Has anyone else noticed that Wikis for most games just aren’t as complete anymore?
I’m the one helping to fill in stuff these days when I swear most games had pretty fully Wiki pages within a week of release. Have most of these just moved to actual Gaming article websites? They sure as hell haven’t gone to Gamefaqs lol.
I’ve recently played Diablo 4, Remnant 2, 30XX, Armored Core 6, and just started Have a Nice Death… and I’ve had to help with additions on nearly every free Wiki… Never used to have to do this…
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I wonder how much it has to do with how much of a shithole the Fandom network is. Between the godawful UX, aggressive SEO to bury competing wikis in search results, and scummy business practices that effectively prevent wiki admins from migrating to other hosts, the idea of maintaining a game wiki probably isn’t all that appealing these days.
I miss Wikia…
I am forever grateful that halopedia rolled their own wiki and was spared from the fandom plague.
Another stark comparison is UESP vs. Fandom for elder scrolls lore. Fandom is absolute cancer, poor UX even with an adblocker.
UESP is such a gem
Yeah I find it completely unusable. I can’t use wookiepedia anymore because it is just awful to use. Like you said, it’s awful even with an ad blocker
Wikidot was the shit for Dark Souls games 😙👌
Fandom ruined actual good wikis. God that site is so shit, why do people keep using it?
Because monopoly.
Shit, Mojang used to maintain their own wiki for Minecraft, but it was dropped and migrated to Fandom and now none of us can have nice things.
I was about to reply and say “nuh uh, the Minecraft wiki isn’t a Fandom one”, but jesus you’re right.
It used to be independent until Curse started Gamepedia and then got bought by Wikia.
How is it a monopoly when mediawiki is FOSS? Lots of fan wikis use that instead.
Monopolies aren’t defined by the availability of alternatives. It’s based on the market share captured by a single entity. We’d need to see statistics to determine if it’s a total monopoly, but I’m not aware of many other hosting platforms for game wikis. Maybe fextralife?
Yeah I think hosting is the thing that they’ve captured, far more than the notion of a domain-specific wiki. Of course, there’s nothing stopping an aspiring wiki admin from hosting on a platform that isn’t targeted at game wikis.
PSA for people sick of fandom: www.antifandom.com has the same content on an ad-free UI
its a mirror of www.breezewiki.com which has a search on the home page as well as a list of other mirrors
I think we hugged it too hard
breezewiki.com is another mirror and looks to be still working
@cre0 @blanketswithsmallpox many of my video game related searches end with -fandom. Thank you for this.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that people have become less willing to contribute to wikis, now that the likes of Fandom/Wikia and Fextralife are the dominant wiki hosts. Who wants to give away their free labour and time to profit corporations, and have their work mired in cesspools of obnoxious advertising, awkward javascript interfaces, and web tracking?
I think what we need are independent wiki hosts. For example, have a look at https://bg3.wiki/
To help your point. Halopedia is still extremely active and will have info from new books within a week. The site has their own software and it’s community run, so people still feel engaged.
I think you’re entirely on the money
Yeah I remember seeing an article about Baldur’s Gate 3 having a wiki being unique.
Simple fact is that hosting costs $$$. And you don’t get something free unless there’s ads involved or you’re so small you can cover the cost yourself.
Perhaps there’s an opportunity here for a nonprofit organization, accepting donations like wikimedia does, to offer hosting to gaming communities?
Edit:
This would not only benefit gamers directly, but also help with cultural preservation, which is increasingly problematic as games disappear from store fronts.
Also, a wiki run by a funded organization is less likely to vanish than one operated by a single person, whose circumstances might change.
Terraria wiki is not a fandom site
I expect you mean terraria.wiki.gg, rather than terraria.fandom.com (which was the first result in my web search). I don’t love the fact that it has a google tracker, but otherwise, it looks nice.
