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…
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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.
Wikidot was the shit for Dark Souls games 😙👌
I’m surprised you could tell, I can’t find the wiki content beneath all the ads
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.
It does seem like we need kind of a federated network of wikis.
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 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.
