Zelda Wiki Leaves Fandom | Hacker News Reader

Zelda Wiki Leaves Fandom

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42 pointsmkr-hn24 comments

Hopefully this will encourage other Fandom sites to do the same. It's absolutely mind-boggling that the current Fandom pages auto-load a Twitch stream by default, and replace the background with pointless high-res assets. Mix in the weird social media aspects and shitty business model... it's not a good working relationship.

If these Wiki sites want to redeem themselves, they should lean into the "clickhole" effect that Wikipedia tends to foster. A link-map (like Obsidian or Logseq) would be an actually useful UI addition. Maybe a sidebar would also be nice for navigating grouped articles.

The Path of Exile and Oldschool RuneScape wikis have gone through this same transition recently. I think this is a broader movement as a reaction to fandom’s business practices

It's been going on for maybe a decade. I remember the old Tekkit minecraft modpack got somewhat around it by declaring that the Wikia wiki would henceforth be for the classic version of the modpack, and not for newer versions.

People have been warning for years what a roach motel wikia/fandom is. But they zealously censor that discontent from wikia/fandom itself, so community after community has to learn it for themselves.

There is a fandom frontend https://breezewiki.com/ just for this ad-spam.

It is included in the Libredirect extension by default https://codeberg.org/LibRedirect/libredirect

Several years ago the Touhou wiki left Fandom/Wikia for their own hosting. The Wikia admins responded by seizing control of the old wiki, removing any redirects or references to the new location, and banning the old admins.

The community largely followed to the new domain, leaving the Wikia version in a sort of dormant state filled with spam and weird "original fan-creation" pages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/44prw7/what_went_wr...

https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Talk:Touhou_Wiki/Archive_3#Wa...

Yes, this has been a complaint against Wikia/Fandom from the start.

The accusation was that Jimmy Wales favoured the deletionist faction on Wikipedia in order to push as much content as he could get away with over to Wikia, where he could monetize it. Once a wiki had been created there, it would be very hard for a different wiki to compete, since Wikipedia lent a huge part of its SEO juice to them.

Wikia/Fandom regularly takes over wikis that try to migrate off the site and scrub the attempt. The biggest recently was the Terraria wiki. The fandom wiki still outranks the official in Google.

It took a couple years for the current Touhou Wiki to gain traction over its former Wikia site. I want to say this coincided with Google changing PageRank to give less weight to large numbers of links from sites in the same second-level domain.

I was temporary host after the move. We had IPs from Wikia's office network vandalizing pages afterward. They literally paid people to vandalize us because we dared detract from Lord Jimbo's holy ad revenue.

I'm happy to see this, and hopeful that more wikis will follow suit. Things like the Minecraft Wiki, Wookiepedia, etc would be much better as self hosted sites rather than Fandom ones, and probably run significantly better too.

But it makes me realise that we really need to support hobbyist/fan run services as much as possible if we wanted self hosting to be rewarded. Is there an extension or something that tries to block sites owned by large companies (whether they be Wikia, Alphabet, Meta, etc)?

I wish them well, they have a hard road ahead of them. Breaking free from the walled gardens comes at a high cost to user retention. After all, those dark patterns that companies use to capture eyeballs actually do work. I have no doubt that Fandom will scrap together their own Zelda Wiki to compete with the newly-independent site.

Then again, this is part of the eternal dance between walled gardens and the distributed internet. We went from self-hosted platforms like wikis and forums, to centralized hosts like Facebook Groups and Fandom. Centralization is appealing at first, because all of that Venture Capital money leads to slick modern UIs, tons of traffic, and ad revenue. But eventually the platform starts to become greedy, wasteful, and starts putting dark patterns ahead of the user's interest. Then it's time to leave.

Do they need "user retention"?

The primary purpose of most gaming wikis is to serve as a useful resource to players of the game they're about. Having web traffic is a side effect, not a goal. Users return to the site because they find it useful, not because the web site is "sticky".

Nobody wants to work on something that nobody uses.

I'm optimistic about them competing, since the other wikis they're affiliated with (the NIWA ones) are some of the biggest gaming wikis on the internet, and have thoroughly trounced their Wikia counterparts in terms of SEO and marketing. Very few people use the Mario, Pokemon and Smash Bros wikis on Fandom compared to the independent ones (Mario Wiki, Bulbapedia and Smash Wiki), and their interwiki links have already been updated to reflect the new domain.

Assuming the fans keep linking to the new one, the Fandom one should get buried as a result.

Wow, it looks like they even started a coalition with other wikis.

https://zeldapedia.wiki/wiki/Community:Nintendo_Independent_...

I wonder how this group will fare in 10 years.

According to the page linked, it was started 12 years ago. So it'll probably survive into the future.

A very incomplete list of wikis which have tried to leave wikia/fandom:

http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forked_wikis

Having worked on wikis that have made this same move before, good choice and good luck.

Cool but I wonder about how it’s setup. Who’s paying for hosting? Who’s going to answer when Nintendo comes in with copyright claims or when someone starts drama?

Because drama wasn't took care of in online communities before Fandom? Also, copyright claims do not change if you host in a walled garden.

What changes is someone else takes the responsibility. If all goes south, Nintendo can sue for damages and claim gigantic amounts of money. It’s difficult to deal with that responsibility using a community that is focused on writing stories about magical princesses.

Nintendo or Japanese companies generally don’t do that. There is a huge market (doujinshi) of selling fan-made manga for decades and it is generally seen as a tradition.

While true, Nintendo in particular is known to be particularly bad with this topic unfortunately, to the point of demanding that people who host Lets Plays on Youtube to take their videos down.

I know of many wikis that left wikia… sorry, fandom, and a decade later fandom still beats them in seo despite sucking so much more.

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