Why make a Wiki when a shitty Discord server with a clunky search function is easier to set up? Of course it‘s also much less useful, more work to maintain in the long run and a never ending source of drama, but most devs don‘t think that far because they kinda only do it to build a community anyway. Being a source of information is just slapped on but enough reason for them to not set up a wiki or proper forum it seems. Ugh.
Just to add on to this, in those unfortunate cases where there really is only Fandom, you can use an extension like LibRedirect which will redirect any Fandom pages to a breezewiki instance, which is a stripped down, privacy respecting, no BS front end for Fandom.
You might like the indie wiki buddy extension, it can automatically redirect you to a independent wiki when you go to fandom (if there is one), remove fandom search results, and redirect you to a ‘breeze wiki’ page if there’s no fandom alternative
(Breeze wiki is an alternative frontend for fandom, much like invidious for YouTube. It guts all the ads and banners and garbage, and gives you a much simpler wiki page)
Oh nice! I use firefox on mobile so I can still use extensions (just have to enable developer settings), but that’s super handy for folks who don’t have that option!
I’ve often been like “I don’t know why people complain about Fandom, this is fine”. And then I saw what the site looks like without uBlock. Sweet merciful heavens. Hey, there’s some ads. Let’s cram some ads in the ads. Some prime blank space? Shove some annoying video things in there. Autoplaying. See that navigation bar over there? Let’s make it pointless. (If you come to the article via web search, surely you want to read about some completely random stuff in another game!)
Fandom is garbage, Fextralife is garbage (and at this rate will probably be bought by Fandom one day). Indie wikis rule.
Just wanted to point out that wiki.gg is out there as a replacement. There’s even a wiki.gg Redirect plugin for Firefox that takes you to the right place, if you hit a Fandom link.
For anyone looking for a wonderful example of this, check out the RuneScape wiki. It’s hosted by a company that is partnered with the game maker, and is fully maintained by the community. It is the single most expansive and in-depth wiki I have ever seen. It is truly the gold standard for what a wiki should aspire to be.
It has everything you could need to play the game, all the way down to automatic calculators (with built in character lookup functionality, using the game’s high score leaderboard system) to tell you things like how many of [x] resource you’ll need to get [y] experience, or what your estimated return on investment will be for turning [x] resource into [y] product.
The game has over 250 quests, (and not just basic fetch or kill quests like most MMO’s have) and the wiki has in-depth walkthroughs (including in-game screenshots) for every single one.
You can even open the wiki directly from the game. There’s a “Wiki” button on the chat box, so you can search the wiki directly via chat, and it opens in your desktop browser.
It took many years and plenty of iteration to make it there. It feels like a fever dream remembering the days Sal’s realm and tip.it were king. Remember when the game map wasn’t even in game, they just had a image linked at the top of the webpage?
Relative to a fandom wiki: I guess? Although you are inherently going to have the same content theft problems where the vast majority of modern wikis are just ripped from the game guides that games media are still paid to prepare.
Relative to an official wiki with developer backing? No, it is not a replacement.
Also: I would generally be very wary of any of the plugins to redirect you since they have VERY broad permissions to… hijack your browser traffic. If you are keeping up to date and monitoring them you are probably fine but that feels like a great example in waiting to find out a bad actor pushed some code last week…
Fandom is icky. A few years ago, my mom was getting scammed by some conspiracy guy from LinkedIn who offered her a “job.”
These dudes set up their own fandom wiki to try to make their bullshit seem real. I can’t remember the name of the people involved but one guy was claiming that he was owed 300 trillion dollars by the government. (Can’t remember the exact number but it was astronomically high. More money than exists kinda high)
A lot of devs of “wiki games” have been doing this lately.
Digital Extremes/Warframe did it a month or two back. And a lot of people have speculated that https://wiki.warframe.com/w/WARFRAME_Wiki:Stakeholder_Analysis and the old fandom equivalent “explains” it but that is inherently tinfoil and biased speculation.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the initiative comes from the OG dev of the game, who is Italian: the efforts we go through since 1996 (all I can remember) to avoid ads and popups are of biblical proportions.
