As the person ultimately responsible for the Minecraft Wiki ending up in the hands of Fandom, it is great to see what Weird Gloop (and similar) are achieving. At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run and so it didn't feel too much like selling out, because we needed money to survive[1]. 15 years later, the internet is a different place, and with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective.
If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years).
[1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.
You and your team made (a good portion of) my childhood. I remember spending nights studying all the potion recipes and enchantment odds. Thanks for all you did
I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years.
Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.
A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place, because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps the spam down, yes, but also new users away.
Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.
Their growth people emailed me again and again and tried to do the same with StrategyWiki decades ago.
Here's one of their emails:
> [Redacted] mentioned that your site was very cool - and that you're heading off to college. As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame) and we are trying to become THE resource for all gamers
> I was wondering if you'd consider moving over to wikia now that you're going to might have less time with your studies. As an incentive I can point to a few things that might make the move easier
I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s, back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today, it isn't.
Every time I wind up on some garbage Fandom page I reminisce about the good old days of Wikia. I remember many a fun night trawling through pages while playing Fallout or Skyrim or whatever - all the information you could ever need, right there at your fingertips. It's an ethos you don't see so much on the modern net.
Wikia is a great example of enshittification - provide great value to users, then take it away from users and hand it to other businesses (eg advertisers), then take it away from businesses too.
Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.
Thanks (seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing. Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with instead starting from scratch.
I can't imagine that this would have happened, like ever. The wiki was basically essential reading prior to starting to play Minecraft, especially in the early days. I think most the crafting recipes were documented by the developers themselves during those days.
If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.
I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them.
[1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.
For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.
It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.
> One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.
While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors.
Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.
I don't really know how exploratory most games are compared to old Minecraft. Some games like Stardew Valley have certain things that are much easier to do because of third party wikis but I don't think the same is true of a lot of games in the same way it was for Minecraft.
More than a decade has passed since then so I am stretching my memory. At peak we were serving in the region of 10 million page views per day which made us one of the most popular websites on the internet (Minecraft was a phenomenon and every Minecraft player needed the wiki). We were probably the highest traffic Wiki after Wikipedia. Nowadays Cloudflare could absorb most traffic because of the highly cacheable nature of it, but at the time, Cloudflare didn't exist, and every request hit our servers.
Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!
If you can run your application on Cloudflare Pages / Workers with Cloudflare's storage/DB things, it really gets dirt cheap (if not free) and very fast. And even without that, Cloudflare's caching CDN is very good, very cheap and very easy.
Ten years ago bandwidth was expensive. Still is, even if not as much. A simple VPS gets overwhelmed, but a simple VPS behind cloudflare can do quite well.
Cloudflare caches pages at many many datacenters, often colocated with large ISPs.
This lets Cloudflare deliver pages from their local cache over local links (which is fast and cheap), instead of fetching the data every time across the world from wherever the VPS is located.
In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately obvious:
- For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out.
- You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation.
- Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages.
Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on.
The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs.
If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money.
One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic...
At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...
As I was exploring self-host options that would scale to our org size, it turned out there was already an internal team running a company wide multi-tenant mediawiki PLATFORM.
So I hit them up and a week later we had a custom instance and were off to the races.
Almost all the work that team did was making mediawiki hyper efficient with caching and cache gen, along with a lot of plumbing to have shared infra (AD auth, semitrusted code repos, etc) thst still allowed all of us “customers” to implement whatever whacky extensions and templates we needed.
I still hope that one day Microsoft will acknowledge that they use Mediawiki internally (and to great effect) and open-source the whole stack, or at least offer it as a hosted platform.
I tried setting up a production instance af my next employer - and we ended up using confluence , it was like going back to the dark ages. But I couldn’t make any reasonable financial argument against it - it would have taken a a huge lift to get a vanilla MW instance integrated into the enterprise IT environment.
A lot of things should be solved by having (micro)caching in front of your wiki. Almost all non-logged in requests shouldn't even be hitting PHP at all.
