How would the Warframe community feel about the wiki migrating away from Fandom?

[(PSN)Unstar]

There's a reasonable argument to be made that that the Warframe wiki is a vital part of being able to play and enjoy Warframe; there is so much information that is either inaccessible or obfuscated in the game itself, and the wiki provides quick and easy access to answers.

Or at least, it used to.  As a console player, I tend to use my phone to access the wiki, and the pop-ups and ads keep getting worse.  Yesterday I visited the wiki to get the answer to a question, and after several minutes of trying to read a chart that was almost entirely obfuscated by ads, I actually decided that I would be better off leaving without the information I was looking.

Today, in a cosmic coincidence, my YouTube feed suggested this video:

Feel free to watch it if you want, but the TL;DW seems to be that many communities and their admins have been migrating away from Fandom due to increasingly invasive pop-ups and a lack of control over content; the video also goes over several possible destinations for migrating wikis.

So I ask my fellow players — and especially the wiki admins — what are your thoughts on a theoretical migration?  I don't want to in any way undersell the lift that such an endeavor would require, but the benefits might be worth it if the wiki becomes more accessible and usable.  Curious to hear what others think on the matter!

Edited November 2, 2023 by (PSN)Unstar
typo

[(XBOX)Lord ChibiVR]

The Minecraft and Terraria wikis (including terraria calamity mod) also moved from fandom to wiki gg, and from what I've heard from Phoenix MC (a Minecraft YouTuber), the change was seriously beneficial to the Minecraft wiki.

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

I would very much welcome it. I really dislike several design and experience choices Wikia/Fandom went through. Auto playing ads, multiple pop ups, issues with loading, etc. To be clear, not the many individuals and users that compile and arrange info their, them I appreciate, and value, I mean the website ... well the video covers a lot of my objections. I usually try to look to other sources for Warframe related issues when I can. 

That being said, like you mention, sort of thing that requires the motivation and potential coordination of a lot of people who do make such contributions and efforts. 

Still, important idea to raise, especially since more and more fandoms, communities etc have made such migrations. 

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

I preferred forum posts for information because the wiki for Warframe was riddled with unwanted auto-playing ads. I agree with changing to somewhere else.

[TeaHands]

If the Ascended Nerds who love informing the Clueless Nerds(me) need a new platform to continue helping I would definitely encourage and donate to that endeavor.

Edited November 2, 2023 by TeaHands

[Flannoit]

I despise Wikia/Fandom more than I despise Fextralife, and I REALLY hate Fextralife. I'm 100% for them moving to a better wiki host.

[SDGDen]

11 minutes ago, Turritopsis_Dohrnii said:

I preferred forum posts for information because the wiki for Warframe was riddled with unwanted auto-playing ads. I agree with changing to somewhere else.

ngl i feel this every single time i look at the wiki on a device without adblock. 

adblock is currently mandatory to make the wiki useable, but with adblock there's not much of a problem with fandom ngl. still, i'd preffer if DE made a self-hosted wiki for the community to use. 

 

[quxier]

41 minutes ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

 

Or at least, it used to.  As a console player, I tend to use my phone to access the wiki, and the pop-ups and ads keep getting worse.  Yesterday I visited the wiki to get the answer to a question, and after several minutes of trying to read a chart that was almost entirely obfuscated by ads, I actually decided that I would be better off leaving without the information I was looking.

43 minutes ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

Feel free to watch it if you want, but the TL;DW seems to be that many communities and their admins have been migrating away from Fandom due to increasingly invasive pop-ups and a lack of control over content; the video also goes over several possible destinations for migrating wikis.

Man, I was expecting more. I've turned on my script in my firefox and there were 2 things: one big window with "advertisement" note (nothing inside) and youtube video that you can close. It's even muted.

ps. maybe you can use desktop mode (or however it's called)? Dunno, I don't use my phone for internet.

ps2. as for topic, I don't mind but I personaly don't see a problem.

 

[TARINunit9]

The more wikis get away from that godawful domain, the better!

[(PSN)Unstar]

50 minutes ago, quxier said:

Man, I was expecting more. I've turned on my script in my firefox and there were 2 things: one big window with "advertisement" note (nothing inside) and youtube video that you can close. It's even muted.

