1y ago

Game wikis just aren't as popular anymore?

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...

76 comments

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...
- I am forever grateful that halopedia rolled their own wiki and was spared from the fandom plague.
  
  Another stark comparison is UESP vs. Fandom for elder scrolls lore. Fandom is absolute cancer, poor UX even with an adblocker.
- Would you care to elaborate on what's preventing wiki admins from migrating?
  
  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
- Wikidot was the shit for Dark Souls games 😙👌

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.
- 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”.
  
  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.
  
  We need sponsorskip to shorten tutorial type videos
  
  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.
  
  I can't stand listening to them. 99% of people doing these videos, any videos, on YouTube have no concept or idea of how to actually talk properly to an audience. I don't want to have to skip through someone fucking mumbling in an indecipherable accent to find what I need.
  Give me written instructions/guides. It's faster, I can re-read easily at my own pace (fast!) and I don't get annoyed by someone's nasally voice. Yes I'm an older one too.
- Youtube lets creators monetize their content, wikis don't. Everything is a hustle now.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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.

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

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
- I think we hugged it too hard
  
  breezewiki.com is another mirror and looks to be still working
- @cre0 @blanketswithsmallpox many of my video game related searches end with -fandom. Thank you for this.

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/
- 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
- 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.
  
  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.
- Terraria wiki is not a fandom site
  
  I expect you mean terraria.wiki.gg, rather than terraria.fandom.com (which was the first result in my web search). I don't love the fact that it has a google tracker, but otherwise, it looks nice.
  Looks like Pokémon also has an independent (but not tracker-free) wiki: bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net

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.

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

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/SatisfactoryWiki
https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/PathofExileWiki
- 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.

It does seem like we need kind of a federated network of wikis.
- The creator of wikis is way ahead of you:
  http://fed.wiki/view/federated-wiki

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

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.

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.
- 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.

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 Redeemed,, 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.

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.

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.

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.
- I don't think it'd work all that well to be frank. You'd wind up with dozens of pages for each subject since each instance can have their own. You could probably come up with a distinct federated solution that might work though, where the servers are federated but the content is shared. Not sure how that would look in practice though, and how you could keep instances from diverging

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.

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.

76 comments