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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#431

Post by bawolff »

noen wrote: post #424
bawolff wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft did open source a bunch of their mediawiki extensions. https://github.com/microsoft/mediawiki-extensions Last i heard though they were moving off it.

Nice!! Made my day. Not sure how they can move off of it, partly because there’s no alternative that has a fraction of the capability

The rumour i heard is they were making their own custom thing.

There was some rumours that they were unhappy about mediawiki's response to patches they submitted (they made a bunch around accessibility). However i looked through their patches at one point when this rumour started flying around and it looked like most were merged. Those that weren't generally had code review comments with questions or pointing out mistakes which were never replied to. I sort of suspect the patch thing was some sort of internal excuse because the team involved wanted to make their own thing.

Regardless, im really happy they decided to open source their extensions and it was nice to see that they put in effort to upstream core patches.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#432

Post by Svip »

stavros wrote: post #376
Svip wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place, because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps the spam down, yes, but also new users away. Note: The reason I…

What kind of costs are associated with something like this, and what sort of visitors are you getting? I'm wondering what kind of infrastructure you need.

Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours.

Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now.

The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.

Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#433

Post by ChadNauseam »

basicallybones wrote: post #326
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…

This is not totally accurate. For reference, here is the Wikipedia entry for Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919) (copy and pasted at bottom). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co . In fact, the relatively new concept of a "public benefit corporation" is (at least in part) an effort to allow for-profit entities to pursue goals other than shareholder enrichment. However, some have criticized public benefit c…

This doesn't contradict what I said. In fact it supports it. I said that the owners of the company are the ones who determine what it does. The shareholders are the owners. If the owners of the company want it to do a certain thing, and the directors do a certain thing, and it does that thing, no court is going to stop them. There is a rule that says that shareholders aren't allowed to try to screw over other shareholders, but I don't think "The other shareholders decided to pursue the public benefit rather than maximum profit" would quality.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#434

Post by forgotpwd16 »

Washuu wrote: post #312
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #177

Should mention the pessimistic possibility that Fandom buys WG and those wikis return under their umbrella. An example being Wowpedia forked off WoWWiki in 2010, moved to Curse's Gamepedia in 2013, which, Gamepedia, Fandom (then Wikia) bought in 2018. edit: Seems they moved again recently to wiki.gg.

The reason behind Fandom buying Gamepedia/Curse is both a blessing and a curse(HAH!) that would require a specific set of circumstances to happen again.[1] Basically during 2018 Curse's owners, Twitch and Amazon, wanted more head count for Twitch and to cut out anything that was not part of Twitch's main mission. The decision at the time from the Twitch CEO was to completely shut down Curse and fire everyone by the e…

Ok, that adds a new perspective to what appeared happened (basically Wikia simply buying off a competitor).

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#435

Post by Pikamander2 »

cubefox wrote: post #109
xnorswap wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, despite the poewiki migration being a fairly long time ago now, the fandom wiki still ranks frustratingly highly. The data on it is of course now very outdated and causes confusion for new players. I wonder how much the effect of lots of people having a redirect extension has. If google sees people click on the fandom result and not come back, do they treat it as a good result when in reality people are redirect…

Why can't they replace the old pages with a link to the new page? Or otherwise remove the contents from the old site?

I tried adding some helpful links to the new Runescape wiki back when the split happened, and within a few hours Fandom had permabanned my decade-old account across their entire network.

Not a huge loss, although it still feels like a bitter ending after I spent years sprucing up a bunch of their wikis.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#436

Post by onei »

zellyn wrote: post #172

Random question: do you work with the new wikis to create some kind of license that prevents Fandom from scraping future changes back into their version of the wikis? Obviously the technical modifications can't translate, but it seems like it wouldn't be that hard for them to slurp most textual/markup changes back in and make it look like their version of the wiki is still alive…

When RuneScape and Old School RuneScape Wikis forked, the license was changed from CC-By-SA to CC-BY-SA-NC. As a result, all new changes come under the new license. To copy changes back to Fandom, they'd need to update their license to match and as I understand it so forfeit some of their ability to use so much advertising. I'm not sure if that license update was also applied to Minecraft or LoL, but it's a possibility.

The only use of CC-BY-SA-NC on Fandom I can recall is Memory Alpha (Star Trek Wiki) which was acquired with that license. There were some extra hoops to jump through to be able to advertise there - I think they granted themselves the ability to do so through Terms of Use that override the license.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#437

Post by bigstrat2003 »

sph wrote: post #265
marxisttemp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What has objectivism got to do with anarchism? I take offence at being put in the same pile as Rand fanatics.

Also, objectivism isn't libertarianism.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#438

Post by pjc50 »

diggan wrote: post #144
pjc50 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!

> Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option. Otherwise, if you like the experience of not paying per GB/TB, go for a dedicated server with unmetered connection that has the same price every month, regardless.

> If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option.

The free plan is a lot bigger than you think.

> dedicated server with unmetered connection

And where have you found one of those with reasonable pricing?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#439

Post by RheingoldRiver »

ykonstant wrote: post #249
paranoidxprod wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tested a bunch and it seems like `path of exile [skill/currency]` usually ranks the Fandom higher while `poe [skill/currency]` ranks the new wiki higher which is why I never noticed (I actually never noticed because I block the PoE Fandom and pin the new wiki on Kagi)

That's good info.

You may also want to install: https://getindie.wiki/

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#440

Post by RheingoldRiver »

starkparker wrote: post #334
bawolff wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also don't forget that any large gaming wiki will want significant amounts of either Cargo, Semantic MediaWiki, or (god forbid) DPL
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