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I wonder how much it has to do with how much of a shithole the Fandom network is. Between the godawful UX, aggressive SEO to bury competing wiki in search results, and scummy business practices that effectively prevent wiki admins from migrating to other hosts, the idea of maintaining a game wiki probably isn't all that appealing these days.
I miss Wikia...
I am forever grateful that halopedia rolled their own wiki and was spared from the fandom plague.
Another stark comparison is UESP vs. Fandom for elder scrolls lore. Fandom is absolute cancer, poor UX even with an adblocker.
UESP is such a gem
Yeah I find it completely unusable. I can't use wookiepedia anymore because it is just awful to use. Like you said, it's awful even with an ad blocker
Would you care to elaborate on what's preventing wiki admins from migrating?
Fandom ruined actual good wikis. God that site is so shit, why do people keep using it?
Because monopoly.
Shit, Mojang used to maintain their own wiki for Minecraft, but it was dropped and migrated to Fandom and now none of us can have nice things.
How is it a monopoly when mediawiki is FOSS? Lots of fan wikis use that instead.
Monopolies aren't defined by the availability of alternatives. It's based on the market share captured by a single entity. We'd need to see statistics to determine if it's a total monopoly, but I'm not aware of many other hosting platforms for game wikis. Maybe fextralife?
Fextralife is utter shit. Always giving you the most unrelated information in the longest amount of time all while being forced to watch a stream you don't care about.
I use an adblocker to remove their stupid stream embed
Yeah I think hosting is the thing that they've captured, far more than the notion of a domain-specific wiki. Of course, there's nothing stopping an aspiring wiki admin from hosting on a platform that isn't targeted at game wikis.
I was about to reply and say "nuh uh, the Minecraft wiki isn't a Fandom one", but jesus you're right.
PSA for people sick of fandom: www.antifandom.com has the same content on an ad-free UI
its a mirror of www.breezewiki.com which has a search on the home page as well as a list of other mirrors
I think we hugged it too hard
breezewiki.com is another mirror and looks to be still working
@cre0 @blanketswithsmallpox many of my video game related searches end with -fandom. Thank you for this.
I don't know if it's just anecdotal, but it feels like a lot of content is moving to Youtube. People make a 10+ min video out of what used to be a paragraph on a wiki site.
Call me an old geezer, but I can’t stand videos for about 95% of all video game guides. They are either too slow or too fast, and include 10 mins of talking for “and the hot key you are looking for is H”.
We need sponsorskip to shorten tutorial type videos
This is why I only look for the videos where the uploader is showing their screen, and then watch them at 10x speed (using the Enhancer For YouTube addon) with the sound on mute.
I've been thinking lately that a lot of people are way worse at reading comprehension than I would have guessed. Like, there's a large chunk of the population where reading is difficult and uncomfortable. Of course they prefer YouTube.
We'd rarely encounter these people on a text first medium like here.
Youtube lets creators monetize their content, wikis don't. Everything is a hustle now.
Because Fandom has ruined the interface, and most people just watch YouTube tutorials
It doesn't surprise me at all that people have become less willing to contribute to wikis, now that the likes of Fandom/Wikia and Fextralife are the dominant wiki hosts. Who wants to give away their free labour and time to profit cesspools of obnoxious advertising, awkward javascript interfaces, and web tracking?
I think what we need are independent wiki hosts. For example, have a look at https://bg3.wiki/
To help your point. Halopedia is still extremely active and will have info from new books within a week. The site has their own software and it's community run, so people still feel engaged.
I think you're entirely on the money
Terraria wiki is not a fandom site
I expect you mean terraria.wiki.gg, rather than terraria.fandom.com (which was the first result in my web search). I don't love the fact that it has a google tracker, but otherwise, it looks nice.
Looks like Pokémon has an independent (but not tracker-free) wiki, too: bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net
If you scroll to the bottom of bulbapedia, they have a "Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance" with links to other games' wikis. Though for Zelda, I always find https://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/Main_Page to be the most useful
If they're on Fandom, it's because Fandom fucking sucks to work with. It sucks to view, and it sucks to edit. So I could understand people not wanting to deal with that shit.
