After several discussions, we are excited to announce that the Minecraft Wiki has now moved from Fandom to minecraft.wiki – all of the information about the game can now be found at the new location!
I only just switched over to firefox + UBO on my phone, and it's so much better. I had just assumed that the beautiful ad-free experience I get on my PC wasn't available on phone, but by jove it is.
Yeah as another Firefox + Ublock Origin user, I came in here to say I've noticed a lot of game wikis announcing they're migrating off of Fandom, and I'm curious as to why. I'm OoTL.
The Terraria wiki is hosted on wiki.gg, which the Minecraft wiki editors strongly considered (reading through the discussion, it seemed like a strong second choice behind Weird Gloop/RuneScape wiki). But wiki.gg really has a lot of the same problems as fandom, just to a lesser degree. Still has a fair amount of ads, still has wiki.gg branding on the website, and most importantly in the discussions I read, they wouldn’t be able to use a domain the Minecraft wiki owns (as in it wold have been at minecraft.wiki.gg rather than minecraft.wiki).
The big problem with not having their own domain is that if things ever go south with wiki.gg (for example if they get bought by Fandom), they would be starting from scratch as far as SEO/discoverability goes, same as they are now.
Weird Gloop (the host for the RuneScape wikis) offered fewer ads, a comparable hosting infrastructure, and the ability to use their own domain, as well as a lot of experience forking from fandom successfully, which sounds like it was really valuable to them.
It's reached the point (or had a couple of years ago, which was the last time I went to a wiki hosted there) that it's virtually impossible to even read an entry, since there are so many ads that the actual text of the article spends more time off the screen than on it.
It's embarrassing that huge and ongoing successful games can't shell out to host official wikis, but instead leave it to the community to either pay out or pocket (not happening) or pick whichever crappy provider they can find willing to host it for ads.
A good wiki needs to have mosly text, a modest amount of pictures, no self-hosted video, and low computing needs. While an unpleasant expense for a private individual, it doesn't cost a company much to host.
While I agree that it's rather sad for developer not hosting their Wiki, I really never had any problem with the old hoster of the Minecraft Wiki. I certainly didn't perceive it as a "crappy provider". It did exactly what it needed to and there weren't any intrusive adds or at least not to my attention. But maybe I'm just really good at ignoring adds myself.
Edit: Or mabye my add blocker did help, hard to tell since I haven't seen the internet without it since years now.
Ya, not all are the level of Fandom. The old one for Minecraft was somewhat tolerable without an ad-blocker. I don't really feel it is fair to blame the providers either - even Fandom. They are stepping up to offer something nobody else feels like paying for.
While fandom sucks (although I think it used to be fine before the redesign many years ago) and game companies/publishers are cheap, I still think 3rd party wikis is going to better, even shitty ones like fandom, because guess what?
Just like every other 'live service' (or even just old games!?! if you're Ubisoft) everything will be fine and dandy until one day some suit decides to shut down the wiki to cut down on costs and all that information and community work gets flushed down the toilet.
With that said, instead of them making some wiki website, it's nice when games lets you look up information in the game itself, without having to open the web browser and going to some wiki.
Arenanet provides a Wiki for Guild Wars 1 and 2. They are both amazing and the second one even integrates into GW2. When GW1 came out it started as a community service but Arenanet took it in officially.
Honestly, without the wiki and the massive work by the community I'd be very lost in GW2.
Looking it up, there is WikiWikiWeb implements Federated Wiki, which Wikipedia describes its primary features as:
adds forking features found in source control systems and other software development tools to wikis. [...]The software allows its users to fork wiki pages, maintaining their own copies. Federation supports what Cunningham has described as "a chorus of voices" where users share content but maintain their individual perspectives. This approach contrasts with the tendency of centralized wikis such as Wikipedia to function as consensus engines.
Gonna look more into Federated Wiki today, because this sounds super interesting to me c:
I don't think a built-in wiki should be a priority for Lemmy. The sysadmin of an instance.com instance can host a separate web app as a standalone wiki at wiki.instance.com.
For example, you could host an mdbook at this subdomain to serve as a docs-style wiki.
Going to a site with a terrible autoplay pseudo-podcast that refreshes on every new page is basically the MySpace experience. It’s incredibly difficult, by the way, for small projects to have their wikis deleted and wiki site staff are less than helpful. Always nice for a defunct wiki to rise to the top of search results when the project website hosts quite a bit more identically formatted information but without random penis based articles. I love that.
This was a good change. Fandom always felt so amateurish even though it's supposedly a big host. I like things to be more like wikipedia and not some blog masquerading as a wiki.
Fandom has since become one of my least favorite websites, simply because of the ads, and the "Honest Trailers" videos that automatically show up (and follow you) regardless of the topic of the page you're on, not to mention that their mobile site is pure garbage. It's just pure garbage, alright.
And I'm a person who browses Logopedia regularly, which is still hosted on Fandom. Boo. Thank goodness the Minecraft Wiki left that.
It's unbelievably frustrating to see Fextralife constantly on the top of Twitch charts because they embed their twitch stream on every page to generate views.
I was playing a Souls game while checking some info from Fandom on my phone. Unbeknownst to me the site was eating all my mobile data because of a live twitch stream playing on a muted and invisible player. Fuck those fuckers.
I'm trying to figure out how to contact DuckDuckGo, so they can redirect the !mcwiki command to the new site, but no luck so far.
EDIT: Nevermind, I found the form.
DuckDuckGo has a page for adding or updating !bang commands (used to redirect searches to other sites). I requested they change which URL !mcwiki searches get directed to, using the minecraft.wiki search pattern instead of the gamepedia or fandom one. https://duckduckgo.com/newbang
ITT: people pretend to actually give a fuck about where a minecraft wiki is hosted just so they can join the rest of the crowds shitting on fandom (deserved)
How many of you commenters actually make frequent use of the wiki and aren’t just using this op to bitch and moan. Can’t wait for Reddit 2.0 here on lemmy.
Edit: cool downvote brigade, the point remains, if you’re not using an adblocker that’s on you. And if you are, then you didn’t have an issue with fandom. There’s a million other wikis out there that were just as good if not better, and y’all know it.
You just want to shit on stuff like everyone else. Seems weird to me, so many other things to care about.
It’s the internet, the information issues everywhere. I’d rather give the dude with 100 views on YouTube a visit than any whack ass wiki site their traffic. _(o_o)_/ sorry i guess
Appreciate your input, was targeting the handful of people on the comments who are using an article as an excuse to continue pointless negative bitching
Wikis are Uber helpful, esp when you’re doing mod packs or they update game mechanics (mob spawning, I’m looking at you, ya cheeky fuck)
My main point here overall is that fandom wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone leads on and I’m sick and tired of negative echo chambers where people bitch just to bitch and claim that their venting is somehow equivalent to objective fact and not what it is: venting frustrations that extend far out of the reach of a fucking Minecraft wiki with some ads no worse than the most popular social media platforms.
I usually consult the wiki multiple times during any Minecraft session, and I have been frustrated with it ever since they moved to fandom. Back in the day it was a standalone wiki and then at some point after beta it was enshittified. So I'm super excited about this change because it is a huge QOL change to my Minecraft experience