131

Game wikis just aren't as popular anymore? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

76 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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...

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] jedibob5@lemmy.world 129 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

I miss Wikia...

[-] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 year ago

I am forever grateful that halopedia rolled their own wiki and was spared from the fandom plague.

[-] deranger@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 year ago

Another stark comparison is UESP vs. Fandom for elder scrolls lore. Fandom is absolute cancer, poor UX even with an adblocker.

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 10 points 1 year ago

Would you care to elaborate on what's preventing wiki admins from migrating?

[-] jedibob5@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] DrQuint@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] ono@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] EnglishMobster@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

What are they going to do? Ban them?

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.

[-] jedibob5@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

It's not too hard to roll back changes on a wiki. Any attempts at sabotage wouldn't be very difficult to undo.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] GrammatonCleric@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Wikidot was the shit for Dark Souls games 😙👌

[-] maynarkh@feddit.nl 79 points 1 year ago

I don't know if it's just anecdotal, but it feels like a lot of content is moving to Youtube. People make a 10+ min video out of what used to be a paragraph on a wiki site.

[-] hightrix@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago

Call me an old geezer, but I can’t stand videos for about 95% of all video game guides. They are either too slow or too fast, and include 10 mins of talking for “and the hot key you are looking for is H”.

[-] DrQuint@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

We need sponsorskip to shorten tutorial type videos

[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 7 points 1 year ago

I've been thinking lately that a lot of people are way worse at reading comprehension than I would have guessed. Like, there's a large chunk of the population where reading is difficult and uncomfortable. Of course they prefer YouTube.

We'd rarely encounter these people on a text first medium like here.

[-] Psythik@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

This is why I only look for the videos where the uploader is showing their screen, and then watch them at 10x speed (using the Enhancer For YouTube addon) with the sound on mute.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] Pxtl@lemmy.ca 32 points 1 year ago

Youtube lets creators monetize their content, wikis don't. Everything is a hustle now.

[-] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

Even that feels sketch though. Most of the actual info I really needed had less than 10,000 views. Usually more in the 2-3k range which makes jack squat on Youtube dollars.

[-] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah I've actually had to resort to this a few times with Armored Core 6 specifically. It seemed like Wiki sites just didn't have the detail for each spot, but did have generalized information for each mission for example. But the extra tidbits for each just straight up wasn't filled in. I'd google, find a gaming website which had some info, but literally not all of it. It was also in the classic 'recipe' style bullshit website where you get through 3 full screens of fluff before what I needed.

I decided I'd help where I could but it came to me after playing two more games in that time that EVERY free wiki site had the same issue. I just don't remember that problem 3-5+ years ago.

[-] Anomander@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

I normally hate turning to Youtube when there's a text resource available, but I've definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] mojo@lemm.ee 72 points 1 year ago

Fandom ruined actual good wikis. God that site is so shit, why do people keep using it?

[-] sebinspace@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] ryapric@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I was about to reply and say "nuh uh, the Minecraft wiki isn't a Fandom one", but jesus you're right.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (5 replies)

[-] cre0@kbin.social 72 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] sebinspace@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

I think we hugged it too hard

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] NinjaYeti76@mastodon.social 8 points 1 year ago

@cre0 @blanketswithsmallpox many of my video game related searches end with -fandom. Thank you for this.

[-] ono@lemmy.ca 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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 https://bg3.wiki/

[-] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

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 think you're entirely on the money

[-] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah I remember seeing an article about Baldur's Gate 3 having a wiki being unique.

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.

[-] ono@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

load more comments (5 replies)

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] Epicurus0319@sopuli.xyz 38 points 1 year ago

Because Fandom has ruined the interface, and most people just watch YouTube tutorials

[-] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago

I’m surprised you could tell, I can’t find the wiki content beneath all the ads

[-] ShadowRam@kbin.social 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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,

https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/wiki/Satisfactory_Wiki

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] Fedizen@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

It does seem like we need kind of a federated network of wikis.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 year ago

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...

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago

Fandom, previously Wikia, a long with all game journalism sites with their SEO have ruined it.

[-] Zoidsberg@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago

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

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] Sabin10@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] LazyBane@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] Pat@kbin.run 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] detalferous@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

They're all just ads

[-] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Suppose there is a federated ActivityPub based Wiki network, how would that work? Fandom is so terrible for looking up actual info with irritating video ads, especially since after they brought out their competition from Curse.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] Paradox@lemdro.id 5 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments