alt Hacker NewsHelping wikis move away from Fandom
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The Runescape wiki is simply amazing. It’s one of the most well built fit for purpose pieces of quality software+content that I have ever come across. It’s clean and crisp visually and well organized at the IA level despite being exactly the type of content problem that resists such attempts by nature. What a solid community. The software doesn't fell clunky, it’s fast and responsive and still feels modern. I can only assume that’s a testament to the quality of mediawiki. I’m glad that it’s getting the attention it deserves.
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 increase, but of course they don't take credit for the gradual decline afterwards, a decline that often enough leaves the site making the same or less money than it did before the craptastic ads.
If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
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 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.
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 the beginning of a trend.
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 are the best.
[^1]: https://publish.obsidian.md/dakota/Hobbies/Gaming/Gaming+Wik...
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?
It's hard running and managing wikis, and anyone/org/group that does so outside of the auspices of fandom or similar trash-aggregation hosts should be celebrated. Love this for weirdgloop. On a related note, shoutout to liquipedia[1], which has been a great experience for so long (a number of years I refuse to recognize as it would prove I'm old), and I have always feared the possibility of it moving to or becoming a fandom.
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.
> [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
A thing that bothers me is that Jimmy Wales, a founder of and arguably the face of Wikipedia, is also the founder and president of Fandom, Inc. (2004–present)
I respect the work of Mr. Wales immensely, and I cannot explain how he has allowed his creation to become synonymous with ad-ridden borderline unusable gaming wikis.
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.
Can wikis on weird gloop use their own domain names? I feel like that is the best way to ensure that they can leave and that the host can't keep a zombie version of the wiki that hogs Google search position.
MediaWiki is actually pretty easy to set up on a web server, speaking as someone who's now done it twice. You plop the files into htdocs, make sure PHP is set up, set up vanity URLs if you want to, and then… well, that's it. The final step is to go to the site, fill in the setup form, download the settings file it gives you and upload it. It doesn't even need an external database, it can use SQLite; if email setup is annoying, it doesn't even need that. And it's the most powerful and flexible wiki software out there: if there's something you want a wiki to do, MediaWiki can do it, but it also isn't too bloated out of the box, so you can just install plugins as and when you need them. Thoroughly recommend it.
I have frequently said to myself, "you know what Fandom needs? More ads"
If I'm looking for a specific piece of info that ends up being on a fandom wiki, it's quite a turn off.
Decided to give OSRS (Old School RuneScape) another try after more than a decade break from the game. Without their wiki, I don't think I would've continued to play; it's open constantly - incredibly easy to use, very well up to date, and just an all around wonderful resource. Above and beyond what used to exist.
Should mention the pessimistic possibility that Fandom buys WG and those wikis return under their umbrella. An example being Wowpedia forked off WoWWiki in 2010, moved to Curse's Gamepedia in 2013, which, Gamepedia, Fandom (then Wikia) bought in 2018.
edit: Seems they moved again recently to wiki.gg.
Hey, as long as they don't have those dark pattern cookie consent forms, I'm a happy camper. The EU should really have specified that accept all/decline all should be a top level choice instead of "Accept all" with the alternative being "learn more" leading to submenus for every one of the 891 "partners".
Crazy 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 Minecraft wiki moving.
They also are running a wiki for Andrew Gower's upcoming game as well.
I really hope I hear about other wikis making the move in the near future. Fandom deserves to die out.
The RS Wiki is the single website I've whitelisted in my ad blocker. And despite needing ads to cover costs - they made sure to ask the community first about adding them and what alternatives to funding might be possible. It was really a last resort and they are obsessive about making sure the ads are non-intrusive, single banner, not in primary real estate, and not harming the wiki experience. If any ads cause problems they completely pause running ads until the ad host resolves the issue. Although I'm usually signed in - so never see ads anyway as they only show for users who aren't signed in.
I 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'
It think it's been changed, but I believe the Transformers wiki on Fandom started out as a copy of the superior [TFWiki](https://tfwiki.net). TFWiki has been referenced by many official creators and Hasbro designers themselves and has proven to be a great resource. I have no idea what their infrastructure or backup plans are, but I dread the day they go down.