One of the things on my todo list is to spend some solid time thinking about load-shedding, and in particular tools and methods for small or hobbyist projects to practice it. Like what do you turn off on the site when it's the 15th of the month and you're already at 80% of your SaaS budget?
Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?
To be fair a lot of wikis' and internet cultural places' continuity woes would be mitigated by making it easier to decentralize hosting or at least do a git pull. Wikis especially don't tend to be that large and their S/N is quite high, making them attractive to mirror.
For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need.
Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.
At least they moved away from Google Captchas, which really hates disabling of 3rd party cookies and other privacy-protection measures.
I haven't had a problem with Cloudflare and their new Captcha system since their changed, but I still suffer whenever I see another website using Google Captcha :(
The other side of the coin is lizards trying to literally end the internet era with their irresponsible behavior, and hell, making a nice living in the process
Cloudflare dropped captchas back in 2022 [0], now it's just a checkbox that you check and it lets you it (or does not).
And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this:
I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare;
but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas where you click on picture of hydrants, I hate this even more and think: move to Cloudflare already, so I can stop doing this nonsense!
The Runescape wiki is simply amazing. It’s one of the most well built fit for purpose pieces of quality software+content that I have ever come across. It’s clean and crisp visually and well organized at the IA level despite being exactly the type of content problem that resists such attempts by nature. What a solid community. The software doesn't fell clunky, it’s fast and responsive and still feels modern. I can only assume that’s a testament to the quality of mediawiki. I’m glad that it’s getting the attention it deserves.
> I can only assume that’s a testament to the quality of mediawiki.
I was curious about this so I poked around both and I think I disagree. Both load very fast for me and are snappy and look pretty nice. The one difference is that the Runescape wiki has a single ad in the sidebar or at the bottom, below the content footer. While the Fandom wikis have 3+ ads, far larger, one of which covers content until interacted with (like being closed). For me, Fandom's ad approach absolutely falls within "offensively bad," while the Runescape ad approach reminds me of early 2000s, "here's an ad to pay the bills. We've tried to keep it well out of your way."
So I'd opine that it has less to do with the quality of mediawiki, and more about how much money both Wiki hosts are seeking to gain from the existence of these resources.
I have seen cookmeplox, one of the admins of the Runescape wiki, round these parts. Thank you for your work, as a gamer and new Runescape addict. For an MMORPG as massive as OSRS, having a good wiki is crucial and probably the reason why it's seen a resurgence over the past few years.
The Dwarf Fortress wiki https://dwarffortresswiki.org is perhaps the most impressive I've seen, as it maintains namespaces to maintain (and update!) information about particular versions, because many players end up staying on a version for various reasons.
It's more a testament to the devs. I kept up with the RuneScape wiki Discord server for a bit and there were flamegraphs flying left and right. You can see some of there recent performance improvements here: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-06-...
I think the theory is people edit more if pages load lightning fast. I can attest to that, especially if you use tools for partially-automated mass edits like https://github.com/wikimedia-gadgets/JWB
This illustrates a problem that I wish more people would see.
People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to make more money. Who doesn't like more money? They add the thing, and revenue goes up!
What they don't see is the effect that comes when fewer people visit the site because they're too annoyed to come back over time. They see and take credit for the small increase, but of course they don't take credit for the gradual decline afterwards, a decline that often enough leaves the site making the same or less money than it did before the craptastic ads.
If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad load is a lever you are probably going to pull.
If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc).
The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.
This all comes down to one phrase I’ve grown to hate. “It must be measurable”.
Maximizing revenue over the next 12 months is measurable.
Creating an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever is _not_ measurable.
So, all these big brain MBAs end up forcing myopia on everyone below them because number go up. They seem so proud of themselves to have mastered inequalities.
> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
That's part of the issue. There are very real financial rewards for short term gain; meanwhile vision and legacy have been greatly devalued at both the personal and corporate level.
