I love the idea of fan wikis, but Fandom is basically the worst possible implementation of that idea.
And ironically, I already hated fandom before I'd seen it without an ad blocker! Just for the large sidebars and ugly flyouts and whatnot. It really feels like a contender for worst site on the internet.
maybe at that moment, you did.
Usually it's stuff where the fan seems to have picked up on something implied in a story, but missed where it is clearly stated that isn't the case ... but then they go and write on fandom and make lots of assumptions from there and fill in other gaps with guesses.
As someone who once edited those wikis, I certainly hope they did. Who wants to work for free to enrich some private equity firm?
It's a not-so-open secret that a lot of wikia wikis are not only vandalised but encouraged to be vandalised as to make people move off them.
Just wish there was a more centralized / good alternative to promote rather than just wrecking fandom.
Prior to my discovery that fandom was bad and a lot of wikis were moving away, I was following so many instances of out dated info in games I was playing due to not realizing that the wiki was no longer maintained since the active contributors had moved elsewhere and updates/patches to the game had rendered the info moot.
I am aware of a few game communities that purposefully poison the fandom version of the wiki with inaccuracies that are non-obvious and time-consuming to verify (so they aren't just auto-reverted).
Same goes with just about every wiki that has a counterpart that's not on Fandom.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page
vs
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki
(Though UESP has had banner ads for a while now)
I don't get it. If I'm looking up a specific year in the star trek universe, say 2381, to see what happened, why would I want 14 minute video on "a history of star trek".
Then why would I want it again when I check the next year
If it were a youtube style video advert I could understand it.
SEO has ruined the Internet.
Fextralife notably stopped streaming almost a year ago after Twitch announced that embedded views would no longer be counted. The solution is in the incentive, but unfortunately on the modern internet those generally don't favor the user.
I assume the irrelevant video is included to give Fandom more video ad space to sell.
I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.
I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few, and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.
But that's just nonsense, if a website can get more revenue from more ads, they are gonna put more ads right away, they aren't gonna wait until their revenue drops under some magic number before they do.