this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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fandom.com has always been a pile of barely usable garbage. More projects should follow and self host a wiki again.
a core issue for moving wikis is that Fandom refuses to delete the old wiki so you 1) have to fight an SEO war against them; and 2) have to contend with directing everyone to the right place or else you have two competing wikis (one of which will gradually lapse out of date). it's very irritating.
The Path of Emilie community made an extension to remove fandom from Google results and automatically link to the real wiki. Hopefully more communities make something similar.
How can one follow on that path of Emilie?
https://getindie.wiki/
wait. they have something in their Terms of Service that prevents you from deleting stuff you posted? That sounds illegal.
i'm pretty sure this is because of two things: 1) they actually host the wikis and the administrators of them simply steward them; and 2) everything is licensed under CC-BY-SA anyways, so you don't retain the right to revoke things you contribute or the right to move the wiki.
It almost certainly is in the EU.
Not if their ToS makes you surrender your copyright to them.
That is not legally possible in the EU. You can grant irrevocable usage rights, but you cannot give away your copyright.
Most Terms of Service don't do that, instead asking you to provide a "perpetual" "irrevocable" "transferable" license for your content -- and while some absolutely stretch the terms to allow them to use it for things like language model learning or shifty monetization practices, such a license is also legally necessary for the website to function at all.
For "open-source" websites like Wikipedia or OSM, the terms are usually even simpler - you agree to license your posts under the same license that they use to distribute it.
As for Fandom specifically, they seem to mostly operate on the latter model -- though you still need an additional commercial use waiver if you want to submit to NC or ND-licensed wikis (which once again goes into the "legally necessary" box).
The same open-source license that lets people edit the wikis and fork them to independent websites without having to ask permission from every single contributor also lets Fandom admins reject attempts to delete or redirect pages.
A gdpr request on content you create but do not own just anonymizes the references to who created and edited the articles you contributed to
I don't see Fandom winning these wars when their site is so bloated with ads. Whenever I end up there I immediately want to leave.
ugh yeah. especially the SEO war thing, the new website doesn't even register on DuckDuckGo yet. at least there's this extension called Indie Wiki Buddy which will hide Fandom results from search engines and redirect you to an independent wiki if you end up on Fandom anyway
What if there are no alternative wikis?
it redirects you to BreezeWiki, a no-bloat frontend for Fandom (example)
Hm, I guess it's an alternative. I'll give it a try. The Fandom & Fextralife wikis constantly being at the top search results often pisses me off.
Hmm. Is there something against linking external wikis on every article you create?
they'll revert that and ban you for "vandalism" (i assume they have automated sensors for checking this), and/or turn your wiki over to new administrators.
It "should" be as easy as a global template inclusion kinda like how wikipedia does donations, but i wouldn't be surprised if fandom doesn't allow that to happen
Wikipedia uses CentralNotice which fandom doesn’t allow individual wikis to configure. But there’s https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Help:Site_notice
Unless you’re careful about it, they ban you.
The only thing more rage-inducing than getting stuck in a game and needing to Google the information I need... is finding that information on a Fandom Wiki composed of 90% ads and 10% useful content. Especially since I'm usually searching for that information on my phone, due to not all games handling Alt+Tab particularly well, and Fandom is somehow even worse on a phone. I have genuinely had moments where I've just closed a game and stopped playing because the information I need isn't in the game but has to be found on a Fandom Wiki.
SEO wars only go so far when the user experience on Fandom is so awful that plenty of players would rather scroll down to use the #2 entry in the search results if it means not having to click a Fandom link. They'd only need a few occasions when the #2 entry is a better experience than using Fandom, and they'll start using the independent Wiki purposefully.
what if someone pushes thousands of edits with random AI generated garbage from thousands of accounts?
Unfortunately they're likely well equipped to deal with that kind of situation as it's not all that different than normal wiki vandalism.