How many CEOs do we honor for years of dedicated service and company growth? Respect is shown in the form of monetary compensation, and that's granted based on short term shareholder results.
And it doesn't help that some companies succeed in spite of their brand tanking (FAANG, etc.). Why would you care about your brand if it doesn't seem to be affecting your bottom line? The brand at that point is for the shareholders first and foremost, and what's a terrible brand to many consumers can be a great brand to investors (Facebook).
I’ve wondered about this wrt public transportation. They keep raising prices, making it less affordable for people. Eventually basically no one is riding, so they … raise prices.
It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.
> It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty buses.
But there's the counterpoint: if you increase service on a route that isn't full already, then you
1. Create more frequent, more reliable transit for people
2. Run more buses emptier than you were before
But if you don't increase service, then you have people complaining that service isn't frequent enough or reliable enough for them to use, regardless of the cost.
In my old college town, I had a job that was on the other side of the city - not a huge distance, as it was a small town, and I'd often walk home from work. Still, I looked at my public transit options one day, and found that my only two choices were to arrive at work two hours early or four hours late. No amount of fare cutting would induce me to take the bus to work. The area I was traveling to was more of an office park type of area, so 90% of commuting wanted to arrive by 8-9 PM and leave by 4-5 PM and outside of those times there was almost no demand, so it makes perfect sense, but there are always examples like that that people will base their experience off of.
(Side note: I lived in that town for several years, was a broke college student/broke minimum wage employee the entire time, and never once took the bus. In fact, I don't think I remember even seeing one.)
Cutting fares entirely will help get more people onto transit, but that also leads to political pushback as people who drive instead of taking transit complain that non-drivers are getting subsidized! Ignoring the fact that fewer cars, trucks, and taxis on the road means a better driving experience for them.
A couple states in Australia have experimented with fee reductions for public transport.
In Western Australia, right now public transport is free for all students, and is free on Sundays for everyone. They also capped the cost of cross-zone travel to 2 zones, i.e. you'll never pay more than $5ish for a ride. Furthermore, unlike a lot of places, the airport train does not have any extra fare.
In Queensland, right now all public transport is capped at 50c. Not sure how long this will last, seems it's a bit of cost-of-living relief, and a bit of an election sweetener.
I’ve worked in media and digital advertising and, on multiple occasions, actually implemented ads on sites.
The proper way to do it is to A/B test different ad SDK configurations (refresh rate, delay to initialization, etc) and measure the impact on various user engagement metrics (time on page, session duration, etc).
These metrics can sort of tell you how people are reacting to the ads, though it isn’t perfect obviously. At the very least, it will let you know how violently people are reacting to the ad experience, which is also a good indicator for how it will impact SEO.
Or course there’s an inverse relationship between ad revenue and user experience: with a very light ad experience you basically make nothing, with a very heavy experience you will make a lot in the short term but in the long term you will lose users, traffic, and ultimately money. If you do things right, you can strike a balance at least.
I’ve also managed websites that hired some outside firm who worked on a revshare basis to come in and load ads on the site, and they didn’t do this kind of testing, and though initial revenue was high their traffic ultimately tanked in a matter of months.
A big problem I’ve seen is you find a nice balance between revenue and UX and then that becomes the new baseline/control that future people start testing against. So slowly over time it’s a death by a thousand cuts.
Turns out a lot of business people are bad at business. It’s hard to even explain how these metrics work to less technical people and it takes a special company to just trust the engineers and turn down the short-term revenue.
They know what they are doing, they can burn an unpriced asset for short term gain, looks good on their balance sheet while they have screwed over the commons (their internal commons).
> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
Its important to denote that this decision occurs at the moment they decide to take someone else's money and promise them a return on their investment. The loss of control and need to produce a return on that investment (or often, to "show growth" to get the next round of investment in a never-ending game of musical chairs) is what produces mandates like massive ads and enshittification.
