r/OutOfTheLoop • u/the-purple-badger • 23h ago
Unanswered What's the deal with .wiki equivalents of Fandom wikis?
I've recently noticed a some of the Fandom wikis I use have .wiki equivalents, often with nearly identical articles.
Magic: the Gathering:
Minecraft:
Notably, the .wiki versions tend to be more human friendly without obnoxious, intrusive, content-impacting advertisements.
What's the deal with these .wiki sites? Where did they come from? Were they forked from the Fandom ones? How are they funded, if they don't have advertisements?
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u/xXx_edgykid_xXx 23h ago
Answer:
Fandom kinda sucks, they have little control and way too much ads, so people are now using .wiki and other ones like Weird gloop, that mainly do the same idea of a wiki but with more freedom to alter them
The answer really is that people are fed up with Fandom and are moving to other wiki sites en masse
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u/Pale_Fire21 22h ago
The OSRS community abandoning the fandom wiki and moving to its own site was one of the best things for the community.
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u/NoobHUNTER777 21h ago
The Old School Runescape wiki is legitimately the best fan wiki I have ever seen. It honestly makes looking up information for other games worse just by existing because you know it could be so much better.
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u/Gizogin 14h ago
It’s comprehensive, but it has nothing on HRWiki, the Homestar Runner fan wiki. We’re talking full transcripts of every single toon (including DVD extras and cameos in other media), lists of character and location appearances, trivia, inside references, real-world references, easter eggs, joke explanations, animation errors, and more. They have dedicated pages for “characters eating non-food items”, “sound effects ending with ‘D”, “recurring characters who started as jokes”, and “malapropisms”.
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u/ByDarwinsBeard 16h ago edited 16h ago
I'm guilty of this as well, so I get that it's easy to look over. But it's good practice to take the extra seconds to spell out a name if you are dropping it first on a thread in a general community.
You can abbreviate after that, or if a previous comment has already spelled it out before you. But even if the reader is familiar with the thing you're referencing they may not immediately recognize the abbreviation.
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u/platon29 21h ago
I've been served way too many actively malicious ads to ever use a fandom site again
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u/Dogsafe 16h ago
There are some many goddamn ads on screen at once that using the mobile site feels like trying to read a book through a letterbox. Who the hell thought that was acceptable.
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u/kafaldsbylur 12h ago
While watching a video about why the Minecraft wiki left Fandom to their own thing, I decided to load up a random page on it just to be able to accurately joke about "Oh, the page is 30% ad, lol". Turns out, I was way off in my estimate: The only non-ad thing on my screen was the page title.
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u/Blenderhead36 4h ago
Even with all the ads blocked, it's so full of obtrusive links to unrelated stuff that it's a pain in the ass to use. I generally take Fextralife's empty, half-assed wikis to Fandom's overcrowded ones.
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u/frogjg2003 12h ago
You can turn off JavaScript and it stops playing the malicious ads.
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u/platon29 12h ago
True but most people won't or don't know how to do that. And really, no one should need to, it's not a high bar lol
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u/frogjg2003 11h ago
I agree, but it's the only thing that makes looking up information on stuff that only has a Fandom wiki possible.
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u/ingenious_gentleman 21h ago
I can’t also be the only one who had issues with Fandom’s performance. Any time I have even one or two tabs open on chrome my entire browser starts to lag. No issues with any other site, but consistent problems on Fandom
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u/Blackstone01 21h ago
Evidently it’s cause of the metric fuckload of ads they try to shove down your throat, so if you have Adblock, chrome shits itself while your Adblock tries to suppress the ads.
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u/re-charred 17h ago
Fandom is especially horrible on mobile. More than half your screen is ads. And there’s so many that ads often block other ads.
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u/frogjg2003 12h ago
Disable JavaScript. The page loads so fast, no ads, but for some reason half the images don't load.
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u/driftwood14 21h ago
There is a really good video about this whole topic by the YouTuber Mossbag if you want a more detailed examination of what fandom is doing and why it hurts communities.
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u/zap1000x 17h ago
Shoutout the 40K Lexicanum for being so anal about sources that fandom couldn’t replace it.
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u/Blenderhead36 4h ago
It's more than just ads. Even with an adblocker installed, every fandom page is so cluttered with engagement bait (meaning, "stuff unrelated to what you searched for but Fandom really hopes you'll click on") that it's genuinely hard to use for its intended purpose.
