Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom
minecraft.wiki
minecraft.wiki
A history recap for those who do not know:
2013: Minecraft Wiki migrates from a self-hosted solution to Gamepedia run by Curse. This was a good decision at the time, because Curse was pretty trusted in the community; Minecraft modding centers around CurseForge the way Skyrim does around Nexus.
2016: Twitch buys Curse. The Curse Launcher is rebranded as the Twitch Launcher and turned into a desktop Twitch client that also does Minecraft modding. The wikis are initially unaffected. This sucks.
2018: Twitch starts breaking up Curse, and sells off Gamepedia to Fandom. This also sucks because Fandom starts inserting more ads, but the ads are manageable compared to Fandom proper.
2020: Gamepedia wikis are migrated over to Fandom proper, for SEO. Overnight the site becomes completely unusable. This sucks much worse, and actually manages to damage Twitch's brand (because a lot of people think they're involved, due to it still being called the Twitch Launcher) and they shutter the launcher and sell off CurseForge (the modding part) to Overwolf.
The embedded Twitch stream is there purely as a way to artificially boost viewer counts on their channel. Almost every time a new game comes out, you can go to its Twitch page and see Fextralife at the top with tens of thousands of viewers, with a dead chat because almost nobody is actually watching, it's all from the embed. Twitch-endorsed pseudo-viewbotting to farm ad revenue is a growing trend, there's even several systems on Twitch itself that encourage it, like the drops system.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3292958
The old fandom wiki is quite dead but it's impossible to get rid of it, alas.
Plus they have RuneLite cooperating with crowdsourcing things like droptables and drop rates. (And of course mods often will outright tell them what certain droprates are or how they function).
Despite the OSRS wiki being legitimately the best website I use every day, it's leadership has been sounding the death knell every few months, always to an alarmingly quiet response.
They have no money, have no revenue generator, and have a full staff that needs to be paid. The last post they put to the community mentioned moving back to fandom (crazy) or injecting ads at a pretty insane volume.
So yes, fandom sucks. But also, a "normal" wiki takes expertise, and usually, compensation.
In reality, we are doing fine on revenue, and more than covering the full-time labor costs by serving one ad to about 35% of users (really more like 20% after you account for ad blockers). It's still a bit icky compared to doing something donation-based or working directly with the studio, but neither of those would pay the bills. It turns out that a pretty small amount of advertising pays the bills just fine, which really puts into perspective how insane Fandom's monetization is.
You can read more specifics/numbers in my post here: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Mid-2023_business_update
You're telling me with all the fancy algorithms and their zillions of engineers they can't manage to notice that an entire subdomain hasn't had any updates to it's pages in 2 years and that every single person that clicks the search result ends up doing another search 20 seconds later?
https://starcitizen.fandom.com/
And a recent post on reddit about the wiki's funding appears to have gotten their patreon up to $140 compared to $110 server costs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/16bo02n/star_c...
Yes, please let us get away from them. If you've ever browsed Twitch, you'll see them with tens of thousands of viewers... but when you join the channel, engagement is sparse.
The reason this happens is because they embed their Twitch stream into every. page. you. visit. This is slimy, annoying, and slows the loading.
https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Project:CD#Forking_from_Fandom
(n.b. I'm an admin there.)
(n.b. 2, we've collaborated with MCW on several occasions)
It is interesting to me how many games, Minecraft in particular, rely on wikis - they're very different experiences, sometimes almost unplayable, if you don't read up on how to make progress.
I played quite a few hours of the game, both alone and together with a couple of friends.
One day, after a couple of weeks or something, I learned about a crafting wiki that told you how to craft different items.
At the time, at least for me, it was not clear how you figure out what items you can craft and what items need to be combined in what patterns to craft those new items.
So for me, that crafting wiki became quite essential.
Maybe other people were figuring out how to craft things by trial and error? Or maybe there was something in the game that told them how to craft specific things?
But NEI (and of course, NEI in GregTech New Horizons) is the only way to play.
Because what is Minecraft without regular expressions in your inventory?
https://wiki.gtnewhorizons.com/wiki/Not_Enough_Items#Search_...
Certainly my experience. I don't think there was much/any guidance in-game at the beginning.
Sometimes I forget how to build a gate versus a fence in MC, the trial and error takes just about the same time as search the MC wiki, I still search the wiki more often than flail.
There's also a "recipe book", which tells you how to craft[1] items. More recipes get added as you collect the ingredients needed to make them.
However, these systems were only added in 2017. (For contrast, the game started development in 2009 and reached 1.0 in 2011.) Before that, how to progress was a lot less clear. It was assumed you had someone teaching you how to play, that you watched videos of other people playing, or that you read the wiki.
