When the old school RuneScape wiki moved to a self hosted solution it was night and day the quality difference. I’d argue that OSRS (and probably regular RS) have some of the best wikis in gaming.
From what I've heard, the RS3 wiki was even better, but for sure both are fantastic. Prime examples of how wikis should work. They're even fully integrated into the game.
Yeah, the RS3 wiki is genuinely fantastic. Daily updates, calculators for virtually every activity, and you can search it directly from the game’s chat box.
@Kovu@simple
I've literally installed an extension to block out fandom results while searching and redirecting to self-hosted fanwikis instead. I hate that ad filled website.
I'm pleased to hear that they're moving. Fandom's had a monopoly on the community-created wiki space for far too long, and it's had a dire effect on the usability of so many wikis. It's like they're trying to make their site everything but a easily usable resource for community wikis.
On a related note, I highly recommend the "Indie Wiki Buddy" extension for Chrome and Firefox. When non-Fandom/Fextralife wikis are available, it'll direct you to those instead; and when they're not, it'll allow you to view the Fandom wiki through a much more usable mirror.
Use android dev or a fork like Fennec, set your own addon collection, then install any addon on mobile by adding it to your collection. Bit more annoying than it should be, but once set up allmost as convenient as on desktop
I'm hoping fallout does as well. Ever since the two fallout wiki merged, I feel like the experience of looking for info on the wiki has been hobbled by fandom.
Is poewiki just the MediaWiki software (IIRC, the name of the software that runs the official Wikipedia) hosted on their own server?
For official wikis it can be feasible, for user-made ones it would surely be more difficult than just using Wikia / fandom / etc...
And yeah, it is more difficult than just using wikia/fandom/etc, but it also provides such a better experience. Not all game communities will go to that length, but PoE players are a different breed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I hope the Fallout and Final Fantasy wikies also migrate out from fandom. Back when they were wikia, they were a lot better. It feels that the search function on fandom is so bad that half the time you're better off going on google and slapping your search there instead.
Imagine if we already had all the tools needed, and all that's missing is a bit of hosting and a bit of moderation.
If only there was a company with some extra cash behind this… haha.
But it's seriously time people retake some kind of control over their online activity. All these "services" looking at every occasion to screw their user is getting annoying.
Yeah I think people need to separate "popular" from "profitable" in their minds because while I do spend a lot of time on the internet, most of it isn't for anything I'd be willing to pay for, and if it's just an excuse to show me ads, I'm not interested.
We see the shit you're doing, we don't like it, and while it might boost some numbers in the short term, it also primes users for the next alternative that won't just be embraced because it's new and shiny, but specifically because it's not the site that used to be great but thought they could abuse their users' time and attention for greater profits.
Like at this point, Reddit could do a full 180 and allow 3rd party apps to return, improve their own UX through their site and official apps, and give up on the IPO entirely, but I still won't be likely to return because all of that just sounds too good to be true and I like it better here than Reddit has been for years.
I don't really want to be someone's product anymore. And if that breaks the whole Internet's business model, then so be it.
This isn't about Mojang. This is about a wiki that is mostly maintained by fans but endorsed by Mojang as the official wiki. If MS tries to force some bullshit Teams or SP solution via Mojang and official branding, the fans will likely abandon it in favor of an unofficial one not hogtied to some BS MS ecosystem.
I admit, all of my fandom.com experience is post wikia-buyout, but just after they bought wikia and before every wikia.com became a fandom.com site, it was still good.
I make it a point to actively avoid Fandom. They're fucking horrible. Luckily for the type of games I'm interested in there's alternatives available (for eg doomwiki, halopedia, UESP)
This makes fandom much better by outright blocking the entire site and redirecting you to alternatives instead
If they have a proper wiki that is not a fandom one for the topic, it redirects you there, otherwise it lets you use a proxy like antifandom to access the data without going on the fandom website
The RuneScape wikis did this several years ago, might even be a decade at this point. The actual developer studio, Jagex, helps pay to keep them online and independent because of how damn good they are and how useful it is for everyone, including developers, to reference.
Microsoft (or Mojang? I don't know anymore) would be well served to do the same here honestly.
Just whatever you do, do not use Google docs to share information that belongs to a wiki. That's is by far the most annoying option and 100 times worse than just having to deal with a fandom wiki.
I agree, it'll also make a mess out of your "shared tab" on your drive. Me opening a document from som random doesn't mean that I want it to bury the documents that has been actively shared with me, from my wife for instance.