They're also still new and fairly large games. Unless the dev itself makes the wiki, they don't usually have much content the first year or so of a game's life.
I’m surprised you could tell, I can’t find the wiki content beneath all the ads
Was it a few years ago Fandom started buying up all these wiki websites?
Then they started with the ads and it all went to shit.
There were a bunch of games that had to move their shit off Fandom because it was a mess..
Now when you want an answer to a simple question, you have to fast track through a some rando's 5min youtube video to get the answer, where they could have put the answer in the title.
Satisfactory and Path of Exile are two games in recent memory that specifically moved their official wiki's away from Fandom,
Coffee Stain Studios seem really give an actual shit about their fans.
Fandom, previously Wikia, a long with all game journalism sites with their SEO have ruined it.
Most games switched to Discord for some reason. Even though Discord is exceptionally bad for permanent info.
Now you need to ask the question in the hopes someone on there is friendly enough to answer. And a while later if someone wants to know the same question, they have to ask it again...
Figure I'll just dump a list of non-fandom wikis I use here.
Tolkien Gateway - General Tolkien stuff
LOTRO Wiki - Lord of the Rings Online
UESP - Elder Scrolls
BG3 Wiki - Baldurs Gate 3
Halopedia - Halo
OSRS - Runescape
Wikia/fandom swallowed up the market but are also just bad at running a wiki network.
Along with all the problems that come with fan wikis. There's like two F-Zero wikia right now because the first one was just overrun by fannon and at one point some random person's OCs and fan theory. And then there's the Xenoblade wikia repeatedly making edits and then locking pages because the owners have something against the newer games being connected to the older ones, even denying thing's like weapons that are called Monados, work like Monados and even use the same arts as Shulk's Monado being "real" monados.
I'm the biggest Xenoblade geek around - what the fuck at your later part (not at you). If you mean Future Redeemed,, that is absolutely 100% tying up the entire trilogy (and also tying in Gears/Saga/X as much as Takahashi could do), and yes - there are multiple monados (A's, Alpha's). Shulks is a replica, but the other two are literally split from Ontos' original. Matthew's gauntlets are also arguably a Monado too, powered by the Pneuma core, and I would also argue that N's sword of the end is also a Monado, based on the Logos core.
I had enough with the Xenoblade community back when XB3 launched and the usual culprits who also run the wiki absolutely laughed anyone out of the room who suggested those statues in the city were of Shulk and Rex. I mean, the descriptions and look made it obvious to anyone with a brain (and FR proved yes, it was them) - but no, these things have to be spelled out in black and white and made 100% obvious apparently otherwise it can't be true. It's sad, frustrating, and goes against the entire philosophy of the series.
Reminder to get Indie Wiki Buddy to automatically be redirected to ad-free versions of fandom wikis or to be redirected to actual genuine wikis, for example, TF2 Fandom Wikis get redirected to the official TF2 Wiki.
They're all just ads
Suppose there is a federated ActivityPub based Wiki network, how would that work? Fandom is so terrible for looking up actual info with irritating video ads, especially since after they brought out their competition from Curse.
I don't think it'd work all that well to be frank. You'd wind up with dozens of pages for each subject since each instance can have their own. You could probably come up with a distinct federated solution that might work though, where the servers are federated but the content is shared. Not sure how that would look in practice though, and how you could keep instances from diverging
This is particularly painful with starfield. I know the game just came out, but the Fandom wiki is atrocious, and I haven't been able to find any others.
I think part of the problem is just that there are a lot more good games that people know about! Unfortunately one of the tradeoffs for all the riches of heaven is that it's a lot harder to cover them all.
I get that wikis cost a little time and money to host and run them, but the studios/devs should offer up a wiki on release that could be moderated by a combo of employees and/or volunteers. They’re losing the opportunity to drive community engagement and keep it all close by letting these big wiki sites it up all the competition.
It's a little money, it's a /lot/ of time. And for what, what does a company actually get by doing it themselves?
I like this idea in principle, but in practice, I suspect the same companies that often abandon games (and even whole platforms) would also discontinue their wikis. I would like information about the games I buy today to still be around when I play them again in ten or twenty years.