What are people's thoughts on putting wikis on web3 infrastructure
Helping wikis move away from Fandom
71–80 of 503 posts
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#72I 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 are the best.
[^1]: https://publish.obsidian.md/dakota/Hobbies/Gaming/Gaming+Wik...
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#73As 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…
> with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective. sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?
If you can run your application on Cloudflare Pages / Workers with Cloudflare's storage/DB things, it really gets dirt cheap (if not free) and very fast. And even without that, Cloudflare's caching CDN is very good, very cheap and very easy.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#74Former 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 to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#75Crazy seeing a weird gloop post in the morning on HN. Cook is very passionate about wikis - as is the rest of the team - and the RS wiki has long been regarded as one of the best gaming wikis on the internet; no contest. If you run a wiki - talk to Weird Gloop. The blog isn't bullshit and they genuinely want to help. I think it's awesome that they're helping more wikis move away from Fandom after the success of the M…
If they're non-tracking ads (related to the content of the wiki, instead of the content of the visitor), I could almost like them.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
laughs in ublock origin
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.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#77Fextralife 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, everywhere.
The initial Dark Souls wikidot was excellent. Fextralife bullied and threatened them into closing down. At this point, people don't move on because of habit, but the quality for the Elden Ring wiki is dramatically bad. Information is outdated, poorly maintained, actual fixes are being reverted by their own, paid editors, other wikis are suspiciously often the target of attacks and deleted content.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#78> [This post] (and many others) have done a much better job than I could, explaining from a reader’s perspective why Fandom is bad place to host a wiki, The linked post (at j3s.sh) appears blank to me, so if others have the same problem here’s an archive link: https://archive.ph/kwt1b
Yeah, the site is down (502 status)
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#79> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki.
It’s very useful, however, to have a place where that’s possible, even if that’s currently Fandom. Many wikis wouldn’t exist without that non-barrier to entry. Those that gain traction can then decide to move elsewhere.
Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom
#80I found Wikia a great product name which evoked the feeling 'this topic may be too obscure for Wikipedia, but here you can make an entire Wiki about it!', and I never understood why it was changed to 'Fandom'