[1]: The process of combining the items you've collected, by slotting them into a 3×3 grid in a specific pattern (the "recipe"), to make new, more useful items.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFd...
This series is notable for inspiring the addition of Ruined Portals, as construction of a Nether Portal had no in-game hints at the time, and was the only thing he needed a spoiler to figure out.
Eerily reminiscent of w3schools for people getting into web dev.
One of the premises is that wikis are required reading; because if you aren't min/maxing, you're breaking the social contract with your guildmates. It's a totally emergent and novel way for a game to become 'unplayable'!
And it doesn't even really touch on how Fandom, sometimes, refuses to delete the old wiki for traffic purposes, and leaves it up as a "zombie" wiki that smothers the new wiki due to SEO, or the more serious conflicts between some admins and contributors in some other specific fandoms.
The Runescape wikis left Fandom a few years ago. The improvement to quality and features has been massive. I'm not sure how much traffic the Minecraft wiki gets, but the Runescape wikis got over a billion page views in 2021 [1]. These are not insignificant losses for Fandom.
A lot. Its the 800lb gorilla of gaming, and it requires a lot of reference to play.
I used to joke that 1/4 of Youtube is Minecraft videos, and I'm not even sure thats a hyperbole.
It's one of the worse possible website experiences there is, that isn't actively clickbait or a scam and it's annoying as hell that actual good content continues to flock to that trash platform.
You care about the quality of the wiki's content though. These kinds of business decisions detract from that.
Why are there people that don't know how to adblock?
Usually information this important will spread to the people that need it. That hasn't happened here. What's blocking it?
My mother doesn't know how to turn off the phone, toggle airplane mode/wifi or use the app switcher... She refuses to learn because its not worth her time. I have family, friends and such that similarly refuse to learn basic things, much less go seek out an ad blocker and learn how to use it for an interface (the web browser) they think they rarely use.
Also, on mobile, it is kinda tricky because you can install an adblock browser, but the app selection is kinda iffy, and it won't replace the unfiltered system webview.
On Android, WebView provider can be changed. On iPhone, SafariView supports ad blocking so it's a problem for apps that uses iOS WebView. Most apps should use SafariView for displaying external websites.
For instance, under that policy, this article was taken down https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&o... and "merged" (with loss of information) to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#P...
I saw a comment accusing Wales of enforcing this policy in order to direct traffic to Fandom. I thought when I read it that the accusation was uncalled for, but given Fandom's intransigence about taking old wikis down and the money-grubbing quality of its UX, I have wondered. Whatever the merits of this policy, it is applied inconsistently or not at all to topics not likely to be in Fandom.
I am still happy with our decision, because Wikia/Fandom has since then just gotten worse.
There's also a 'ublacklist' extension which lets you block sites from search results as well. I think this edits the results to erase matched sites, though - you're not communicating to Google, et al. that you don't want to see that site.
Trust the search engine to do the signal/noise calculations for you. You are no longer on Google. Kagi is your agent, not your adversary.
Only sites I block on my Kagi are sites that outright trick or lie to the user; keyword content farms, pinterest, and StackOverflow cloners
I found it through Libredirect which is the same idea but for more sites, but some of the alternative sites don't work as well in my experience.
google.*###rso .MjjYud a[href*="fandom.com"]:upward(.MjjYud)I think the move has been really successful. They've managed to add lots of exciting game-specific features to the wiki, like tracking requirements for a quest, or historical item prices. It also didn't seem to take long for the new wiki results to rank above the Wikia/Fandom results on search engines.
Good luck to the Minecraft wiki and its contributors!
I'm all for seeing wikis leave them because it'll be a huge usability win. Fandom can still fill the gap for small niche wikis that don't want to deal with hosting and such, but larger established wikis using their own platform will be great.
I think Google is partially to blame as it seems to rank Fandom pages way higher than self-hosted wikis.
Stupid question, why do they need to make money? I thought they are maintained by volunteers. For hosting?
From the Fandom Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)):
> The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.
But note that Jimmy Wales was a founder as well.
Unlike NetHack, the Minecraft Fandom site is probably a lot more lucrative in ad revenue.
I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures."
I had no idea they've been collecting sites like infinity stones. I guess ads pay handsomely? Ugh.
Enshittification as a service.
Katamari Fandomcy.
