The Hollow Knight wiki community is another in a long line of wiki communities choosing to leave Fandom behind. But why is that? What is it about Fandom that...
    • simple@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      9·
      2 years ago

      The video pretty much describes why Fandom is so bad and why many games are moving their wikis to alternative services, and why you should stop using it in general. Some examples include:

      • Ads everywhere, including autoplaying video ads that play another ad when they’re done. There are also ads sneakily inserted in the middle of articles that are related to the wiki, like a Gamespot review (Gamespot is owned by Fandom)

      • A sidebar you can’t remove that promotes their content

      • Fandom hijacked the community’s Mcdonald’s wiki to turn it into a giant advertisement

      • Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages

      • Fandom sometimes introduces things nobody wants, such as AI generated answers that are usually wrong, take up the top half of the page, and with no way for wiki admins to remove it. They removed it after a lot of backlash but still…

      • When people fork their wikis to other sites, fandom refuses to let admins delete their old wikis. This makes new wikis difficult to start because Fandom usually ends up as the top result on search engines, even if they’re old abandoned wikis.

        • buddhabound@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          And then you learn about Fextra’s embedded twitch player that artificially inflates their twitch view count and pushes out smaller content creators who are actually trying to engage with a game’s audience.

  • w3dd1e@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    TLDR; Fandom has a lot of QAnon articles written to make the scams seem legitimate to less computer savvy people.

    My mom has fallen in a Qanon conspiracy world. The people from that world write Fandom articles about themselves to make it seem legitimate. I found them when I started investigating these people trying to convince her to steer clear.

    I don’t trust a single thing on Fandom anymore.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Or we could just… host our own wikis. There’s plenty of open source software for them. It’s not hard. Not everything needs to be federated.

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      decentralized open alternative (like lemmy) to take back control

      which unfortunately still require capital to run

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        We can’t just get out of capitalism, but you can work to improve your situation. If you have a yard, grow a garden.

        Also, see if there’s a mutual aid group in your area, and if not consider talking with your neighbors about what you can do to help each other out. One person might be good with car Maintanance. Another might be a good gardener. Everyone can contribute something.

          • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            Where did I say it would solve the climate crisis? I was just having an alternative to capitalism to provide some of your food. Of course it won’t dismantle capitalism or save the world. People have been gardening forever, yet here we are. It’s just a step you can take to take some control over your situation back.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.

      There was a time, long ago, where companies actually cared about their customers, and wanted to sell them good products while making a profit, and they strived for the win - win, and the “customer is always right” philosophy. They took their fair share, and they didn’t triy to squeeze every last dime out of their customers with crappy products.

      Not that that they were saints by any stretch of the imagination (there were definitely bad players back then too) but there used to be a sense of ethics with Capitalism, in America at least, a sense of products being warrantied to work the way they should be and advertised as how they would actually work.

      I have no effing idea how to get back to that state, as it seems like the “lunch for wimps” crowd are running the c-suites these days.

  • venia_sil@fedia.io
    1·
    2 years ago

    Starting up wikis is so easy nowadays that there’s no excuse. I maintain a few Dokuwiki-based ones, it’s my preferred engine for simple wiki stuff, but Mediawiki (the same one that powers Wikipedia) is not bad either and not really too difficult, just a bit more demanding storage-wise. Heck, you can currently fire-and-forget DW-based wikis on SDF’s “one payment” access tier, even! Probably on Neocities too, haven’t checked.

  • M500@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I loath this site. It’s rarely loads well and the images never load for me. And it’s always so slow. It’s probably because I have an adblocker.

    • at_an_angle@lemmy.oneEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I’ve found the best way to browse Fandom(if necessary) is to use a VPN set to Nordic countries. Ads are very generic and in a language I can’t read. So they are very easy to spot.

        • 10EXP@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Better yet: Try the Indie Wiki Buddy extension. It serves 2 purposes:

          1. It redirects you from fandom wikis to the new official wikis, to which the community has now moved from the fandom one. Also filters out fandom results from search engines only if an independent, more up-to-date alternative exists.
          2. If something is still hosted on fandom with no indie wiki, redirects it to a BreezeWiki instance.

          I use it in combination with wiki.gg redirect, which redirects to newer wikis which aren’t independent, but moved to wiki.gg from fandom.

          Update: IndieWikiBuddy can now redirect to Wiki.gg wikis too, no need for wiki.gg redirect.

  • g6d3np81@kbin.social
    0·
    2 years ago

    Regarding SEO, What’s stopping maintainers from vandalizing their own fandom page?

    It would not be difficult to make a bot to update fandom page with a convincing but slightly wrong info, after a few hundred iterations, it’s all useless. Go look at what google recommend and do complete opposite. I’m convinced this will bomb ranking and put whatever wiki they migrated to at the top.

    • djsoren19@yiffit.netEnglish
      01·
      2 years ago

      The disinformation doesn’t really matter. The fandom wiki’s naturally become incorrect over time, since they’re typically no longer maintained after a community switches, so vandalizing it after the fact won’t really change anything. For Path of Exile, it took the developers linking to the new wiki, and about two years of the community sending new players to the correct wiki, before it even started to show up in searches. Even then, I believe the fandom wiki still shows up first if you look at some of the very old entries.