[jdoss]

I play a lot of Path of Exile and one of the best quality of life improvements I did this summer was adding the Fandom Path of Exile wiki URL to my Kagi deny list so it never shows up in search. The official one that is maintained and kept up to date by the game developer poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki was always third or forth on my searches.

[xnorswap]

Yes, despite the poewiki migration being a fairly long time ago now, the fandom wiki still ranks frustratingly highly. The data on it is of course now very outdated and causes confusion for new players.

I wonder how much the effect of lots of people having a redirect extension has. If google sees people click on the fandom result and not come back, do they treat it as a good result when in reality people are redirecting to poewiki via the extension?

The situation improves every league, particularly since now there are quite a lot of items, skill gems or skill tree node passives/notables missing from the fandom wiki. It's much better than in the past when you could outright search "<skill> poewiki" and not have the poewiki result anywhere.

But it still feels like there's a long way to go, and it's a shame because it further increases the knowledge gap between experienced players who might know to seek out the poewiki, and new players (or very casual players) who might not.

It hints also at the power of the "old web" and it's historic power over google rankings.

[cubefox]

Why can't they replace the old pages with a link to the new page? Or otherwise remove the contents from the old site?

[xnorswap]

That's considered vandalism of fandom, and probably rightly so.

Could you imagine if someone declared a successor to wikipedia and edited all the pages to redirect?

Sometimes you just have to put the effort into making the new better, and it's a hard long slog especially against a well funded incumbent.

But like all problems in PoE, PoE2 will fix it. ;)

[cubefox]

I mean the Wikipedia content arguably belongs more to the Wikipedia community than to the Wikimedia Foundation... Of course it is hardly possible to gain the approval of a majority of editors.

> But like all problems in PoE, PoE2 will fix it. ;)

Isn't that the game for which Sannikov came up with his new global illumination algorithm? [1] (Apparently yes)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3so7xdZHKxw

[jjmarr]

it already belongs to the Wikipedia community, but it's licensed under a copyleft licence. Ditto for Wikia. Anyone can fork it if they give proper attribution.

[cubefox]

Good point

[Pikamander2]

I tried adding some helpful links to the new Runescape wiki back when the split happened, and within a few hours Fandom had permabanned my decade-old account across their entire network.

Not a huge loss, although it still feels like a bitter ending after I spent years sprucing up a bunch of their wikis.

[yifanl]

Usually attempts to advertise migration efforts on high visibility wikis away from Fandom will be deleted by Fandom staff.

[duskwuff]

And they will remove rights from wiki admins who take steps to advertise alternate resources.