Does Fandom need to own all wiki's? Do they need 300 employees? Do they need to own TVGuide, Metacritic, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and a thousand different media publications? Hell no they don't, if their goal was to provide a useful service.
Unrelated but I put Forbes on a blocklist on my Google News feed because they almost intentionally epitomize the enshittification of the web. I can only imagine the horrors of browsing Forbes without an ad blocker, but even with an ad blocker, Forbes does some weird shit with my browser history. On Android, if I swipe, I either do a browser Go Back action, or if nothing to go back to, exit the browser. On Forbes, swiping takes me... Right to the page I was already on. I check my history stack, there's like five Forbes records. If I find the article interesting enough to share, I'd copy the URL... But for some reason, the URL is not even for the article I'm reading. It's for some totally unrelated article. How do I get the URL of the article I'm reading? This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know!!
Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.
I've seen some interesting articles lately on Forbes' transition from news site to content farm. I couldn't find the one I originally read, but this one seems to be covering the same bases.
Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.
Former Wikia engineer here too! I also thought there was a lot of potential there. We even invested in some RDF and structured data and NLP projects (second screen, sentiment analysis on comments for detecting flame wars, etc), but for various reasons they just didn't work out beyond hackathons and demos. I think there were a lot of well meaning engineers who wanted to make stuff like that work. Part of the problem is mediawiki itself. A page is literally just text using an awful hacked together xml parser and some regexes to emit HTML. It might look like a database sometimes when it is rendered (and there is Wikidata) but there is no actual structure to it, just a pile of templates made of other templates that people have to tediously wrangle by hand. That it eventually turns into some HTML that you can view is almost an accident.
Also former Wikia/Fandom engineer. I won a hackathon with a wiki text validator on page save - the idea was never moved to production because nobody ultimately cared about the wiki part of it for years and years. It was just a cost center. Nice chrome to put around ads.
Yes, extracting the real human-readable text from a Wiki was a lot harder than you'd expect.
There was also a question of investment. I think even with some early successes quantified with A/B tests and things like that, there just wasn't the executive or product buy-in to broaden the investment.
Former Gamepedia/Wikia/Fandom engineer, I left not too long after Fandom bought out Gamepedia/Curse. You left at a good time. The upper management had no idea what they were doing and were entirely disinterested in the company. Talking with the CEO felt like talking with someone that had no idea what they were doing there.
It’s worth remembering that there was AI before generative AI, and there are applications of AI that don’t produce slop, like knowledge graphs and natural language search. Some of that might be called just “machine learning” now.
Sure, but think about something as low stakes as, "Does such-and-such a character from my favorite TV show have any siblings" vs. "Is it safe to consume XYZ"
Even with the great structured and semi-structured data that Wikis can provide with this like infoboxes and other sort of templates, there were definitely limitations to the tech nearly ten years ago. My experience back then is one of the reasons I'm super skeptical of the long-term value of the AI / LLM trend we're going through right now.
The licensing on that stuff is complicated, and I haven't looked at it in a while. It does allow you to take your toys and leave, but for those that don't, it would be simple enough to prevent ethical AI scrapers from extracting that content. That's all I mean by data moat in this context.
A few years ago, Path of Exile migrated from the fandom to a new site. GGG (Path of Exile's company) even decided to host the new wiki on their servers (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3292958)! At this point, the new wiki ranks higher then the old one, but for a time it was an issue. Interesting to see more cases of games wikis leaving Fandom with how horrible the site is, and hopefully this is just the beginning of a trend.
Just tested a bunch and it seems like `path of exile [skill/currency]` usually ranks the Fandom higher while `poe [skill/currency]` ranks the new wiki higher which is why I never noticed (I actually never noticed because I block the PoE Fandom and pin the new wiki on Kagi)
There is an extension which automatically redirects you from Fandom to the new wiki. While that's convenient it probably helps Fandom stay near the top.
I love this post. I also LOVE wikis. I have railed against Fandom for years and I have often shared my view on this in the past[^1]. It's an absolute blight on so many beloved game communities at this point.
