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Flax_vert ,

Mfw you want to check some quick Minecraft details and you get a pop up then half your screen covered with one video. Thank heavens that they created minecraft.wiki as a wiki is basically essential for playing that game.

mana ,

This is one of the main reasons I use Kagi. I have sites like fandom and fextralife blocked in my search results.

One of the things I miss about early internet years was all the independent fan sites and forums people had. Now, so much is just posted to these garbage platforms that control everything.

Gaybees ,
@Gaybees@artemis.camp avatar

Yes!! Gotta love Kagi and the ability to tailor search results to be exactly what you want.

janAkali ,

I use Metager instead - it’s FOSS and also has an option to filter out choosen domains from the search results.

Jarmer ,

and recently the AI written garbage “gamer” websites have become a problem as well. You can tell instantly that some ai just collected and regurgitated a bunch of text that doesn’t even make sense.

Now I pretty much stick just to the fan created wikis. Stuff like bg3.wiki and uesp.net

YarHarSuperstar ,
@YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world avatar

What’s wrong with fextralife? I’m ootl

mana ,

Fextralife embeds their twitch stream into their site, artificially inflating their twitch viewer numbers, which in turn hurts smaller streamers since fextralife will be sorted first by viewer count.

val , (edited )

They game SEO to flood search results with articles that are pure, useless placeholders which most of the time will never be written. Even when they’re more than a placeholder page, they’re often wrong outside of a few games because they’re just there to get clicks. Downvote bots were used against links to competing wikis, and while Fextralife denies it, they were conveniently spared.

There is more shady behavior out there around Fextra, but the most important thing for a user is there is almost always a better wiki that’s being suppressed in the search results. If you blacklist the site you’re a lot more likely to find something useful.

YarHarSuperstar ,
@YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world avatar

Oh wow. Is it still worth using on games like elden ring where they have a good amount of info on every page?

val ,

Still haven’t gotten around to playing Elden Ring so I don’t know if there are better alternatives.

val ,

Another comment without watching so I might be repeating something in the video, but did they mention how poor bloated the site is? I was trying to use the Forgotten Realms wiki and after a few tabs it would grind my browser to a halt. For something that really just needs to be serving text and a few images it’s wild how badly the site performs.

cttttt ,

Yah. Fandom is an Adblock-required site. And even then it’s pretty hard to browse.

TheNanaimoBarScene ,
@TheNanaimoBarScene@lemmy.ca avatar

I agree with the premise; fandom sucks. But does it really require a 20 minute exposé though?

I’ve seen a few links to the Indie Wiki Buddy extension page. I’m not too interested in installing a browser extension to find new wikis, but I bookmarked their listing page: getindie.wiki/listings/

Lizzy_Wizzy ,

Saw this yesterday. Great video that informed me on something I was completely oblivious to. Fuck fandom

dx1 ,

I got special Stylish CSS blocking half the shit on Fandom. IDK about any politics about them but the site is borderline unusable.

Jhogenbaum ,

Easy. Never heard of it. Done.

Psychodelic ,

Lemmy has more niche users (read: geeks/nerds) on one site than I’ve ever experienced.

It’s awesome, but man, I feel so out of my element. I thought I was a nerd on reddit but on lemmy I have like no idea what half of the users are talking about or consider normal. It’s legit fascinating, tbh. I really wish it was possible to see the demographics of users here

morgunkorn , (edited )
@morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

My easy solution, whenever I land on a fandom page, is to add “anti” in front of the domain name, “antifandom” will filter out the crep out of the original page and present a clean version of the wiki. This is powered by BreezeWiki

Example:

edit: typo, added example

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

That’s really cool!

victron ,
@victron@programming.dev avatar

Thanks for sharing, didn’t know that.

terrehbyte ,

An extension called Indie Wiki Buddy can also help with this by helping direct you to known alternatives to fandom for specific franchises or falling back to Breezewiki-based instances that rehost Fandom content without all of the Fandom bloat. It also provides this filtering and hinting to search results too, so you don’t have to change your workflow too much to use it.

