what's your thoughts on FANDOM wikis(and it's deteriorations)?

personally, my gripe with FANDOM(formerly known as Wikia) wikis lies on some of it's wikis are utterly lost to the sands of time, if it's dedicated to more obscure franchises

i never liked that site lmao, the pages look too cluttered and confusing + it's full of ads, i always avoid that page when it appears on my search results when i look for info about characters or shows

what about older fansites?

I can't go on there without some form of adblock unless I want to get bombarded with a million different ads some of which autoplay. It really sucks from an archival standpoint how they sold themselves out.

There is however this extension I've been using that redirects you to non-FANDOM hosted wikis when they're available, or if not gives you the option to open it through a third party service that makes the formatting far more manageable.

I quit using it a long time ago. I had to close my wiki for my stories due to excessive vandalism caused by people who hated my guts, and there was no way to auto-lock pages to guests. I rarely even use it for other fandoms, because I get bombarded with ads, most of which are borderline pornography, and floating videos up the wazoo. I'm holding on to hope that Ammonite comes soon since the only non-Fandom wiki farms I could find are for video games only.

There are ways of making your own using wiki software such as MediaWiki or DokuWiki, but you'll likely need to pay for hosting, with some such as the JoJo wiki even relying on fan donations to stay afloat. The website for the extension I mentioned does list the supported independent wikis, many of which probably use such software.

I did try self-hosting, but I'm not very tech savvy, so I couldn't figure out how to get my local host up and running, and third party hosting certainly costs an arm and a leg these days. If the rumors are true that the .com domain used to be free in the 90s, then I wonder what caused them to jack-up the price? I'm probably just going to build an on-site wiki or something, especially since I can't figure out why MediaWiki or DokuWiki won't show images.

I used to like it as a Kid but now as an adult it's just Meh. Because after decision after decision they made that was bad and other things that's wasn't related to it my own Experience with it was Ok I guess.

I mostly look into some fandom wikis out of boredom or curiousity, but I’ll never make an account on there though, no thanks. (I rather make an account on another forum site tbh.)

that's why I use Webs.com to webhosting my mega-crossover project's website, even too bad, webs dot com did shutdowns(before it's shutdown, webs dot com did had similar spambot problems with today's deviantart)

Logistics did hold me back from self-hosting my websites

I used to use Webs too, but I had to move to Infinity Free hosting after my site got frozen due to the new system that limits users to 5 pages per site. I'm planning to use the new site as a character hub, episode guide, and wiki.

In terms of FANDOM itself, my biggest complaint is lack of feature parity with other free hosts. I don't know how much of the UI is designed different to separate itself from Wikipedia (Wikicities was founded by Jimmy Wales and other Wikimedia staff), but I do not like the 2021 overhaul. I've personally had no issue with staff themselves, though my direct experience has been limited to technical issues; I know people that have serious problems with (lack of) user moderation. The ad glut is absolutely awful if you're not logged in, and until recently you couldn't access file pages at all without an account.

Individual wikis are entirely dependent on their leadership and user culture, and that's always liable to change. Besides a discontinued project I maintained on behalf of a former gaming group, I've been involved with two others: one for a kids' cartoon that has since been virtually subsumed by fanon, and one for a major game franchise whose front-end is largely decent but whose administration is as obstinate against structural reform as the Soviet Union from Brezhnev on.

My biggest peeve for the latter: the C&C Wiki, ostensibly a player reference for a major video game franchise, is written in-universe and foregrounds the lore, making separating game-relevant data from the fluff needlessly tedious. When they announced in 2018 that they were moving official focus to Gamepedia, I was hopeful the Fandom copy could be salvaged into something more user-friendly (though never acted on it)—then two years later Gamepedia was folded into the main domain and so ended that dream.

Well ".com" literally means "commercial site", so a bait-and-switch was probably inevitable. :B

The Fandom/Wikia wikis are almost unusable anymore, especially on mobile, because of all of the ads that plague the site. :[ Sucks because I used to spend hooours reading as much as I could about the different things I was into on the wikis.

