Has anyone else noticed that Wikis for most games just aren’t as complete anymore?
I’m the one helping to fill in stuff these days when I swear most games had pretty fully Wiki pages within a week of release. Have most of these just moved to actual Gaming article websites? They sure as hell haven’t gone to Gamefaqs lol.
I’ve recently played Diablo 4, Remnant 2, 30XX, Armored Core 6, and just started Have a Nice Death… and I’ve had to help with additions on nearly every free Wiki… Never used to have to do this…
Fandom ruined actual good wikis. God that site is so shit, why do people keep using it?
Because monopoly.
Shit, Mojang used to maintain their own wiki for Minecraft, but it was dropped and migrated to Fandom and now none of us can have nice things.
How is it a monopoly when mediawiki is FOSS? Lots of fan wikis use that instead.
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.
I use an adblocker to remove their stupid stream embed
I was about to reply and say “nuh uh, the Minecraft wiki isn’t a Fandom one”, but jesus you’re right.
It used to be independent until Curse started Gamepedia and then got bought by Wikia.
Wikia/fandom swallowed up the market but are also just bad at running a wiki network.
Along with all the problems that come with fan wikis. There’s like two F-Zero wikia right now because the first one was just overrun by fannon and at one point some random person’s OCs and fan theory. And then there’s the Xenoblade wikia repeatedly making edits and then locking pages because the owners have something against the newer games being connected to the older ones, even denying thing’s like weapons that are called Monados, work like Monados and even use the same arts as Shulk’s Monado being “real” monados.
I’m the biggest Xenoblade geek around - what the fuck at your later part (not at you). If you mean Future Connected, that is absolutely 100% tying up the entire trilogy (and also tying in Gears/Saga/X as much as Takahashi could do), and yes - there are multiple monados (A’s, Alpha’s). Shulks is a replica, but the other two are literally split from Ontos’ original. Matthew’s gauntlets are also arguably a Monado too, powered by the Pneuma core, and I would also argue that N’s sword of the end is also a Monado, based on the Logos core.
I had enough with the Xenoblade community back when XB3 launched and the usual culprits who also run the wiki absolutely laughed anyone out of the room who suggested those statues in the city were of Shulk and Rex. I mean, the descriptions and look made it obvious to anyone with a brain (and FR proved yes, it was them) - but no, these things have to be spelled out in black and white and made 100% obvious apparently otherwise it can’t be true. It’s sad, frustrating, and goes against the entire philosophy of the series.
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,
Coffee Stain Studios seem really give an actual shit about their fans.
Personally love UESP. It was there way before fandom and will be there long after.
They’re all just ads
This is particularly painful with starfield. I know the game just came out, but the Fandom wiki is atrocious, and I haven’t been able to find any others.
Most games switched to Discord for some reason. Even though Discord is exceptionally bad for permanent info.
Now you need to ask the question in the hopes someone on there is friendly enough to answer. And a while later if someone wants to know the same question, they have to ask it again…
Figure I’ll just dump a list of non-fandom wikis I use here.
Tolkien Gateway - General Tolkien stuff
LOTRO Wiki - Lord of the Rings Online
UESP - Elder Scrolls
BG3 Wiki - Baldurs Gate 3
Halopedia - Halo
OSRS - Runescape
Add Doom Wiki as well for all things Doom related
Great addition, I didn’t know about that.
Fandom, previously Wikia, a long with all game journalism sites with their SEO have ruined it.
Reminder to get Indie Wiki Buddy to automatically be redirected to ad-free versions of fandom wikis or to be redirected to actual genuine wikis, for example, TF2 Fandom Wikis get redirected to the official TF2 Wiki.
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.
It’s a little money, it’s a /lot/ of time. And for what, what does a company actually get by doing it themselves?
The company wouldn’t be the ones in charge of handling the wikis content. It would be up to the community like is being done now in other cases.
I’m mainly saying that it would be helpful if they provided the space vs it being done by independent companies/orgs.
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.
Steam already hosts forums. Hosting a wiki wouldn’t be a big leap from that.
Because Fandom has ruined the interface, and most people just watch YouTube tutorials
I’m surprised you could tell, I can’t find the wiki content beneath all the ads
PSA for people sick of fandom: www.antifandom.com has the same content on an ad-free UI
its a mirror of www.breezewiki.com which has a search on the home page as well as a list of other mirrors
@cre0 @blanketswithsmallpox many of my video game related searches end with -fandom. Thank you for this.
I think we hugged it too hard
breezewiki.com is another mirror and looks to be still working
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.