I like this approach much more than the games that have decided to move to another managed/hosted service like https://wiki.gg - which has a very real change of becoming the "next" Fandom.
The connection is that 2 of the main people involved originally (jimmy & angela) had a lot of ties to wikimedia, but they were doing wikicities/wikia/fandom as their own thing, not as part of wikimedia.
Also long ago there was some minor connections. They briefly shared an office like 15 years ago i think, and they tried to jointly develop a wysiwyg editor back in like 2012 (wikimedia did most of the work i think, but wikia leant a few devs to the project at one point) which eventually became the mediawiki visual editor.
You're right, that's incorrect on my part. Fandom (well, Wikia) was founded and run by Jimmy Wales for a long time, but there is no official connection with the Wikipedia project/Wikimedia foundation. I will fix that.
Just as an example - the stardew valley offical wiki is massive and complete, and nearly everyone uses that, but google still directs users to the fandom site for almost any specific search. Its one of the main things that has led me to think that using Google gives far less useful information than competitors.
One of the first sites I downrank in kagi is all the fandom sites. I don't outright ban them, sometimes they're all there is, but I try and make it so any other result shows up ahead of them
If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.
They don’t need to. Fandom benefits from being an old and popular site. Google manually adjusts their ranking to prioritize such sites, because they think those sites are what the “average” searcher expects to see come up when they search certain topics.
Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.
> However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?
Yes, per this post:
> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.
...
> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]
It's hard running and managing wikis, and anyone/org/group that does so outside of the auspices of fandom or similar trash-aggregation hosts should be celebrated. Love this for weirdgloop. On a related note, shoutout to liquipedia[1], which has been a great experience for so long (a number of years I refuse to recognize as it would prove I'm old), and I have always feared the possibility of it moving to or becoming a fandom.
Can't see it ever happening, it's obviously not a service driven by revenue. The Dota2 non-esports wiki recently migrated from Fandom to Liquipedia too
Readit News
If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years).
[1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.
Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.
Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.
Here's one of their emails:
> [Redacted] mentioned that your site was very cool - and that you're heading off to college. As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame) and we are trying to become THE resource for all gamers
> I was wondering if you'd consider moving over to wikia now that you're going to might have less time with your studies. As an incentive I can point to a few things that might make the move easier
> 1. We have cool new software - gaming.wikia.com lets users do more blog-like contributions in addition to wiki editing - new social networking tools on the wiki - see our test server at http://sports.box8.tpa.wikia-inc.com/index.php?title=User:[R...
> 2. We could also hire you to help moderate the strategy wiki and other wikis if you need some beer and pizza money :-)
> 3. or we could offer to pay all the hosting costs and share some of the ad impressions/revenue with u
> If nothing else, I'd love to chat by phone and get to know you better.
> Let me know if that'd be ok :-)
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Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.
If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.
I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them.
[1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.
It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.
While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors.
Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.
sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?
This lets Cloudflare deliver pages from their local cache over local links (which is fast and cheap), instead of fetching the data every time across the world from wherever the VPS is located.
- For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out.
- You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation.
- Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages.
Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on.
The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs.
If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money.
One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic...
At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...
I adopted mediawiki to run a knowledge base for my organization at Microsoft ( https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/I... ).
As I was exploring self-host options that would scale to our org size, it turned out there was already an internal team running a company wide multi-tenant mediawiki PLATFORM.
So I hit them up and a week later we had a custom instance and were off to the races.
Almost all the work that team did was making mediawiki hyper efficient with caching and cache gen, along with a lot of plumbing to have shared infra (AD auth, semitrusted code repos, etc) thst still allowed all of us “customers” to implement whatever whacky extensions and templates we needed.
I still hope that one day Microsoft will acknowledge that they use Mediawiki internally (and to great effect) and open-source the whole stack, or at least offer it as a hosted platform.
