Fandom purchasing Gamepedia and moving everything onto Fandom Wikia was so awful. I’m so upset the Dota2 Gamepedia wiki is now on Fandom, and I’m sure many other communities feel that way for their own community run and community led wiki pages.
Not that I was particularly warm about Gamepedia either, but at the bare minimum I didn’t feel like the page was all ads and no information. Fandom wikis are explicitly set-up to drive as many eyeballs as possible onto advertising and engagement, and are holding actually relevant information for the visitor as a hostage to get those eyeballs. It’s information masquerading as a social media site.
The Runescape community convincing Jagex to cover the hosting costs and moving all their wiki pages to their own set-up has been such a huge boon for their community. It is super unfortunate that for many communities, the community-led wiki pages are a huge trove of information but the companies/games/groups these communities coalesce around have shown little to no interest in merely just financially supporting the endeavor.
I’m certain that Jagex wasn’t necessarily doing that out of the kindness of their hearts. RuneScape community sites have had a history of advertisements that border on malware at worst, are paid phishing attempts at best, and benevolently full of grey market account services and real world trading platforms.
Best case scenario was them hosting the platform to protect the integrity of their game, and the community.
Not to distract from the good move that it was, of course.
If I recall correctly, the official Minecraft wiki used to be a custom/self-hosted MediaWiki installation. They moved to Fandom at some point.
It was hosted on gamepedia and it was called official, but when fandom bought gamepedia and moved the wiki to their site it lost its official status
Fandom purchasing Gamepedia and moving everything onto Fandom Wikia was so awful. I’m so upset the Dota2 Gamepedia wiki is now on Fandom, and I’m sure many other communities feel that way for their own community run and community led wiki pages.
Not that I was particularly warm about Gamepedia either, but at the bare minimum I didn’t feel like the page was all ads and no information. Fandom wikis are explicitly set-up to drive as many eyeballs as possible onto advertising and engagement, and are holding actually relevant information for the visitor as a hostage to get those eyeballs. It’s information masquerading as a social media site.
The Runescape community convincing Jagex to cover the hosting costs and moving all their wiki pages to their own set-up has been such a huge boon for their community. It is super unfortunate that for many communities, the community-led wiki pages are a huge trove of information but the companies/games/groups these communities coalesce around have shown little to no interest in merely just financially supporting the endeavor.
I’m certain that Jagex wasn’t necessarily doing that out of the kindness of their hearts. RuneScape community sites have had a history of advertisements that border on malware at worst, are paid phishing attempts at best, and benevolently full of grey market account services and real world trading platforms.
Best case scenario was them hosting the platform to protect the integrity of their game, and the community.
Not to distract from the good move that it was, of course.