[Nouser76]

One of the best cases of leaving Fandom that I know of is the Runescape wiki mentioned in the article[0]. The community that ran the fandom wiki had buy-in from the creators of Runescape to assist with the transition, help with funding, and eventually direct integration into their games. In a game as information-dense as Runescape, that updates weekly, the wiki is basically a necessity for folks to play efficiently, or to find out how a new update actually works.

Fandom isn't the only bad wiki site though. Fextralife had (has? I haven't kept up) an issue where they were embedding Twitch streams on each page load, which was boosting viewer counts for whatever streamer they decided to embed on every page.

I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying and hosting, but I also understand that most companies don't have the motivation to do that as it doesn't always directly impact their bottom line and it can take effort to moderate.

[0]: https://runescape.wiki

[ThrowawayR2]

> "I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game..."

I played a game where the developer did that. The wiki and all of its painstaking user contributions vanished the day the game reached its end of service and is lost to history forever.

[bisby]

Path of Exile hosts their own wiki now. poewiki.net

> This is the official Path of Exile wiki, maintained by the community and hosted by Grinding Gear Games.

But for duckduckgo if you use the !poe bang... It takes you to the fandom page, even though the fandom page doesn't get updates anymore because there is an official wiki elsewhere.

As an example of out of dateness of fandom: https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Version_history claims the latest update to the game is version 3.17, from feb 2022... https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Version_history says its version 3.24.0 from April 23, 2024. They don't even bother scraping the official wiki to update their own. It's actually dead.

Ive submitted to DDG a few times that the !poe bang points to an unofficial bad source when an official better source exists, but search engines don't care. The out of date fandom page is still the second result, because people will keep clicking it and it has years of accumulated SEO.

[xnzakg]

For what it's worth, Kagi's !poe bang takes you to poewiki.net.

[soared]

Would love to watch a documentary on the osrs wiki and especially the power transfer from fandom. Such a ridiculously incredible wiki. It makes me wish I never used it, as no other source of information (video game or not) is anywhere near as complete and knowledgeable. Anything you want to know about osrs, it’s in the wiki.

[kibwen]

I'll nominate the following wikis as contenders to rival OSRS in completeness and thoroughness:

https://www.stardewvalleywiki.com/Stardew_Valley_Wiki

https://minecraft.wiki/

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Portal:Main

But you know what the weirdest, greatest one of all is? You'll never guess: it's the Transformers wiki: https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Main_Page Some absolute madlad has taken it upon themselves to seemingly caption every single image on the 30,000+ pages with a unique sarcastic quip.

[NoGravitas]

Memory Alpha is so good. I'm not interested in Transformers, but I've always been impressed by tfwiki whenever I've used it to understand some joke from Shortpacked! or Dumbing of Age.

[danaris]

Memory Alpha is good, but I was somewhat disappointed when they moved to Fandom. It used to at least have its own domain (en.memory-alpha.org for the English version); I don't know what hosting and platform they used at the time.

[spondylosaurus]

I don't play OSRS, but my partner does, and on more than one occasion they've shown me a page from the wiki and I've felt the exact emotion you're describing. Even a lot of enterprise software tools struggle to produce docs as good as the OSRS wiki's.

[TZubiri]

Probably related that it pertains to a game built on a 2000 engine. The lack of complexity and repetitiveness is built into the game, which directly correlates to the popularity among the autism community.

[spondylosaurus]

OSRS is forked from a build of RuneScape from 2007, actually :)

[TZubiri]

And the tick based SQL + Java engine was built in 2004 when it migrated from RS classic to RS2.

[Macha]

It also means the RS Wiki have full control over their fate, in comparison to e.g. what happened with the WoW wiki where it was WoWWiki at Fandom (then Wikia), they split to Wowpedia at Gamepedia which then got bought by Fandom and reeled them back in, and so they had to move out again, so now they're Warcraft Wiki. But they're at a new wiki host (wiki.gg) so who knows, maybe Fandom buys them too and they end up having to do a 4th fork.