It sounds like even with "scripts on", your Firefox (or something else that's active) is still doing some blocking, hence the ad window with nothing in it.  I'm accustomed to a half-dozen simultaneous pop-ups (that dominate the screen real-estate on mobile).

Edited November 2, 2023 by (PSN)Unstar

[quxier]

8 minutes ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

58 minutes ago, quxier said:

Man, I was expecting more. I've turned on my script in my firefox and there were 2 things: one big window with "advertisement" note (nothing inside) and youtube video that you can close. It's even muted.

It sounds like even with "scripts on", your Firefox (or something else that's active) is still doing some blocking, hence the ad window with nothing in it.  I'm accustomed to a half-dozen simultaneous pop-ups (that dominate the screen real-estate on mobile).

Maybe it's platform specific (e.g. Window, mobile, ps etc) and browser (e.g. firefox or chrome). Does this happen on other platforms/webbrowsers?

[(PSN)FirmBizkit]

The issue with something like this is it’s a mostly pointless endeavour. It’s like when we all switched from cable to streaming. It was cheaper, you watched what you wanted when you wanted, there were no ads. Now it’s expensive as hell, there’s ads and it’s basically the same thing as cable was. It will just shift the profits from one entity to another and will eventually follow the same path.

Really these compendiums of information should be hosted on first party platforms.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

Wiki is Unusable in current state

even with adblock plus on

the bad scripting all over fandom crashes my browser

 

[TARINunit9]

37 minutes ago, (PSN)FirmBizkit said:

The issue with something like this is it’s a mostly pointless endeavour. It’s like when we all switched from cable to streaming. It was cheaper, you watched what you wanted when you wanted, there were no ads. Now it’s expensive as hell, there’s ads and it’s basically the same thing as cable was. It will just shift the profits from one entity to another and will eventually follow the same path.

Really these compendiums of information should be hosted on first party platforms.

Even if you were correct about alternate hosts, the difference is: Cable isn't so broken and unstable it doesn't even fully load the content 50% of the time

[(PSN)robotwars7]

anything that involves less ads gets a thumbs up from me, even better if that room gets filled with useful information instead. there are WAY too many ads on the net these days, I wish there were laws that limited the amount of ads on a page at any given time., especially since the computer I use for this forum is a potato at the best of times and all these ads seem to slow it down even further..

[(XBOX)Hellsteeth30]

Thrilled would be an understatement.

Seeing as it's the one stop shop for information about Warframe.

My phone can deal with the ads, but I'd rather it didn't have to.  They're obstructive and slow things up.

Overframe is much worse though, that site is nigh unreadable at times.  That's a different topic though.

[Numerounius]

Watched the video.

I'd say the Warframe community is too fragmented to make this as easy of an answer compared to some of the communities that have made the switch.

Just as you can easily get information from the WF wiki, you can also get it from Youtube or one of the big Discord communities or self-contained knowledge or from Overframe etc. And you have consider it for the dozens of updates and dozens of content islands there are in Warframe and the interactions that would be needed between all of them that needs to be linked to their own wiki pages. Trying to force all of the Warframe information onto one wiki is hard enough as-is. Then trying to migrate it would be no easy task given the relative size of the information needed to be transferred compared to the man-power that would be available.

 

Another thing to consider is how bad the SEO is with the WF wiki on Google as this is the main way to get to the wiki. Its a shame this isn't covered heavily in the video as that is what drives 99% of wiki traffic. I don't know if anyone else runs into this but for me if I don't type out the word Warframe at the end of the search exactly as intended it instead defaults to a random WF wiki page, I think at the moment that is the Laetum page, instead of providing search results as if I didn't intentionally make that spelling error. Adding another wiki on top of that would send the SEO into overdrive and screw it up even more.

 

On the topic of wiki on the phone, use Brave on your phone! It has a built-in adblock, for PC use Ublock Origin.

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

11 minutes ago, Numerounius said:

PC use Ublock Origin.

I second this. Ublock Origin is great and have been using it for years.