There is something fundamental here. It used to be the case that you could form communities around commercial entities. But nowadays it seems to be too many short term profit vultures roaming around looking for targets, to not end up selling out the community. Efficient market I guess.
Random question: do you work with the new wikis to create some kind of license that prevents Fandom from scraping future changes back into their version of the wikis? Obviously the technical modifications can't translate, but it seems like it wouldn't be that hard for them to slurp most textual/markup changes back in and make it look like their version of the wiki is still alive…
There's a browser extension that provides links to Fandom alternatives on various topics: https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy
In my opinion, the best approach to videogame wikis is what valve did with the TF2 wiki. They saw that it was a great community resource, and so they took it under their wing, gave it hosting and a subdomain, and then left it alone. The wiki maintains full editorial control, which lets it remain a useful resource
I was a user of one of the Fandom wikis this group took over. Moving the information to a better platform is fine.
What wasn't fine is how they made every single page on the existing Fandom wiki redirect to a meme page that didn't explain what was happening. This was particularly disruptive because it made every single google result for "<game name> <topic>" invalid as it redirected to this useless page. Fandom has better SEO and the replacement wiki was so new it didn't appear in google results for several weeks. It was extremely annoying.
Out of curiosity, how does weirdgloop pay for wiki hosting? The amount of traffic certainly wouldn't be low... what is stopping them from having to abandon these wikis in the future due to cost pressure?
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.
Slightly ad hoc funding (which is probably sensible, spread it around):
https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited
Some donations, some ads, and contracts (one so far) with companies that benefit.
It all looks very Wikipedia-like. I wonder if the WMF could be persuaded to throw some of their massive pile of cash in this direction, in the public interest? But then Weird Gloop would probably have to be a non-profit.
The Noita wiki moved away from Fandom to noita.wiki.gg due to ads, etc. The Fandom one still exists, of course, but has no community backing and lacks information from the newer updates of the game.
Unfortunately the Fandom wiki is still the first link when searching on DDG :-(
Weird Gloop have been doing a great job with the Old School Runescape Wiki for a while now, happy to see them extending that elsewhere.
Sadly, Fandom still has a lot of search mojo. For instance, when searching for "minecraft redstone filter bedrock" I get a link to the Fandom minecraft wiki rather than minecraft.wiki. Hopefully over time, that corrects itself.
Also, the Google search results page for that search made me pine for the good old days of Google being 10 real links…
> 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.
I've noticed how many wikis for games I look up are on fandom and, probably because of my experience with web development, I take special note of the fact that they're always at game-name.fandom.com (I'm also a bit disappointed, like when I bought Chrono Trigger on Steam and looked up why the cat wouldn't follow me). I don't think I've ever seen a wiki with their branding/style that is not also on their domain. Perhaps some exist which use their software but I've never heard of such a vendor then also demanding a new style to be used, though I guess that's possible.
Anyway, I've always doubted it to be an accident that seemingly all of their wikis are hosted on the same domain[1]. Glad to see someone doing good work about that, even if it's just incidental while they solve a different problem. Seeing the official LoL wiki on leagueoflegends.com suggests they don't intend to do the same sort of -- admittedly presumed -- widespread tracking.
Regardless, it sounds like the wiki maintainers prefer working with Weird Gloop rather than Fandom and I don't otherwise have a lot of sympathy for Fandom. I have no specific bone to pick with them but I also can't help but feel glad for people who are finding other wiki software vendors.
(It's also kind of interesting to see the Minecraft wiki at minecraft.wiki instead of something like wiki.minecraft.com. I guess it's a community project, just noting that Microsoft/Mojang don't seem interested in maintaining it(?). Maybe the community prefers it that way and they're respecting that.)
1: Turns out it definitely is not an accident: https://support.fandom.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021258554-I-...
> We can only change the first part of your wiki's URL (i.e. example.fandom.com) - we do not support wikis outside of fandom.com.