I can remember my father taking the PC away from me as soon as he saw I was exposed to one, going “I can take that away, it will be a minute”.
It wasn’t a minute.
Very nice to see. Might start playing again to 100% it (yet again) now that there’s an actual useful wiki for it. Always love to see pure media wiki usage. I wish we could just scrub Fandom’s one now.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Good! Hopefully more devs follow suit and pull traffic away from Fandom.
Also hopeful that they manage to fix the SEO on the site, as Fandom is still the top result for “Vampire Survivors wiki”.
Same with the Terraria wiki. Afaik the fandom wiki is mostly abandoned and people moved to the much better gg wiki.
The Oxygen Not Included wiki made the jump a few years ago and the gg wiki seems to finally be better referenced
Why make a Wiki when a shitty Discord server with a clunky search function is easier to set up? Of course it‘s also much less useful, more work to maintain in the long run and a never ending source of drama, but most devs don‘t think that far because they kinda only do it to build a community anyway. Being a source of information is just slapped on but enough reason for them to not set up a wiki or proper forum it seems. Ugh.
Try the browser add-on Indie Wiki Buddy.
It suggests a better wiki when you browse one on Fandom.
edit: there is an open issue to add the official Vampire Survivors wiki: https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy/issues/1102
Just to add on to this, in those unfortunate cases where there really is only Fandom, you can use an extension like LibRedirect which will redirect any Fandom pages to a breezewiki instance, which is a stripped down, privacy respecting, no BS front end for Fandom.
I assume Google prioritizes the wikis that bring in the ad dollars. Not sure if any amount of SEO can change that.
Well, GGG hosts their community wikis since years too…
This pleases me.
They have taken the survivors.wiki domain.
I wonder if they are planning spinoffs with other themes?
Edit: typo
Accountant Survivors coming in October.
survivors.wiki *
Thanks
Love this, and the site looks great. Wonder what software that is. Is it just mediawiki?
Yes.
Ah, perfect, thank you. I was particularly interested because I just recently dabbled with mediawiki and ended up going with dokuwiki.
I avoid using fandom like it’s contagious. It’s so cluttered, when my blockers on images don’t load half the time. It’s a slow site.
It’s really the worst, I’d rather scrub through a YouTube video to find the answer I’m looking for rather than go to a fandom site.
You might like the indie wiki buddy extension, it can automatically redirect you to a independent wiki when you go to fandom (if there is one), remove fandom search results, and redirect you to a ‘breeze wiki’ page if there’s no fandom alternative
(Breeze wiki is an alternative frontend for fandom, much like invidious for YouTube. It guts all the ads and banners and garbage, and gives you a much simpler wiki page)
If you browse a lot on mobile and cannot install extensions, all you have to do is replace the “fandom” in the fandom wiki URL with “antifandom”
Oh nice! I use firefox on mobile so I can still use extensions (just have to enable developer settings), but that’s super handy for folks who don’t have that option!
I’ve often been like “I don’t know why people complain about Fandom, this is fine”. And then I saw what the site looks like without uBlock. Sweet merciful heavens. Hey, there’s some ads. Let’s cram some ads in the ads. Some prime blank space? Shove some annoying video things in there. Autoplaying. See that navigation bar over there? Let’s make it pointless. (If you come to the article via web search, surely you want to read about some completely random stuff in another game!)
Fandom is garbage, Fextralife is garbage (and at this rate will probably be bought by Fandom one day). Indie wikis rule.
Best thing that happened to path of exile too, the devs provide the wiki platform for the community
https://www.poewiki.net
Very based
Same thing happened with minecraft.wiki too, people finally got fed up with fandom’s bullshit
Same with doomwiki.org and a bunch of others.
osrs.wiki lets just list them all
I’m surprised the OSRS wiki isn’t mentioned more. The game itself is very community oriented as well.
OSRS wiki is BY FAR the best wiki in the entire industry.
That’s not the same, Mojang isn’t affiliated with the wiki at all.
Warframe just did it too. Fantastic move.