I haven’t given Brave a try but I keep hearing good things about it everyday. I might give it a whirl one of these days…

[Voltage]

1 hour ago, (PSN)FirmBizkit said:

Really these compendiums of information should be hosted on first party platforms.

Then the first party is then liable and responsible for the information and its accuracy. It makes sense why stuff like this is passed off. 

[(PSN)FirmBizkit]

28 minutes ago, Voltage said:

Then the first party is then liable and responsible for the information and its accuracy. It makes sense why stuff like this is passed off. 

Not necessarily. There’s a load of information and guides on the forums that they aren’t liable for its accuracy m. It would just be passing off the hosting and formatting to the first party. It wouldn’t really be much different than the forum in that sense.

 

[Hexerin]

4 hours ago, Flannoit said:

I despise Wikia/Fandom more than I despise Fextralife, and I REALLY hate Fextralife. I'm 100% for them moving to a better wiki host.

Fextralife isn't a wiki, so not really comparable. Fextralife is admin'd by a petty clique that actively posts false info and bans anyone who attempts to correct it.

1 hour ago, Turritopsis_Dohrnii said:

I haven’t given Brave a try but I keep hearing good things about it everyday. I might give it a whirl one of these days…

I've also never used it, but I've kept loose tabs on it. From what I hear, they've fallen from grace and aren't worth migrating to.

[DrBorris]

A year or so ago the Path of Exile wiki was moved off of Fandom and Grinding Gear Games took on hosting it. PoE is one of the few games that can beat Warframe in a "how poorly is this explained in game" competition. If they can do it, Warframe's community can.

It can happen, there's a chance.

[Flannoit]

11 minutes ago, Hexerin said:

Fextralife isn't a wiki, so not really comparable. Fextralife is admin'd by a petty clique that actively posts false info and bans anyone who attempts to correct it.

Fextralife treats itself like a wiki, and yes it is extremely clique-y and they do flood with false information, light example being the Elden Ring wiki they hosted which they flooded with beta information and refused to actually correct later, heavy example being Baldur's Gate 3 where they blatantly flooded EVERY SINGLE PAGE with DnD 5e information including stuff that isn't even in the game and a vast majority of it wasn't even accurate for BG3 as well.

There's tons of simple wikis you can use for little/no cost that aren't the disgrace that Fandom, but I'm sure there's a good chunk of free wikis out there that allow you to do what is currently done with the Fandom wiki but better and not flooded with malicious ads

[(PSN)Unstar]

5 minutes ago, (PSN)FirmBizkit said:

Not necessarily. There’s a load of information and guides on the forums that they aren’t liable for its accuracy m. It would just be passing off the hosting and formatting to the first party. It wouldn’t really be much different than the forum in that sense.

I agree that they'd be in the clear in regards to information and it's accuracy.  The main issue that I can imagine coming up if DE hosted the wiki would be that of moderation.  Which is to say, in a hypothetical world where DE is hosting the current wiki, they would be platforming hate speech.  Not in the articles/pages themselves (at least not from what I've seen), but in the Comments sections below those pages, where anyone can pretty much say anything.

In actual reality, DE isn't hosting the wiki and thus has no ability to moderate that content.  And as they say, "ought implies can": nobody can reasonably expect you to do something you don't have the power to do.  So DE is in the clear, their reputation unaffected by what a few bigots choose to do on a website DE doesn't control.

But the instant they host the wiki, that's no longer true; DE would then have absolute power over the content hosted on the wiki, and with that power would come responsibility and expectations.  Just like with the forums, DE would likely need to pay a skilled team to moderate the content of the wiki and any comments.  To not do that would undermine the values that DE has worked to associate with their brand.

Because of that, I would understand if DE doesn't jump to the rescue and offer to host the wiki, as it would almost certainly require not only paying the fees associated with hosting, but also the salaries of those tasked with keeping the wiki in-line with DE's inclusive values.  But if they did, that would be cool and appreciated! ^^

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

1 hour ago, Hexerin said:

I've also never used it, but I've kept loose tabs on it. From what I hear, they've fallen from grace and aren't worth migrating to.

Oh! Thanks for that. I almost stepped on a landmine, heheh.