I'm happy that people are creating alternatives, but personally I never had a problem with Fandom.
Yes, they will monetize the content, but they'll also manage it because it makes them money. Content on fandom is probably going to still be available 10 years later. It's the same with DeviantArt, it's worse now than it has ever been, but artwork uploaded 10 years ago is still available, and it will probably still be available 10 years later. You could also say this about Youtube, Google, and many other platforms.
I hope the emerging alternatives prove to be successful, but so far I still don't see a reliable alternative for Youtube, Google, or DeviantArt (or even Twitter, Reddit, etc.). In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a replacement win in the long run. Maybe I'm just too young.
The Oldschool Runescape and Guild Wars wikis are still some of the best wikis I've experienced. Both of them are even implemented into the game. In GW1&2 you can just type /wiki <insert subject> and it'll open a browser tab to the wikipage.
In OSRS there's a button next to the minimap that you click on first and then on the subject and it opens the wikipage for it.
I wish Warframe would move to a osrswiki model. A theorycraft heavy game almost requires a good, performant wiki.
Somewhat recently Wowpedia moved away from fandom to wiki.gg, dunno yet if it'll be another fandom, we'll see.
Would be cool to know what extensions you’re using on MediaWiki and how you’ve set it up to maximize performance. These wikis seem really quick to respond.
Thank god. Fandom is the most unusable website I have ever landed on.
Hoping OP will still see this on a 9 day old post. I just had time to read this.
How do I know who owns/controls a wiki on Fandom? Or is that not the right question?
> 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.
By the way, you can replace the fandom in the url with breezewiki and get a much more pleasant experience without ads. it's not that much of a difference on desktop, and the layout might debatably be uglier, but it's a godsend on mobile where the search bar doesn't even work half the time for me.
With so many communities interacting on Discord, and given that platform's ephemeral nature, I'd recommend having a module that can summarize highlighted chats and import or append them into the wiki as a stub that needs expansion.
Most of the updates I've made on Fandom were of this nature.
Path of Exile was so keen to host the community Wiki[0] back in the days because Fandom just sucks.
I love when somebody disrupts a hidden market like that. Fandom had terrible UXs for years, but nobody seemed to care enough to make an alternative. I'd assume most users are not engineers/founders, so the opportunity was hidden for a while.
In hindsight it makes total sense.
I've always wished that more games would self-host a wiki. Gamers love wikis with detailed data about the game, and I hate it when I go to play a game which has poor wiki coverage. This can happen with small titles that don't have a big enough player base, titles where the player base didn't "align" on one wiki, or with games where the information is inconsistent across game versions/platforms (Don't Starve is notorious for this). But the biggest issue is competing, hard-to-use, user-unfriendly wikis - and this would be solved if more game studios were willing to self-host a wiki.
A huge congrats to the Weird Gloop team on this, and to the League of Legends community for what's certain to be a huge bump to the availability of high-quality information and community space.
As others have pointed out, the RuneScape Wiki (where Weird Gloop started out) is probably the highest quality gaming wiki on the internet. Not only is its information itself up-to-date and accurate, but it has countless custom features and interactive tools that elevate it from a crowdsourced knowledgebase to a sort of data and analytics hub for the game.
Anyway, this really is terrific news and any wiki that chooses to partner with Weird Gloop is certainly in the best of hands.
The same thing is happening to older forums, if you browse without an ad blocker you get ads that try to trigger every emotion all at once, all of them larger than the actual content.
Three cheers for weird gloop, JES, and everyone else fighting the good fight.
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.
Not sure how expensive this is to offer, but I would love if more wikis were encouraged to offer a bulk export option. Monthly db dumps or similar. I am sure many sites get wasteful spider traffic which could be avoided if the structured content were available. Maybe host them on Internet archive the way stack overflow did.
Also, if the exports were significantly better documented that Wikipedia”s. I could not make heads or tails of the hundreds of options Wikipedia presents, all seemingly without any unifying resource describing the differences.
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".
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 with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective.
If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years).
[1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.