Chetzemoka ,

I don’t seem to run into a lot of Hollow Knight fans around here yet so I popped over to the HK community on that other website. Confirm: this video is one of the top trending on YouTube today lol. I figured, mossbag is…shall we say a very well-known figure in the community, if you’re not in the know.

I absolutely still rely on the wiki for HK shit I can’t remember like boss HP scaling and where tf was that last item I need for that one upgrade god dammit?? Glad to see them move to somewhere independent. Will donate.

xvlc ,

You might have heard of alternative frontends to services such as YouTube (Piped, Invidious), X/Twitter (Nitter), etc.

Something similar exists for Fandom: Breezewiki. This instance seems to occasionally result in errors, other instances seem to work more reliable.

Vipsu ,
@Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

Fandom hosts a lot of wikis for long forgotten nich’e games and with these games there usually isn’t enough interest to move to another wiki. When it comes to these wikis theres rarely if ever a team behind updating the wiki and more often than not the content is just being updated and maintained by random invidividuals who just happen to be engaging with the content at given time. The very low barrier of entry makes this possible as you don’t really need to join a team to edit pages or even coordinate with other people.

When playing one of these games I like to record and share some my observations and findings about games mechanics etc but more often than not the only wiki I can find is fandom wiki that is either incomplete and possibly even abandoned. I cant be bothered to create my own Wiki for these games so I’ll just start editing that one instead because it’s easy, the foundation is usually already there and I don’t need to bother taking any sort of responsibility/mantle of maintainer or admin.

While Fandom may not be the most optimal choice and there may be better ways to host wiki out there its still better than some obnoxious google document or poorly formatted steam guide that no one else can edit.

wildginger ,

The reason you often cannot find smaller wikis is because this site killed them off.

Vipsu ,
@Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

All too common within attention economy for people to go for the more popular choice.
Search engine algorithms tend to make things even worse.

But there are games out there that might not even have wikis if Fandom didn’t make the barrier of entry so low.

wildginger ,

What games are so small as to not be capable of generating a non fandom wiki, but are large enough that the wiki is not completely empty and factually incorrect?

Vipsu ,
@Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

Well old games like The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut or Moero Chronicles.
Neither of these where completely empty when I found them. Been updating them and filling some gaps in the wiki for the fun of it.

Many would consider both of these games “dead” by many metrics but people can still buy them, play them and have fun with them.

wildginger ,

And wiki.gg wouldnt host them?

Vipsu ,
@Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

The problem is that the content is already in wiki fandom and there are no contributors invested/interested enough to migrate all the information to alternative wiki. These fandom wikis have no teams just random individuals making contributions of various sizes.

If I do ever get invested enough to a game to actually create a wiki I’ll definately use something else than fandom.

wildginger ,

… Didnt you just say you made those 2 examples? Or did I misread

Vipsu ,
@Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

Quoting what I said in earlier reply:

Neither of these where completely empty when I found them. Been updating them and filling some gaps in the wiki for the fun of it.

I have not created any wikis myself I’ve just contributed to few that I’ve found which unfortunately have been hosted on fandom.

wildginger ,

Ah, I did misread.

Pretty sure wiki.gg has a wiki port request, so the fandom versions can be moved

Resol ,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

I wish I could, but I like browsing Logopedia which is hosting on Fandom and has announced no plans to leave the site. If they did, I’d completely abandon that place and block everything that has to do with them.

And no, it’s not easy to migrate a database of hundreds of thousands of logos to another wikifarm, especially if new stuff arrives all the time.

hal_5700X ,
@hal_5700X@lemmy.world avatar

Who knows of a good Final Fantasy wiki?

g6d3np81 ,
@g6d3np81@kbin.social avatar

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 ,

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.

g6d3np81 ,
@g6d3np81@kbin.social avatar

Misinformation may reduce repeat visit, that part, I have no idea if google take into account when they rank the result. Domain/page age also plays a role. But what about other "problems"? If I try to de-optimize every items on that guide, will it speed up the de-rank as well?

Stovetop ,

UESP has also been the best information resource for Elder Scrolls since forever but that doesn’t stop Fandom’s Elder Scrolls Wiki from being the first result if you Google “Dunmer”.

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