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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#321

Post by bawolff »

baud147258 wrote: post #97
dcchambers wrote: post #72

I love this post. I also LOVE wikis. I have railed against Fandom for years and I have often shared my view on this in the past[^1]. It's an absolute blight on so many beloved game communities at this point. I like this approach much more than the games that have decided to move to another managed/hosted service like https://wiki.gg - which has a very real change of becoming the "next" Fandom. Truly independent wikis…

I skimmed the post linked at [^1], but I have a doubt about that: > Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia Are you sure about this? Since Fandom got acquired by private equity in 2018, I don't think Wikipedia has any stake in Fandom anymore

They never had a stake at any point.

The connection is that 2 of the main people involved originally (jimmy & angela) had a lot of ties to wikimedia, but they were doing wikicities/wikia/fandom as their own thing, not as part of wikimedia.

Also long ago there was some minor connections. They briefly shared an office like 15 years ago i think, and they tried to jointly develop a wysiwyg editor back in like 2012 (wikimedia did most of the work i think, but wikia leant a few devs to the project at one point) which eventually became the mediawiki visual editor.

Anyways totally separare orgs.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#322

Post by bakugo »

> For starters: on average, moving away from Fandom doubles the number of people editing

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who actively avoids contributing to Fandom wikis because it's effectively doing unpaid labor for a corporation that only cares about making as much money as possible off of said unpaid labor.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#323

Post by babypuncher »

Svip wrote: post #142
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 was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years. Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular…

The Infosphere has always been one of the best fan wikis out there, thank you for your hard work (and for not selling out to Fandom)

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#324

Post by xahrepap »

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…

I’ve wondered about this wrt public transportation. They keep raising prices, making it less affordable for people. Eventually basically no one is riding, so they … raise prices.

It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#325

Post by sushid »

languagehacker wrote: post #137
rideontime wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 skept…

Aren't those types of prompts the MOST likely to generate hallucinations?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#326

Post by basicallybones »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #263
robotnikman wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it is a private company though, meaning they are are required to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors. They have much more control over where the company goes and how it operates.

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 corporations as being entities that simply strengthen executive control at the expense of shareholders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

About Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.:

Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich 459; 170 NW 668 (1919),[1] is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism.[2][3] At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule, leaving Ford an extremely wide latitude about how to run the company.[citation needed]

The general legal position today (except in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled and where shareholder primacy is still upheld[4][5]) is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive.[citation needed] Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#327

Post by dudeinhawaii »

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.

On the Steam platform for instance there is an option (perhaps developer supported) to stay on a certain version of a game. For instance, in the game Mount and Blade: Bannerlord, players notoriously stay 2, 3, or even 10 versions behind in order to maintain compatibility with specific mods or sets of mods (10s or 100s of mods). Eventually, enough of the modders move to the next or latest version and the players gradually move with them.

Games with "always on" or auto-updaters avoid this.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#328

Post by entrox »

ykonstant wrote: post #49
paranoidxprod wrote: post #45

A few years ago, Path of Exile migrated from the fandom to a new site. GGG (Path of Exile's company) even decided to host the new wiki on their servers ( https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3292958 )! At this point, the new wiki ranks higher then the old one, but for a time it was an issue. Interesting to see more cases of games wikis leaving Fandom with how horrible the site is, and hopefully this is just…

Fandom PoE still pollutes the top of Google searches :(

Consider switching to Kagi with its feature to personalize your results by biasing certain domains.

I've configured it to lower results from *.fandom.com and am really happy about it.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#329

Post by Sebguer »

sushid wrote: post #325
languagehacker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 skept…

Aren't those types of prompts the MOST likely to generate hallucinations?

Not in the contexts that the author is talking about, when you have the canonical answers in your data set and know roughly where to look for them.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#330

Post by EcommerceFlow »

starkparker wrote: post #268
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?

> However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running? Yes, per this post: > I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host. ... > If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come s…

Super confusing as to why not? How else would they achieve their goal.
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