I tried setting up a production instance af my next employer - and we ended up using confluence , it was like going back to the dark ages. But I couldn’t make any reasonable financial argument against it - it would have taken a a huge lift to get a vanilla MW instance integrated into the enterprise IT environment.
I just assumed they were still there based on momentum.
What kind of decisions got you in that position? Hard to phatom.
Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?
Although I most assuredly was a kid.
For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need.
Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.
I haven't had a problem with Cloudflare and their new Captcha system since their changed, but I still suffer whenever I see another website using Google Captcha :(
And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this:
I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare;
but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas where you click on picture of hydrants, I hate this even more and think: move to Cloudflare already, so I can stop doing this nonsense!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007370
Dead Comment
I was curious about this so I poked around both and I think I disagree. Both load very fast for me and are snappy and look pretty nice. The one difference is that the Runescape wiki has a single ad in the sidebar or at the bottom, below the content footer. While the Fandom wikis have 3+ ads, far larger, one of which covers content until interacted with (like being closed). For me, Fandom's ad approach absolutely falls within "offensively bad," while the Runescape ad approach reminds me of early 2000s, "here's an ad to pay the bills. We've tried to keep it well out of your way."
So I'd opine that it has less to do with the quality of mediawiki, and more about how much money both Wiki hosts are seeking to gain from the existence of these resources.
Fandom makes it extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to do something as simple as access the page of an image asset.
I think the theory is people edit more if pages load lightning fast. I can attest to that, especially if you use tools for partially-automated mass edits like https://github.com/wikimedia-gadgets/JWB
People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to make more money. Who doesn't like more money? They add the thing, and revenue goes up!
What they don't see is the effect that comes when fewer people visit the site because they're too annoyed to come back over time. They see and take credit for the small increase, but of course they don't take credit for the gradual decline afterwards, a decline that often enough leaves the site making the same or less money than it did before the craptastic ads.
If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc).
The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.
Maximizing revenue over the next 12 months is measurable.
Creating an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever is _not_ measurable.
So, all these big brain MBAs end up forcing myopia on everyone below them because number go up. They seem so proud of themselves to have mastered inequalities.
Same with Amazon, it's now just sponsored spam. I just don't get why they think it's a good idea.
Selling your brand is a very real thing, and I wish more people would take it into account. Brand health correlates with long term health.
That's part of the issue. There are very real financial rewards for short term gain; meanwhile vision and legacy have been greatly devalued at both the personal and corporate level.
How many CEOs do we honor for years of dedicated service and company growth? Respect is shown in the form of monetary compensation, and that's granted based on short term shareholder results.
And it doesn't help that some companies succeed in spite of their brand tanking (FAANG, etc.). Why would you care about your brand if it doesn't seem to be affecting your bottom line? The brand at that point is for the shareholders first and foremost, and what's a terrible brand to many consumers can be a great brand to investors (Facebook).
It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.
But there's the counterpoint: if you increase service on a route that isn't full already, then you
1. Create more frequent, more reliable transit for people
2. Run more buses emptier than you were before
But if you don't increase service, then you have people complaining that service isn't frequent enough or reliable enough for them to use, regardless of the cost.
In my old college town, I had a job that was on the other side of the city - not a huge distance, as it was a small town, and I'd often walk home from work. Still, I looked at my public transit options one day, and found that my only two choices were to arrive at work two hours early or four hours late. No amount of fare cutting would induce me to take the bus to work. The area I was traveling to was more of an office park type of area, so 90% of commuting wanted to arrive by 8-9 PM and leave by 4-5 PM and outside of those times there was almost no demand, so it makes perfect sense, but there are always examples like that that people will base their experience off of.
(Side note: I lived in that town for several years, was a broke college student/broke minimum wage employee the entire time, and never once took the bus. In fact, I don't think I remember even seeing one.)
Cutting fares entirely will help get more people onto transit, but that also leads to political pushback as people who drive instead of taking transit complain that non-drivers are getting subsidized! Ignoring the fact that fewer cars, trucks, and taxis on the road means a better driving experience for them.
