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Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

I love this post. I also LOVE wikis. I have railed against Fandom for years and I have often shared my view on this in the past[^1]. It's an absolute blight on so many beloved game communities at this point.

I like this approach much more than the games that have decided to move to another managed/hosted service like https://wiki.gg - which has a very real change of becoming the "next" Fandom.

Truly independent wikis are the best.

[^1]: https://publish.obsidian.md/dakota/Hobbies/Gaming/Gaming+Wik...

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I skimmed the post linked at [^1], but I have a doubt about that:

> Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia

Are you sure about this? Since Fandom got acquired by private equity in 2018, I don't think Wikipedia has any stake in Fandom anymore

You're right, that's incorrect on my part. Fandom (well, Wikia) was founded and run by Jimmy Wales for a long time, but there is no official connection with the Wikipedia project/Wikimedia foundation. I will fix that.

They never had a stake at any point.

The connection is that 2 of the main people involved originally (jimmy & angela) had a lot of ties to wikimedia, but they were doing wikicities/wikia/fandom as their own thing, not as part of wikimedia.

Also long ago there was some minor connections. They briefly shared an office like 15 years ago i think, and they tried to jointly develop a wysiwyg editor back in like 2012 (wikimedia did most of the work i think, but wikia leant a few devs to the project at one point) which eventually became the mediawiki visual editor.

Anyways totally separare orgs.

To be fair I think you could argue we're actively witnessing a cautionary tale about one founder having large interests in both a nonprofit and a related for-profit company with the ongoing Wordpress.org/Automattic/WPEngine drama.

Oh definitely. Its definitely a bad coi for soneone to control both.

The other side of this is that jimmy does not have very much control over Wikimedia foundation now a days either. He still has a board seat, but its just one seat among many and the board is pretty hands-off.

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