• https://starfield.fandom.com
• https://starfield.wiki.fextralife.com
• https://www.ign.com/wikis/starfield (this is the honorable mention)
None of them are complete, and all have vastly different ideas on how it should work and look. Want to know what the best shield generator is? Some wikis will have their own page on them, others just have it stuffed into a table called "starship components", maybe divided by category.
---
Whats interesting is that Ward Cunningham saw all these problems YEARS ago, and started pushing for a federated wiki experience. Doesn't seem to have caught on outside a very small niche circle, sadly. IMO because the various wikis that implement the federated wiki are lacking a lot of features that other wiki engines provide
https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Main_Page
Started as a community wiki, and then Valve started hosting it and supporting it a few years later. They leave most of the admin up to the community, but do step in as needed for Terms of Service.
It's pretty incredible that Fandom/Fextralife have driven people to developing browser extensions just to avoid everything they touch...
It's slightly counterproductive from an SEO perspective as it redirects Fandom clicks to the new wiki, which gives Fandom all the SEO benefits of receiving those clicks.
Thankfully there's been a notable shift in the past 3-6 months.
What has finally helped I think is the sheer amount of stale or missing data on fandom, so as a really basic current example, it doesn't have mention of tattoos, a fairly critical aspect of the current league.
We definitely over index on content added post-fork, which makes sense given that we're not competing with Fandom for those searches.
According to Google Search console, in the last 3 months we've had 32.9M impressions and 4.39M clicks, which is nothing to sniff at.
(Also, the 2nd result is an official Mastodon post which mirrors this announcement, so it would be easily discoverable. Not too bad!)
(For Google, it's the 7th result for me, below three different versions of fandom.com).
Got me thinking it could be interesting for Kagi to release personalized packages, like say you get into a new hobby (Minecraft) and you can quickly peruse/apply sensible personalization.
I'm reading this over the ultra-slow[1] airplane satellite wifi. The wiki loaded reasonably quickly. I don't even want to try opening any fandom wiki (it probably wouldn't load at all). Congrats!
I had to search for this information a bit, but looks like the new wiki is powered by MediaWiki. I wonder if there's a market for fandom alternative that would offer easy to onboard instances to various groups (so they don't get locked into fandom early).
[1] Because I bought the cheapest plan, of course.
For example, Bloodborne has a "Fandom", a fextralife, and an actual high-quality wiki at https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/
Can you imagine if this kind of advertisement came to Wikipedia? Would make the fundraising banners look like nothing.
I run Weird Gloop (the group hosting the Minecraft/RuneScape wikis) and your view is generally correct. The content is extremely cacheable and the infrastructure costs have extremely strong economies-of-scale. The labor costs are a bit less obvious, but past a certain baseline (of, say, having enough people for a reasonable oncall rotation), the marginal labor cost of hosting additional wikis is quite low.
What if the monetization is the point, not the content?
Minecraft Wiki considers move away from Fandom to new platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325 - July 2023 (25 comments)
The Paradox Studios wiki's are the best: https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki
In MCs case a wiki is such integral part of the game it should almost be integrated.
OSRS set the bar pretty high: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/
Clean, concise, and accurate.
Back in the day, WoWWiki started as its own thing before it shifted over to Wikia (what we now know as Fandom).
Wikia was even worse than Fandom today. They had this set layout that didn’t work for many of the wikis they brought in. This led some folks from the community to branch out and create Wowpedia, which was on its own again.
Later, Wowpedia joined Curse's Gamepedia, kind of like Wikia but not as in-your-face.
But here’s the twist: in 2018, Fandom/Wikia bought Gamepedia. So, Wowpedia landed back with Fandom. At some point, they decided to archive WoWWiki so there is only Wowpedia now.
----
My personal opinion in general about this topic is that Fandom is a very bad host (Wikia used to be worse, to be fair), but the worst is having two competing wikis.
At least in this Minecraft's case, it looks like the majority of contributors moved together.
The situation of WowWiki/Wowpedia at the time was just sad, a lot of hard work went down the drain.
And speaking of which, isn’t the Terraria Wiki going through something similar right now?
Out of two wikis:
https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki
I can't figure out which one’s busier right now. I understand that terraria.wiki.gg now is the "official" one, but if you check out their recent change frequencies, they seem pretty close.
I can’t help thinking there's a lot of duplicated effort here too.
[1] https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Forum:Vote_to_Leave_Fandom
Wow that's vendor lock in right there.
Fandom should have features to make the wiki read only, disable new posts, also a feature to pin a permanent banner for announcements, in this case for announcing the new home/link.
That will be a much better migration path.
.. for practicing your element blocking technique in uBlock Origin.