"There is also deep disquiet among wiki editors over a recent controversy with the McDonalds wiki, in which Fandom replaced the existing Grimace page to a paid-for McDonalds advertorial, without the consent or knowledge of the McDonalds wiki editors. No I'm not making this up."
I'm an editor for a community wiki that moved off fandom a few years ago to Mireheze. When the recent discussion about Miraheze shutting down happened I briefly inquired about where we would migrate to, expressing my hope to not return to fandom, and was quite thouroghly assured that fandom is not somewhere that would even be considered returning to. I don't think I've had a single positive experience on a fandom wiki ever, or at least not in over 8 years, with issues ranging from intrusive ads, to the comment section pop in making scrolling inconsistent, to even something as simple as it universally looking fucking ugly, I can't wait for people to leave and am actively cheering on its slow death as a website.
I am an admin on another wiki that used to be on Gamepedia before the Fandom buyout. We forked immediately. I have also been self hosting a wiki for another game since early 2017. Completely worth it. Fandom has always had terrible user experience, and frankly they do not care about their users at all. Maybe their community-level staff do, but definitely not the higher ups. I've chatted with them directly when we were planning to fork. They're only in it for the money, not for the good of the editors or readers. They make ridiculous changes that are great for advertisers but completely subvert the user experience and actual content on the page. They've also let go a lot of their staff for nonsensical reasons. I really hope the Minecraft wiki goes through with the fork, and that more and more wikis follow. It's absurd how much of a monopoly they have, given how awful their service is. I for one will be happy to visit the Minecraft wiki again, as someone who plays occasionally, but not often enough to be keeping tabs on all the new features and updates. But I boycott Fandom wikis on principle so I haven't been there in years.
Don't think it's really necessary. The different wikis don't really need to talk to each other. But an open source Gamepedia-like wiki software would be great. Maybe it exists already.
The problem is mostly google search results get dominated by fandom due to longterm trust in the "brand" that google provides to these corporations whether or not they produce garbage. If a federation can provide value that helps new wikis gain visibility in search results then it would provide considerable value over others.
Ability to contribute to all wikis and to federate content from the wikis across one another without having them all owned by one company like fandom.com
Federated wiki does not sound like a good idea, as in, all articles coming from different servers. But we don't have to go that far; hosting a wiki is quite straightforward.
If you're already paying for hosting, you might as well just use the tools readily available. But for "fan" wiki, you'd require a strong enough core to handle that part while other contributes.
I think it would work like how it does here, where you can access/edit all the pages on independent wikis hosted on different servers with one account identity. Federation is about getting both the advantages of centralized services and independent operations (sometimes disadvantages too), and I think outside of forums, fan wikis are probably the best sites for a federation structure. After all, wikia/fandom already kinda operates like this.
Oh come on, I am capable of way more than just being a marketing genius on Lemmy, and running one dumb repetitive joke into the ground like a shitty reddit novelty account isn't very funny, unlike my new movie, "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
(But seriously though, comedy is about timing more than anything else.)
Yeah... A lot of it is just reddit-like powermod activities and the insane bureaucracy and rule lawyering there if you go to any remotely controversial talk page. You would not trust info on Wikipedia if you saw how the sausage is made on the talk pages.
As a matter of fact, there are opportunities here for other companies that don't have general wikis for gamers to create a better hosting service. They have not done this and I don't understand why. Steam could easily do this, I think. Just imagine Steam creating a wiki for games, with links to the best guides, etc. It would be a modern version of GameFaqs (which still exists) but improved. When I do a search on a game and I get Fandom in my results, I tend to skip over it and look for something better without ad bullshit. I would think that other gamers tend to do the same thing. I mean, it's that bad, even for a user without a registered account (like me).
I really hope that they do, Fandom is annoying as heck to use with the constant advertising and unnecessary sidebar that pops up a big window on mouseover etc. In fact, I hope all fandom wikis leave Fandom and migrate elsewhere.
MediaWiki is great but Git-based wiki are more distributable and easy to back up. A trustworthy platform taking care of infrastructure is all contributers like these look for
I remember installing PC adblock just for Wowhead because even though they have great info (just about all the quests and dailies in WoW) they have so many ads and video popups. Haven't really looked back since.
I haven't gotten around to doing adblock for my phone, and so whenever I do visit those sites, I get really annoyed by everything.