Looks like Pokémon also has an independent (but not tracker-free) wiki: bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net
Yeah, terraria.wiki.gg is the official site.
Pokemon even has another wiki that’s almost entirely dedicated to game data, Serebii, and yes, the design is dated, and yes, it is also the most accurate and concise source of knowledge for the series.
Because Fandom has ruined the interface, and most people just watch YouTube tutorials
I’m surprised you could tell, I can’t find the wiki content beneath all the ads
Was it a few years ago Fandom started buying up all these wiki websites?
Then they started with the ads and it all went to shit.
There were a bunch of games that had to move their shit off Fandom because it was a mess…
Now when you want an answer to a simple question, you have to fast track through a some rando’s 5min youtube video to get the answer, where they could have put the answer in the title.
Satisfactory and Path of Exile are two games in recent memory that specifically moved their official wiki’s away from Fandom,
Coffee Stain Studios seem really give an actual shit about their fans.
It does seem like we need kind of a federated network of wikis.
There was nothing wrong with the gamefaqs model, not every game needs or deserves a fully fleshed out wiki. Wikis are great if you want to know more about a game universe and its characters but are pretty awful as walkthroughs.
Agreed. I could completely understand why Gamefaq FAQ creators stopped though.
It’s A LOT of work. For no payoff besides name recognition and being a good guy. If there were community built GameFAQs sure, but they’re by author. I’ve never seen a community based Walkthrough in the classic text based only format.
Figure I’ll just dump a list of non-fandom wikis I use here.
Tolkien Gateway - General Tolkien stuff
LOTRO Wiki - Lord of the Rings Online
UESP - Elder Scrolls
BG3 Wiki - Baldurs Gate 3
Halopedia - Halo
OSRS - Runescape
Add Doom Wiki as well for all things Doom related
Great addition, I didn’t know about that.
Wikia/fandom swallowed up the market but are also just bad at running a wiki network.
Along with all the problems that come with fan wikis. There’s like two F-Zero wikia right now because the first one was just overrun by fannon and at one point some random person’s OCs and fan theory. And then there’s the Xenoblade wikia repeatedly making edits and then locking pages because the owners have something against the newer games being connected to the older ones, even denying thing’s like weapons that are called Monados, work like Monados and even use the same arts as Shulk’s Monado being “real” monados.
They’re all just ads
Suppose there is a federated ActivityPub based Wiki network, how would that work? Fandom is so terrible for looking up actual info with irritating video ads, especially since after they brought out their competition from Curse.
I don’t think it’d work all that well to be frank. You’d wind up with dozens of pages for each subject since each instance can have their own. You could probably come up with a distinct federated solution that might work though, where the servers are federated but the content is shared. Not sure how that would look in practice though, and how you could keep instances from diverging
I get that wikis cost a little time and money to host and run them, but the studios/devs should offer up a wiki on release that could be moderated by a combo of employees and/or volunteers. They’re losing the opportunity to drive community engagement and keep it all close by letting these big wiki sites it up all the competition.
It’s a little money, it’s a /lot/ of time. And for what, what does a company actually get by doing it themselves?
The company wouldn’t be the ones in charge of handling the wikis content. It would be up to the community like is being done now in other cases.
I’m mainly saying that it would be helpful if they provided the space vs it being done by independent companies/orgs.
I like this idea in principle, but in practice, I suspect the same companies that often abandon games (and even whole platforms) would also discontinue their wikis. I would like information about the games I buy today to still be around when I play them again in ten or twenty years.
That’s a good point. Fan hosted wikis have the same issue unless they’re maintained and funded by users. Big wiki companies are becoming scummy.
I get not every game is on steam, and not everyone games on PC, but maybe Steam could implement something like this as I don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon.
Or maybe we need to bring back good ol printed game guides.
I think part of the problem is just that there are a lot more good games that people know about! Unfortunately one of the tradeoffs for all the riches of heaven is that it’s a lot harder to cover them all.