And if you look for "fandom" in the wiki's search, it redirects to an entry about a location in the game called "Castelia Sewers". [2]
[1]: https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/WikiDex:WikiDex_ya_no_forma_par...
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I just turned off my ad blocker and literally only 21% of the page is content and the remaining is ads. After 2 seconds, it got replaced by a full screen ad. What? How? What are the people at fandom thinking? This is completely unusable without adblockers!
Don't believe me, here are the screenshots I just took: https://imgur.com/a/sNg3IlJ
https://breezewiki.com/dota2/search?q=Chaos+Knight
Exception raised in Racket code at response generation time: string::2: bytes->jsexpr: bad input starting #"You are not allowed to access this resource " context...: /home/cadence/racket/collects/syntax/readerr.rkt:15:2: -raise-read-error /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/breezewiki/src/page-search.rkt:70:2 /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/racket/share/pkgs/web-server-lib/web-server/dispatchers/dispatch-lift.rkt:11:0 /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/private/more-scheme.rkt:163:2: select-handler/no-breaks [repeats 9 more times] /home/cadence/racket/share/pkgs/web-server-lib/web-server/private/dispatch-server-with-connect-unit.rkt:141:2
The fact that they are removing a the ability for people to access a game they paid for is unacceptable and should be illegal.
All Mojang and Minecraft accounts were deleted from Mojang's servers.
>which surely would have been major news.
I wish it was. In a few months people will want to revisit the game and then realize they have to rebuy the game if they want to play it again.
As somebody who's never touched Minecraft, surely all Minecraft accounts are Minecraft/Mojang accounts? If everybody playing suddenly needed to rebuy the game Tuesday it would have been big news.
Minecraft accounts were the original account system that minecraft used. Once Mojang was working on Scrolls they created the Mojang account system to span all of the studio's games. After the acquisition by Microsoft it was changed so that people buying Minecraft would instead use Microsoft accounts.
I always hesitate before browsing to a Fandom wiki because the user experience is so full of dark patterns. I guess this is just another facet of that...
That is precisely what they do.
They also, in some cases, ban the mods/contributors making the change.
// @match https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/*
window.location.hostname = "minecraft.wiki";
^https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/(.*)|https://minecraft.wiki/w/$1Also, any hosting platform has to balance user control over extensions and customisations, on the one hand, with system reliability on the other. You can't easily delegate control of extension installation to Wiki administrators, unless you give them console access.
The Minecraft Wiki is currently hosted by Weird Gloop which is the entity responsible for the forked RuneScape Wikis, and they manage the servers directly: https://weirdgloop.org/
The harder bit is convincing people to move, and trying to beat Fandom on Google. One of the reasons they picked Weird Gloop is the experience in this space - they've pretty much won the battle in respect of the RuneScape Wikis, which have sat dormant for years.
https://wiki.gg is probably the biggest, but there's also https://abxy.org and https://weirdgloop.org/, who is now hosting the minecraft wiki
In my experience the Fandom wiki will stay always above the new wiki in google, making this move pointless.
UESP predates Fandom and was extremely fleshed out, and is frankly superior to the Fandom version at every point in history. But even with the "head start," UESP has really suffered due to the existence of Fandom, for no reason other than artificial SEO dominance.
OTOH, I refuse to edit wikis in Fandom, because it feels like I'm not doing it for the community but for the Fandom company, which I don't care for.
My problem with the ad soup that is Fandom is that the community that is providing the content and inhabiting the space is not the one benefiting from the placement of the ads. This creates a perverse incentive for Fandom to maximize ad revenue at all costs. A publisher who is also the steward of the community will typically be more selective with what ads and where to put them.
I find it tragic that after the heyday of self hosted software like forums, we entered what I fully believe will become a dark age for the internet where content is walled away by the larger providers who have every incentive to extract value from users and hoard their data, both given and created, to maximize their own interests.
The thing that bothers me is how much weight you are ascribing to organic search given each of the communities’ niche. Being in “the know” here usually comes with the knowledge of where to find the wiki and other resources. If they have to stumble around to find it the first time, maybe they see the old (or replacement) Fandom site and instantly realize what a horrible mistake they made by clicking thru to the trash heap it is.
I would love to believe you (especially as someone who exclusively uses Kagi now); but do you have statistical data on this, as it pertains to the median usage of Google results?
For context, I volunteer at a community center and library helping people use computers (usually focused on kids going into stem field, but the general public uses it too). It’s not a diverse sample as this serves only a only a specific middle and working class neighborhood, and I have not been rigorous in data collection (or have literally any strategy to do so).
The people contributing matter, but it doesn't matter how many people use the other wiki.