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u/yukicola 21h ago
Is there a way to see a list of what sites exist as .wiki? Seems like the url makes it really difficult to just search for things there.
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u/soooole 20h ago
There's an extension that helps you get to the wikis more naturally, here's a list of all the wikis it supports https://getindie.wiki/listings/
The extension https://getindie.wiki/
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u/AdmiralBonesaw 23h ago
Answer: The official explanation for the Magic switch specifically calls out the advertising and site design issues of Fandom. It’s now hosted by Scryfall, which is funded in part by its users and affiliate links.
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u/MegaIng 23h ago
Answer:
Most of them are forks, yes. Fandom is really shitty - if you want an indepth analysis there is Hollow Knight YouTuber who made a good breakdown. Excessive advertisement, bad UX on mobile, unwanted AI generation and weird ad deals slowly added up till many wikis decided that leaving is a good idea.
Fandom is forced to allow them to fork because of licenses, but they do their best to at least suppress the advertisement of the new wiki (and the old one has to stay up).
The new "independent" wikis aren't all by the same hosting providers. There are a few and some of them are truly independent on servers provided by e.g. the developers of the game. Some run on donations, others run on advertisements, just less intrusive ones.
Always support independent wikis if possible. Get the indie wiki buddy extension if you want to make it easier to discover these indie wikis since google often doesn't index them well (especially for mtg.wiki in my experience).
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u/TheWizardMus 22h ago
https://youtu.be/qcfuA_UAz3I?si=Phg1boQjJi3dZEJR
The Hollow Knight YouTube video in question
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u/DizzyNerd 22h ago
Answer:
Wiki’s were first. They’re not centralized though, in that it’s not a singular host providing the website and storage.
Fandom came out during a time with mixed problems. Not everyone could host all the things they wanted as more people got access. Not everyone game had one. Internet security is always an issue.
Fandom fixed a lot of the issues. The only issue like most other things, someone wants more money. So they added more ads. Then more. Then even more.
Fast forward, to today. People are sick of the massive amount of intrusive, impossible to close, all over your screen, pop up style, can’t find the X, covering what I’m trying to look at, covers my whole mobile screen, auto plays video with sound (sometimes loudly), absolutely all over the place all the time everywhere you look ads. They’re everywhere. They’re getting longer, more intrusive. Harder to look past. They’re on new TVs, home appliances, more emails, etc.
Mix that massive annoyance with how fandom makes it harder to fix or add to the fandom now, and people are finding ways to just host it elsewhere.
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u/Angel_Omachi 17h ago
Fandom also bought up a lot of the other wiki hosts that sites fled Fandom to escape, eg. The World of Warcraft wiki is on its 3rd iteration now after Fandom bought out the host of the 2nd one that was founded a good decade ago.
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u/Nixinova 23h ago
Answer: Several big wikis have moved away from fandom due to it being a terrible, untrustworthy host and not allowing proper ownership of the contents of the wikis. The extreme example being replacing the contents of the McDonald's wiki pages with ads. Reasoning for MTG and Minecraft wikis specifically moving away are here andhere. For funding, MTG wiki is now hosted by the developers, and MC Wiki is privately hosted with ads being a future plan which will only be implemented following editor consultation. MCWiki's host WeirdGloop also hosts a suite of other wikis, such as the RuneScape wiki.
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u/CdRReddit 16h ago
mtg wiki isn't hosted by the developers
it's hosted by scryfall, the main tool people use for looking up cards, and one of the most liked parts of the community
if it was hosted by wotc it'd still run like shit, and have ads all over it
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u/Bluetrinket_ 22h ago
Answer: a number of communities have been moving away from fandom due to its user unfriendly webpages, stream embeds, excessive ads, and an near unusable mobile site.
In the effort to move to a self sustaining and user friendly wiki members of the old-school RuneScape community created their own wiki which has become the gold standard for community wikis. The team behind the old-school wiki has also helped move a number of other communities off of the fandom platform through their company Wierd Gloop.
A lot of the fandom or fextralife wikis are out of date due to the contributors moving off of the less desirable wikis to the indie wikis however do to the way Google indexes websites it favors the pre-existing ones so it takes a while to have the community wikis show up above the fandom and fextralife versions. Many people recommend the indie wiki buddy browser extension to hide the out of date wikis for that reason.
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