cookmeplox

"You shouldn't care about Google if you run a wiki" is really common take, and I think it's really harmful/wrong because it badly misunderstands the way that wiki communities actually form, and how losing all of the readers means you eventually don't have any editors. I talk about this more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606772

I think this logic falls apart if you realize that wikis only "work" when you're able to get some of the readers to turn into long-term contributors, and losing 90% of your traffic by not showing up on Google is a great way to kill that funnel.

There's a ton of historical evidence of wiki migrations (1) starting out with all of the editors and none of the readers, (2) not doing anything to get those readers to the new site, and (3) ultimately losing the whole war because the reader->editor flow was still happening on the Fandom wiki. "Invisibility" is absolutely not desirable here, even if your only goal is maximizing the amount of good contributions.

I think you can love what we're doing with the wikis, but also be candid that it's not an optimal reader-facing domain name. It was never really intended to be that - it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered

But it ended up being the only reasonable place we owned where we could put Fortnite, Overwatch and Valheim wikis that wouldn't get crushed by this new Google jail situation. Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. Chicken and egg.

What's the wiki? I'm always interested to get more data points on this, because it has definitely applied to wikis for brand new topics that aren't competing with anything on Fandom (it's not the same as the normal "duplicate content penalty" that people talk about)

I have a medium-sized Discord server of web sysadmin people (mostly wiki operators) that came together after I wrote a similar blog post [1] about how the LLM scrapers/resproxies are making it suck to run wikis. Not sure if there's other private communities out there, but feel free to email me if you want to join

[1] - https://weirdgloop.org/blog/clankers

https://weirdgloop.org/feed.xml should do it

Yeah - it would be on the same domain, so way users access it wouldn't change at all.

If any of the wikis we host want to leave, we'd provide them with a database dump. The admins would have to configure all of their own MediaWiki stuff of course, but I figure that's a pretty reasonable switching cost.

We have services agreements with the League of Legends and RuneScape developers, and we run 1 ad (below-the-fold, not in EU/UK) on the RuneScape wikis. This covers all expenses (including 5 staff) by a pretty healthy margin

Thanks! I've been meaning to write up a post that talks about some of the specific tricks we're using. A couple big ones:

- Heavy use of Cloudflare Workers to cache ~95% of logged-out pageviews, with a particular focus on doing a lot of edge-side modifications to minimize cache fragmentation

- Using the MediaWiki jobrunners to repopulate the parser cache before pageviews are requested, so even when pageviews hit the server, there's a high chance that the core contents have already been computed somewhere

- I realized that MediaWiki latency is usually dominated by I/O wait time. For example, some pageviews require thousands of synchronous database/redis cache reads, so the difference between 0.5ms lookup and 0.1ms lookup adds up. So we colocated more of those caches on the same physical machines as the webservers that were reading them, which on average dropped latency by ~40%

That's me! I also wrote the blog :)

We're already turning a profit! And there are no third-party investors (or debt) – it's all controlled by wiki people[1]

[1] https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited

Your formulation is not equivalent. The actual Ramsey theory formulation is something more like...you need to color, either red or blue, all of the edges of a fully connected graph of 6 elements (there are 15 such edges). No matter which coloring you choose (there are 2^15 of these), there will always be a "triangle" between three nodes where the entire triangle is either fully red, or fully blue. If you were to instead restrict yourself to a graph with 5 elements instead of 6, it's possible[1] to color the edges so there's no triangle where all the elements are the same.

As an exercise, try repeating your same argument for 5 colors/blocks, and note that it still works, when it shouldn't.

[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RamseyTheory_K5_no_m...

I think you might have some of the facts wrong here - the post you're talking about never mentioned moving back to Fandom (nobody would ever entertain that option), and we ended up putting one pretty small ad in a pretty non-disruptive place, not "injecting ads at a pretty insane volume".

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

> Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.

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.

It's totally possible to beat the old wiki on Google! We did it for runescape.wiki, which was the most popular wiki on Fandom before we left in 2018.

Cool to see our site show up on HN! Thanks for the kind words :)

The FAQ https://rs-archive.github.io/faq.html is pretty clear about what they're used for:

> They contain all the various raw assets used in the game (e.g. maps, models, sounds) and the definitions of content like NPCs, Items, and scenery objects.