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.
Fextralife is utter shit. Always giving you the most unrelated information in the longest amount of time all while being forced to watch a stream you don’t care about.
If they’re on Fandom, it’s because Fandom fucking sucks to work with. It sucks to view, and it sucks to edit. So I could understand people not wanting to deal with that shit.
They’re also still new and fairly large games. Unless the dev itself makes the wiki, they don’t usually have much content the first year or so of a game’s life.
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.
Open Hexagon is pretty good if you enjoy music reaction/arcade games. It’s an open source successor of Super Hexagon with several community made level packs. The only flaw is the steep learning curve of the gameplay.
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.
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.
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,
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 bg3.wiki
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.
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
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.
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 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.
They don’t actually let admins shut down their wikis or remove content from them. They can leave and start a new wiki, but they have to leave the old one in place (for which Fandom could potentially just find new admins), and they can only link to the new wiki from the Fandom wiki for a period of two weeks. With Fandom’s SEO, there’s a good chance the Fandom wiki will still be ahead of search results of a new wiki even after migration. Source
I wonder if this could be mitigated (or even nullified) by a cooperative game developer, through DMCA takedown notices sent to Fandom. There is a lot of art on these wikis, after all, and I imagine the copyright holder has some say in who is allowed to distribute it.
Thank you. I’ve been dabbling with the idea of establishing a non-profit for my lemmy instance. I’m not a user of game/movie/etc wikis, but I do love looking after my servers. I wonder if a non-profit owned wiki site bear any weight over time.
Man this was an issue already some 10 years ago when touhou wiki went self-hosted. It took a whole year for google to get memo and link the new one above the old.
Nowadays I assume it’s pretty much impossible to reverse the flow unless if your game is huge and highly sought after.
Honestly if I was migrating away from Fandom I’d do everything I can to burn every bridge. Go through and edit every page to have every link redirect to the better wiki. Ignore their 2-week period, and don’t inform the Fandom overlords that the wiki is being shut down (it’s not like they’re going to check without being prompted).
I’d make them ban me, and then good luck finding an admin.
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.
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