[ye-olde-sysrq]

OSRS also moved to oldschool.runescape.wiki and AIUI jagex pays for their hosting and provides some kind of content access to make updating/syncing easier.

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).

[Reubachi]

OSRS wiki isn't the best example. Jagex does not fund it, and is recommending they move to fandom/ad based support.

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.

[cookmeplox]

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

[Fergusonb]

It's also available via the osrs.wiki URL. Also, it's the highest quality wiki I've ever encountered.