Alright, that makes sense.

i hate FANDOM wikis because theyre littered with ads and stuff and it makes the site SO SLOW on mobile and/or if you are not using adblocker. in some of the more unpopular franchises i want to read about or have a special interest in, people dont need to have an admin role or whatever to edit a page, so there are some pages of characters i want to know about that are vandalized (someone fangirled too hard for a character and wrote that the character was being held hostage and was in love with them 💀). in some pages, the comments can be extremely vile and gross.

thankfully the game i always need a wiki for to read about lore and characters has its own dedicated wiki and its part of a (nintendo independent) wiki alliance specifically to stand themselves out from fandom. i mean anyone can still edit the wiki but if it's not from FANDOM i'm still going to trust it more to be honest 😂 i feel like the only good thing about FANDOM, or at least the few wikis i use on there is the fact that they usually have rare official images and artworks for characters that i would not see usually or at all. that is literally the only thing i like about FANDOM because this is pretty much absent in the non-FANDOM wikis of franchises i like 😭

Wikia wasn't so bad before it was rebranded to FANDOM, then it just went to complete crap. I used to use that redirect for non-Wikia hosted fan wikis, but unfortunately a lot of info for series I follow have outdated fansites, sites that are now offline, or the alternative wiki doesn't have as much canon/technical info, so I have to resort to using the Wikia for some of them anyway. Or FANDOM bought out the independent wikis and made them into Wikias. If a Wikia was around before the FANDOM rebranding and doesn't have a comment section, it's probably still decent now. But a lot of them tend to be amateurly run. No way I'd join a Discord for one of those.

It's really vexing because FANDOM really turned actual fandom and hobbies related to media into a corporate mainstream thing, when it arguably was never meant to be that.

not to mention before it's rebrand, Wikia Wikis that long not edited can last forever instead of automatically deleted after a year

I suppose the question then is whether those wikis have official sanction, or they've just netted the most determined archivists.

The two bona fide benefits FANDOM holds over rivals are a) public presence and b) social media integration, though the second is subjective and completely irrelevant to people like me so... :^) But yeah, for actual archiving I consider it middle-of-the pack and weighted to form over function. Personally I lean toward ShoutWiki for the classic Wikipedia feel, and it looks like they may have finally finished full crossover to HTTPS so no more broken images.

Thorvald:

I suppose the question then is whether those wikis have official sanction, or they've just netted the most determined archivists. The two bona fide benefits FANDOM holds over rivals are a) public presence and b) social media integration, though the second is subjective and completely irrelevant to people like me so... :^) But yeah, for actual archiving I consider it middle-of-the pack and weighted to form over function. Personally I lean toward ShoutWiki for the classic Wikipedia feel, and it looks like they may have finally finished full crossover to HTTPS so no more broken images.

lol yah i definitely think it might be the latter cause they will be collecting images and artwork from tweets/posts of official artists, scans of art books or otherwise that have been long since deleted or lost to time 😟 i do not know how those specific individuals in those specific fanbases do that 😂

FANDOM definitely has a chokehold on public presence regarding wikis becuz they always take up the first slot on a google search so people are always gonna end up there before seeking other better wikis or sites of information, dooming us all to mid wikis because they're given more traffic 😔 also i looked up shoutwiki and some of the wikis people made and the UI already feels more at home and better than FANDOM 😸 i love the classic wikipedia feel as well, in my opinion its much more easier to navigate and easier on the eyes compared to other wiki UI's, but then again its probably just me really liking simple easy-to-read UI websites.

I use it if I'm seeking info on a series/franchise and there isn't something more comprehensive on the first page of google for whatever I'm searching. I don't like the look/UI of the site itself.

I also use Wikia for researching whatever Franchises I got into(and it's characters), at least before it become FANDOM