some of there recent performance improvements here: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-06-...

I think the theory is people edit more if pages load lightning fast. I can attest to that, especially if you use tools for partially-automated mass edits like https://github.com/wikimedia-gadgets/JWB

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#384

Post by lolinder »

beAbU wrote: post #200
stonemetal12 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks (seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing. Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with instead starting from scratch.

I can't imagine that this would have happened, like ever. The wiki was basically essential reading prior to starting to play Minecraft, especially in the early days. I think most the crafting recipes were documented by the developers themselves during those days. If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.

citricsquid wasn't a Mojang employee. This whole thing is and always has been community-run [0], so the "they" in "if they killed the wiki" is not the same as the "they" that was selling Minecraft.

Now, one could reasonably ask why Mojang/Microsoft didn't (and I'm assuming don't) foot the bill for the manual that is an essential part of their game.

[0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website)

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#385

Post by kibwen »

csmcg wrote: post #259
sph wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

One of the Crawl design philosophies is that it should be possible to play without needing to consult a wiki. E.g. inspecting a monster shows you its spells and their damage ranges, there's a searchable in-game encyclopedia of all items/spells/monsters/etc., there's an extensive in-game manual with things like species skill aptitudes, examining an item tells you exactly what skill level you need to use it optimally, and so on. There's plenty of useful stuff on the wiki, but it's not a priority to update because it's not entirely necessary.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#386

Post by Sharlin »

bawolff wrote: post #310
Sharlin wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Thanks!

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#387

Post by Terr_ »

chongli wrote: post #228
red-iron-pine wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to put a finer point on it: capitalism. "then the MBAs got involved" is a cop-out, it's a systemic issue.

to put a finer point on it: capitalism. That's still an extremely blunt point. While we can imagine some alternative world where we all live in a communist utopia and the internet is the great free place it was in its early days, it's not so easy to build such a society. All the attempts I'm aware of either didn't scale (small, local communes) or were large-scale disasters resulting in the deaths of millions. What we…

I'm assuming parent-poster means "publicly-traded corporations with limited-liability and low friction on transfers of ownership."

However you're right that "capitalism" encompasses many potential different varieties and actors. For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#388

Post by m463 »

j3s wrote: post #315
robjwells wrote: post #4

> [This post] (and many others) have done a much better job than I could, explaining from a reader’s perspective why Fandom is bad place to host a wiki, The linked post (at j3s.sh) appears blank to me, so if others have the same problem here’s an archive link: https://archive.ph/kwt1b

oop, my bad. it got oomkilled somehow - should be back up now :3 original post is at https://j3s.sh/thought/stop-using-fandom.html

nope.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#389

Post by m463 »

fenomas wrote: post #40
tombert wrote: post #6

Fandom is one of my least favorite things now. The site ends up having more ads than the average porn or piracy website, it manages to slow down my relatively beefy laptops without even trying. I love the idea of fan wikis, but Fandom is basically the worst possible implementation of that idea.

Just a week or two ago my chrome plugins got temporarily disabled for some reason, and I didn't notice for a day or two... until I happened to check a fandom wiki. Then for about five seconds I thought I'd somehow installed All The Viruses. And ironically, I already hated fandom before I'd seen it without an ad blocker! Just for the large sidebars and ugly flyouts and whatnot. It really feels like a contender for wor…

> I'd somehow installed All The Viruses

maybe at that moment, you did.

Post reply on HN