Helping wikis move away from Fandom • Hacker News Board

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#131

Post by mossTechnician » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:05 PM UTC

ryukoposting wrote: post #87

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 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.

Wikia is a great example of enshittification - provide great value to users, then take it away from users and hand it to other businesses (eg advertisers), then take it away from businesses too.

Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#132

Post by yifanl » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

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 The data on it is of course now very outdated and causes confusion for new players.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?

Usually attempts to advertise migration efforts on high visibility wikis away from Fandom will be deleted by Fandom staff.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#133

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:07 PM UTC

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #12

Google giving Fandom powerful rankings bothers me too, since their intrusive ads clearly go against Google ranking factors. Still, I'm glad for some competition. However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?

[deleted]

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#134

Post by Dwedit » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:07 PM UTC

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.

Fandom is perfectly usable with adblockers and the "Cleaner Fandom" userscript. But only with those extensions!

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#135

Post by jezzamon » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:08 PM UTC

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…

A data moat of user provided wiki contents? The thing that this article is advocating for the users themselves to own over the hosting site??

Somehow I don't think that is the solution.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#136

Post by otterpro » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:08 PM UTC

The only wiki in Fandom I actually go to is the Vim Tips Wiki (https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki). But how did Vim get in a Fandom in the first place? I hate going to Vim Wiki, even though they have good tips not found anywhere, due to all the things that were mentioned in the article. 50-70% of screen real-estate is filled with ads or distractions. I hope that vim will get its own wiki instead.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#137

Post by languagehacker » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:09 PM UTC

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...

Sure, but think about something as low stakes as, "Does such-and-such a character from my favorite TV show have any siblings" vs. "Is it safe to consume XYZ"

Even with the great structured and semi-structured data that Wikis can provide with this like infoboxes and other sort of templates, there were definitely limitations to the tech nearly ten years ago. My experience back then is one of the reasons I'm super skeptical of the long-term value of the AI / LLM trend we're going through right now.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#138

Post by languagehacker » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:12 PM UTC

jezzamon wrote: post #135

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…

A data moat of user provided wiki contents? The thing that this article is advocating for the users themselves to own over the hosting site?? Somehow I don't think that is the solution.

The licensing on that stuff is complicated, and I haven't looked at it in a while. It does allow you to take your toys and leave, but for those that don't, it would be simple enough to prevent ethical AI scrapers from extracting that content. That's all I mean by data moat in this context.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#139

Post by marxisttemp » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:12 PM UTC

First thing I thought of seeing the title was the wonderful Old School RuneScape wiki! Whenever I have to use a Fandom wiki I think longingly of the OSRS wiki. I would love if the GTA wiki migrated to you.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#140

Post by theamk » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:13 PM UTC

Dwedit wrote: post #129

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…

Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page .

Cloudflare dropped captchas back in 2022 [0], now it's just a checkbox that you check and it lets you it (or does not).

And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this:

I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare;

but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas where you click on picture of hydrants, I hate this even more and think: move to Cloudflare already, so I can stop doing this nonsense!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007370