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Miraheze to shut down

meta.miraheze.org

31–40 of 89 posts

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#31
post #16

> ...long term sustainability problems, financial situation... Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance says they have more money right now than they had at the start of the year and twice as much as they had the same time last year. > Owen and Alexander are fully committed to seeing the sustained growth of Miraheze > Compared to where we were before 2019, Miraheze is in a much better financial position,…

My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is this: - Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge - Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide - The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits - There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of voluntee…

One job! This sounds like an adversarial attack against those who would host wikis on their site.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#32
post #20

Have all the fan wikis now consolidated under the horrible ad-ridden Fandom brand wikis now?

Not all. There are still some independent holdouts like https://yugipedia.com/ and some decent wiki hosts like https://wiki.gg/ Gamepedia being folded into Fandom is still a massive shame though. From gold to septic waste...

Wiki.gg was setup by the folks that used to run gamepedia, fwiw.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#33
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate how in search results Fandom is always above the better wiki about the same topic, that are independent or on better wiki farms like Miraheze. Fandom's SEO is brutal. They've slowly crippled the website and fucked over the regular users, but that doesn't affect them does it? Pinned at the top of Google there are always more clueless losers cascading in, they can't lose.

Worse yet: Fandom has a policy of not deleting inactive wikis, even if the community has deliberately abandoned them to move elsewhere, and will treat any attempt to advertise that another wiki has been created as vandalism and will block users (even wiki admins!) who attempt to do so. This means that, if a community does decide to move their wiki off of Fandom, they have an uphill battle to "beat" their old wiki in…

Even worse, Google actively penalises wikis that choose to fork from Fandom.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#34
post #16

> ...long term sustainability problems, financial situation... Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance says they have more money right now than they had at the start of the year and twice as much as they had the same time last year. > Owen and Alexander are fully committed to seeing the sustained growth of Miraheze > Compared to where we were before 2019, Miraheze is in a much better financial position,…

My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is this: - Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge - Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide - The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits - There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of voluntee…

My wiki also got affected by the harddrive. They send out a message with everything they knew pretty much immediately even to people not affected by the error and continued to update as they learned more. Not sure why you seem to think it took "weeks". For a volunteer-run service they've actually been quite on top of it and compassionate in my experience

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#35
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some further context at https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Stateme... -- specifically: > To clarify a bit on the reason behind this choice, the technical team behind Miraheze is currently 3 people (5 if you include two unprocessed resignations). Two of those three people (myself include) are currently burned out on the project and wish to step away. There's also some discussion of possibly h…

Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...

I had figured it was not exactly technical burnout in running Mediawiki installs but regulatory burnout in following Euro GDPR/cookie banner/bullshit-of-the-now requirements. Some of them are easy but the rest phase in once you reach a certain scale of users (which it sounds like they probably have).

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#36
post #8
post #6

This is the first time I'm hearing about this platform. Should I have been aware of it before?

Doesn't look like anything special, just free mediawiki hosting, powered by donations

media wiki's a particularly complicated thing to host and I don't think there's anything else quite like MiraHeze currently. It's been used by everything from video game wikis to casual conlangers to even some state governments so I'd say it's a pretty big deal

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#37
post #21

Have all the fan wikis now consolidated under the horrible ad-ridden Fandom brand wikis now?

I hate how in search results Fandom is always above the better wiki about the same topic, that are independent or on better wiki farms like Miraheze. Fandom's SEO is brutal. They've slowly crippled the website and fucked over the regular users, but that doesn't affect them does it? Pinned at the top of Google there are always more clueless losers cascading in, they can't lose.

[deleted]

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#38
post #6

This is the first time I'm hearing about this platform. Should I have been aware of it before?

They are a free wiki host run by a UK non-profit, pretty much the only free wiki host that has no ads whatsoever and also offers a reasonable selection of Mediawiki extensions. There are thousands, but some examples of popular wikis hosted on Miraheze:

- NATO Cyberlaw Toolkit - https://cyberlaw.ccdcoe.org/wiki/Main_Page (Yes, an intergovernmental military alliance with infinite money is using a free wiki host)

- Loathsome Characters Wiki - https://loathsomecharacters.miraheze.org

- A ton of amateur wikis that migrated from Fandom (formerly Wikia) after a series of poor decisions by Fandom, such as the Polandball Wiki: https://www.polandballwiki.com/

- MOGAI Wiki, a continuation of some of the gender and sexual identities wikis from Fandom. There was a huge debacle where fandom tried to forcibly merge various superficially similar wiki communities, which caused a lot of chaos for LGBT wikis due to disagreement over xenogenders. https://mogai.miraheze.org/wiki/MOGAI_Wiki

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#39
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...

I had figured it was not exactly technical burnout in running Mediawiki installs but regulatory burnout in following Euro GDPR/cookie banner/bullshit-of-the-now requirements. Some of them are easy but the rest phase in once you reach a certain scale of users (which it sounds like they probably have).

It clearly says technical burnout. Why do you have to blame GDPR? If anything it was the best thing to happen to the open internet

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#40
post #2

This is a bummer. Miraheze is/was a wiki farm that provided a free Mediawiki-based wiki to pretty much anyone who was able to articulate a reason and fill out a request to be given one. This was invaluable in an age where the term "wiki" has become so debased that "a bunch of Markdown files in a GitHub repo" is, against all good taste and reason, considered a wiki. Miraheze was supported by donations, which is almost…

Another comment mentions that a lot of the volunteers on this projects have moved on to a similar project called WikiTide, and that's the "recent events" mentioned in the article. https://meta.wikitide.com/wiki/WikiTide does seem like they offer a similar thing (though, of course, Lindy's law applies regarding its reliability/viability).
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