Just wanted to point out that wiki.gg is out there as a replacement. There’s even a wiki.gg Redirect plugin for Firefox that takes you to the right place, if you hit a Fandom link.
and then wiki.gg gets bought, as other wikis got. No thanks.
Write content in a community mediawiki maintained by the community instead.
Instructions unclear.
Locked it behind a Discord community instead. 🤡
Guess whose doing an IPO and will sell all its data plus get advertisements everywhere? Yep, Discord…
I know this is a joke.
But seriously from my heart
Fuck you.
For anyone looking for a wonderful example of this, check out the RuneScape wiki. It’s hosted by a company that is partnered with the game maker, and is fully maintained by the community. It is the single most expansive and in-depth wiki I have ever seen. It is truly the gold standard for what a wiki should aspire to be.
It has everything you could need to play the game, all the way down to automatic calculators (with built in character lookup functionality, using the game’s high score leaderboard system) to tell you things like how many of [x] resource you’ll need to get [y] experience, or what your estimated return on investment will be for turning [x] resource into [y] product.
The game has over 250 quests, (and not just basic fetch or kill quests like most MMO’s have) and the wiki has in-depth walkthroughs (including in-game screenshots) for every single one.
You can even open the wiki directly from the game. There’s a “Wiki” button on the chat box, so you can search the wiki directly via chat, and it opens in your desktop browser.
It took many years and plenty of iteration to make it there. It feels like a fever dream remembering the days Sal’s realm and tip.it were king. Remember when the game map wasn’t even in game, they just had a image linked at the top of the webpage?
Relative to a fandom wiki: I guess? Although you are inherently going to have the same content theft problems where the vast majority of modern wikis are just ripped from the game guides that games media are still paid to prepare.
Relative to an official wiki with developer backing? No, it is not a replacement.
Also: I would generally be very wary of any of the plugins to redirect you since they have VERY broad permissions to… hijack your browser traffic. If you are keeping up to date and monitoring them you are probably fine but that feels like a great example in waiting to find out a bad actor pushed some code last week…
We did the same for The Talos Principle Wiki.
The community is hosting its own MediaWiki rather than rely on Fandom.
The Monster Hunter community just did the same: https://monsterhunterwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
Folks finally got tired of the several horrible options and did it themselves. There’s also a discord for coordinating contributions if so inclined.
Same for us with the Cyber Knights: Flashpoint wiki. More devs should learn that self-hosting a community wiki for their game is not that hard.
ublock origin and firefox.
no ads, no popups. game wikis are a breeze to use for me.
Breezewiki?
Based dev. Fuck fextralife and fandom
Sometimes it feels like fextralife is filled only with stub articles.
me: “Hmm, I wonder about [a thing] in [a game]”
fextralife’s entire article: “[A thing] is a thing in [a game]”
brilliant, thank you.
Wat?! Fandom has ads?! Never saw these. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Good to see we’re finally fighting back against Fandom
Fandom is icky. A few years ago, my mom was getting scammed by some conspiracy guy from LinkedIn who offered her a “job.”
These dudes set up their own fandom wiki to try to make their bullshit seem real. I can’t remember the name of the people involved but one guy was claiming that he was owed 300 trillion dollars by the government. (Can’t remember the exact number but it was astronomically high. More money than exists kinda high)
A lot of devs of “wiki games” have been doing this lately.
Digital Extremes/Warframe did it a month or two back. And a lot of people have speculated that https://wiki.warframe.com/w/WARFRAME_Wiki:Stakeholder_Analysis and the old fandom equivalent “explains” it but that is inherently tinfoil and biased speculation.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the initiative comes from the OG dev of the game, who is Italian: the efforts we go through since 1996 (all I can remember) to avoid ads and popups are of biblical proportions.
I can remember my father taking the PC away from me as soon as he saw I was exposed to one, going “I can take that away, it will be a minute”. It wasn’t a minute.
shouldnt this be built in the game anyway?
Very nice to see. Might start playing again to 100% it (yet again) now that there’s an actual useful wiki for it. Always love to see pure media wiki usage. I wish we could just scrub Fandom’s one now.