In Western Australia, right now public transport is free for all students, and is free on Sundays for everyone. They also capped the cost of cross-zone travel to 2 zones, i.e. you'll never pay more than $5ish for a ride. Furthermore, unlike a lot of places, the airport train does not have any extra fare.
In Queensland, right now all public transport is capped at 50c. Not sure how long this will last, seems it's a bit of cost-of-living relief, and a bit of an election sweetener.
We're all very familiar with induced demand when it comes to widening highways and other car-centric infrastructure.
Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes.
These metrics can sort of tell you how people are reacting to the ads, though it isn’t perfect obviously. At the very least, it will let you know how violently people are reacting to the ad experience, which is also a good indicator for how it will impact SEO.
Or course there’s an inverse relationship between ad revenue and user experience: with a very light ad experience you basically make nothing, with a very heavy experience you will make a lot in the short term but in the long term you will lose users, traffic, and ultimately money. If you do things right, you can strike a balance at least.
I’ve also managed websites that hired some outside firm who worked on a revshare basis to come in and load ads on the site, and they didn’t do this kind of testing, and though initial revenue was high their traffic ultimately tanked in a matter of months.
A big problem I’ve seen is you find a nice balance between revenue and UX and then that becomes the new baseline/control that future people start testing against. So slowly over time it’s a death by a thousand cuts.
Turns out a lot of business people are bad at business. It’s hard to even explain how these metrics work to less technical people and it takes a special company to just trust the engineers and turn down the short-term revenue.
Its important to denote that this decision occurs at the moment they decide to take someone else's money and promise them a return on their investment. The loss of control and need to produce a return on that investment (or often, to "show growth" to get the next round of investment in a never-ending game of musical chairs) is what produces mandates like massive ads and enshittification.
Does Fandom need to own all wiki's? Do they need 300 employees? Do they need to own TVGuide, Metacritic, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and a thousand different media publications? Hell no they don't, if their goal was to provide a useful service.
Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.
https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-fa...
Edit: I think this is the article I originally read, but I'm not 100% certain. https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/
Yes, extracting the real human-readable text from a Wiki was a lot harder than you'd expect.
There was also a question of investment. I think even with some early successes quantified with A/B tests and things like that, there just wasn't the executive or product buy-in to broaden the investment.
Even with the great structured and semi-structured data that Wikis can provide with this like infoboxes and other sort of templates, there were definitely limitations to the tech nearly ten years ago. My experience back then is one of the reasons I'm super skeptical of the long-term value of the AI / LLM trend we're going through right now.
https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-launches-new-creator-to...
https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/15vxs2x...
Somehow I don't think that is the solution.
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I've configured it to lower results from *.fandom.com and am really happy about it.
(I'm guessing it does technically exist online, but access to it is limited to closed beta players (under NDA) for now ?)
I like this approach much more than the games that have decided to move to another managed/hosted service like https://wiki.gg - which has a very real change of becoming the "next" Fandom.
Truly independent wikis are the best.
[^1]: https://publish.obsidian.md/dakota/Hobbies/Gaming/Gaming+Wik...
> Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia
Are you sure about this? Since Fandom got acquired by private equity in 2018, I don't think Wikipedia has any stake in Fandom anymore
The connection is that 2 of the main people involved originally (jimmy & angela) had a lot of ties to wikimedia, but they were doing wikicities/wikia/fandom as their own thing, not as part of wikimedia.
Also long ago there was some minor connections. They briefly shared an office like 15 years ago i think, and they tried to jointly develop a wysiwyg editor back in like 2012 (wikimedia did most of the work i think, but wikia leant a few devs to the project at one point) which eventually became the mediawiki visual editor.
Anyways totally separare orgs.
Still, I'm glad for some competition. However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?
Practically, you can pay SEO experts to help you keep your rankings up.
Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.
Yes, per this post:
> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.
...
> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]
1: https://weirdgloop.org/contact
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[1]https://liquipedia.net/