[Nouser76]

This may be tangential, but the interesting thing to me about the Warcraft Wiki is that it serves the lore and API information in great detail and is my go-to resource for those. But when it comes to precise data about the content (e.g. spell data and its coefficients), guides for current content, etc. Wowhead has much more relevant content in greater detail - which is a shame because to me the navigability and discoverability on Wowhead is nowhere near as good as MediaWiki.

My dream is somebody takes the data from Wowhead and ports it into MediaWiki and the community rallies behind keeping that in date, but I know it's a bit of a pipe dream.

[Macha]

My understanding is sites like Wowhead get their reference content in an automated fashion to some extent, pulling it from the Blizzard API and the game data.

[robotnikman]

Another example I can think of is the Minecraft wiki, which originally was its own thing, but through a series of acquisitions ended up with Gamepedia/Fandom.

The most active users split from it and created https://minecraft.wiki/

"On September 24, 2023, after growing frustrations with the Fandom platform, the wiki completed its process of moving from Fandom and is now hosted independently at minecraft.wiki by Weird Gloop, with the old Fandom wiki now deprecated. The move also re-introduced a skin similar to the one used on Gamepedia, re-enabled anonymous editing, and introduced a new logo." https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website)

[p3rls]

"It can take effort to moderate" Hah, I run a database/wiki (kpopping.com) and it's almost four fulltime jobs per week (150ish hours) to moderate and maintain and we've been doing it for eight years.

Oh well, I don't understand the sunk cost phenomenon and do it for things besides money, but most people like being financially rewarded for these kinda herculean efforts. So we get what we deserve. And what google gives us.

[langsoul-com]

Any tales from the trenches to share?

[account42]

> I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying and hosting, but I also understand that most companies don't have the motivation to do that as it doesn't always directly impact their bottom line and it can take effort to moderate.

I'd rather that communities around games remain more independent of the developers to be honest. The incentives of the two are not always aligned and having at least two independent "authorities" helps keep each honest.

[debesyla]

Same with Guild Wars game series, where both games had officially hosted wiki sites and the best part - those are directly accessable ingame by using command "/wiki [item name or whatever you are searching]" in chat window. Handy!

https://wiki.guildwars.com/ https://wiki.guildwars2.com/

[Waterluvian]

The Fextralife Twitch thing was so weird to see. Just some random stream with 14k viewers but the chat moved glacially.

[SSLy]

their last twitch stream was two years ago, the day before twitch stopped counting iframe embeds in the viewer stats

[account42]

I've seen https://twads.gg/ used on other sites more recently.

[rifty]

Also cool is that the company the community formed (as a distinct entity from Jagex) to manage the Runescape wikis has now also become the host of the Minecraft wiki helping that community to migrate themselves.[1]

1. https://weirdgloop.org

[cloud_line]

>"I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying and hosting..."

I think the next best thing is when a company hosts their own forums where the community and in some cases the devs are active in answering questions. As long as forums are well-moderated then they naturally evolve into an knowledge base. X3:Terran Conflict comes to mind, along with IL-2 Sturmovik, which has good official forums and some excellent unofficial forums.

[AndrewOMartin]

Same with USEP for the Eldar Scrolls Series, the fandom site is janky and incomplete and often entirely inaccurate. The UESP (powered by mediawiki) is a truly impressive resource.

[pndy]

For last 2 years I'm browsing fanbases wiki's thru breezewiki "proxy" because reading content on fandom interface is beyond any usefulness - displaying unrelated stuff took over the actual content. So I'm glad someone did even such short note on this issue.

I saw few cases where a longstanding wiki project of a particular topic created by fans faced a competition in form of a fresh project created within wikia/fandom that was filled with low quality articles. There even were situations where content was blatantly copied over. Pretty sure that was done only to hijack position of the fanbase project so ads could be displayed on fandom wiki and user tracked.

Luckily there are projects which managed to avoid being sucked into this fandom blackhole, like evawiki for Evangelion franchise or both Guild Wars games wikipedias

---

And on as site note, I really don't like this recently introduced font change on general Wikipedia - previously default font is now the "small" size and current default is inconveniently the bigger "standard".

[bee_rider]

I don’t have any issue with boosting their Twitch rating, actually it is a pretty funny trick, and who cares about Amazon anyway? Messing with their stats is a social good. But it is annoying how slow it makes their site.