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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#101

Post by duxup »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #53
duxup wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even accurate at times. I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it. I've seen several that have chunks of straight wrong information. Usually it's stuff where the fan seems to have picked up on something implied in a story, but missed where it is clearly stated that isn't the case ... but then they go and write on fandom and make lots of assumptions from there and fill in other gaps with guesses…

> I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it. I've seen several that have chunks of straight wrong information. It's a not-so-open secret that a lot of wikia wikis are not only vandalised but encouraged to be vandalised as to make people move off them.

I can understand the urge and frustration level.

Just wish there was a more centralized / good alternative to promote rather than just wrecking fandom.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#102

Post by delecti »

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.

Every page has a live chat and video stream. The content tends to be better, but it's not mechanically much better than Fandom.

It also highlights an important difference between why wikis can be useful. If I want information about Elden Ring as a game, Fextralife is pretty good (with some ublock filters to kill the stupid chat), but it does that at the expense of information about Elden Ring as a fictional world. That's not usually why I'm looking up Elden Ring information, but it sometimes is.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#103

Post by jchw »

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…

In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately obvious:

- For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out.

- You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation.

- Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages.

Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on.

The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs.

If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money.

One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic...

At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#104

Post by sph »

duxup wrote: post #63

These are hosted by weirdgloop.org ... but as far as I can tell without a common known good domain it's hard to know if you're looking at a "good" wiki or "bad".

I mean.. you can use your eyes to tell if it's a good wiki or not.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#105

Post by jabroni_salad »

duxup wrote: post #63

These are hosted by weirdgloop.org ... but as far as I can tell without a common known good domain it's hard to know if you're looking at a "good" wiki or "bad".

There is a browser extension called Indie Wiki Buddy that keeps track of who the best wiki for each game is. And for the ones that do insist on using fandom, it can redirect to breezewiki which is a lite and respectful rehoster.

https://getindie.wiki/

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#107

Post by maverwa »

duxup wrote: post #63

These are hosted by weirdgloop.org ... but as far as I can tell without a common known good domain it's hard to know if you're looking at a "good" wiki or "bad".

I'd say if you cannot tell what its hosted at, its "good". If it shouts "fandom" in your face, its "bad". Easy!

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#108

Post by card_zero »

teddyh wrote: post #76
tombert wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ublock now too, but it's this really annoying feedback loop; people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers, and making the website worse and more likely for them to install an ad blocker etc... I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.

> people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few , and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.

Some sites have a message like "hey, we can't serve you ads, you must be using an ad blocker, stop that and absorb the advertising as is your duty because we need the money". But maybe that's just desperation and they aren't losing much to ad blockers anyway.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#109

Post by cubefox »

xnorswap wrote: post #52
jdoss wrote: post #42

I play a lot of Path of Exile and one of the best quality of life improvements I did this summer was adding the Fandom Path of Exile wiki URL to my Kagi deny list so it never shows up in search. The official one that is maintained and kept up to date by the game developer poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki was always third or forth on my searches.

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?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#110

Post by sph »

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…

I loved the Dark Souls wikidot. Sad to see the Elden Ring "official" wiki is the Fextralife one.
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