Minecraft Wiki considers move away from Fandom to new platform | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft Wiki considers move away from Fandom to new platform

wikis.world

35 pointsKye25 comments

One issue with "moving" from Fandom is that Fandom sometimes refuses to shut down the old wiki.

The old fandom wiki languishes unmaintained with outdated info, but it still gets most of the traffic because of Fandom's SEO.

It would be best for the Minecraft wiki maintainers to keep this a secret for as long as possible...

Do local administrators have any clout insofar as deleting pages and content, or do meta-admins override them in order to keep the zombie going? You'd think that if Minecraft Wiki admins arrived at a consensus, they would be empowered to make sure the content goes away.

Fandom's entire business model is to absolutely demolish SEO rankings on any other wiki and display sometimes extremely obnoxious ads in the pages, having had a lot of people contribute to wikis on it and increasingly absorbed smaller wiki hosting providers and not done such invasive things until they had eaten the world, and not letting any wiki local admins override it.

So yes, they will absolutely forcibly keep things open and keep giggling at winning the SEO game even if people decide to migrate off because they hate what's being done.

I think a lot of the reason people hate it is that they often act like they don't need to have any discussion with anyone before making unilateral changes like renaming a wiki's URL because they think it will SEO optimize better, or the recent controversy where McDonalds went to them and said "we would like to hand you a sack of money to override this article for a while for an ad campaign" and Fandom said "ooh, money" and did it.

Fandom is actually one of the main reasons I switched to Kagi as my primary search engine. Being able to manually down rank or even ban some of Fandom's domains from my search results has resulted in a dramatic quality improvement, something I'm very willing to pay for.

I honestly find it shocking that Google allows Fandom to get away with it's shenanigans all considered. For casual searches, community wikis are the primary repositories for quality results, yet they seemingly put very little effort into actually ensuring they present the correct one.

I'm positive they do a certain degree of curation to search results for News reporting, to fight "misinformation". Why not do this for community wikis as well? It certainly wouldn't require the same level of effort as news, and just changing the rankings of a single domain would have a huge impact to an entire category of searches.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Google cares more about influencing their users than it cares about returning quality search results these days.

You can write ublock rules to block domains from search engine results. Several public lists already exist for this purpose. The pattern is simple should you want to add your own.

Fandom doesn't allow you to delete content, if you fork away from them they will still keep the old unmanaged wiki up (which sucks for SEO). They also don't allow you to advertise the fork much.

Here's their forking policy - https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy

> do meta-admins override them in order to keep the zombie going

That is precisely what happens.

See, for instance, Runescape's move: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia

Note that the old Fandom runescape wiki is still live. But the move to runescape.wiki was "successful" because it now sits above Fandom in Google search results.

Other splits are not so successful... Even really old ones like UESP, which predate Wikia.

Isn't it possible to add a disclaimer?

No, because Fandom would revert the disclaimer.

For anyone using this or other wikis still hosted at Fandom, there’s an excellent lightweight front end called Breezewiki with multiple public instances you can use. My favorite is at antifandom.com, which is a short hop from any fandom.com link you find yourself on.

https://breezewiki.com/

Also check out Indie Wiki Buddy, a browser extension I maintain for Chrome+Firefox. It can automatically redirect you from Fandom to BreezeWiki mirrors, and will also redirect you to an independent wiki when one is available.

https://getindie.wiki/

The Runescape and Oldschool Runescape wikis forked away from Fandom to become independent 5 years ago and they're considered one of the best video game wikis nowadays, and loved by the community. They did have support from Jagex with funding though which Mojang/Microsoft may not be open to, which makes fully independent harder.

I consider the Guild Wars wikis some of the best in the industry. The developer provides the platform, the community the content.

After over 15 years I'm always surprised how good we have it when I'm looking for facts about other games.

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages is another great example. It looks the same as it did 10 years ago. Not sure how they are funded though.

https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/UESPWiki:About

They should move to wiki.gg - was started for the same reason; fandom buying up previously good independent wiki hosts and turning it into an ad riddled hellhole.

That's one of the possibilities discussed over on the Fandom page.

They should just self host so they are not dependent on anyone else's platform. Microsoft is worth 2.5 trillion dollars. I am sure they can spare a few pennies to toss at a server running mediawiki.

wiki.gg is currently an excellent host, but it's still ultimately a farm owned by Freedom Games. The day will come where it'll need to give a return on investment (i.e. more ads). And it's also possible that one day, Fandom (or another large, corporate entity) will acquire it just as they did Gamepedia. Self-hosting, or using one of the smaller hosts described as "semi-independent", is the way to go to maintain self-control and not be tied to larger for-profit companies.

Now check where the two cofounders of Freedom Games worked before they cofounded the company.

fandom is infested with overbearing ads and dark patterns, and was the culprit of random cpu rage often enough that I made it a habit never to leave it open in a tab. Anything else is bound to be better

Yeah, that whole survey thing they force you to do seems suspicious

History of the wiki

https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft_Wiki:History

For how amazing Wikipedia + the Wikimedia Foundation is, it blows my mind how awful Fandom, the for-profit branch, is.

Horribly ad-ridden and user hostile. You would never believe they come from the same people.

They're separate companies, did you even go past the first sentence on wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales is the founder and current president of Fandom. Not sure if there's any deeper connection than that, but I'd guess that's what the parent comment is referring to rather than mistaking them for being literally the same company.

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