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…

  • jedibob5@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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…

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I am forever grateful that halopedia rolled their own wiki and was spared from the fandom plague.

      • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Another stark comparison is UESP vs. Fandom for elder scrolls lore. Fandom is absolute cancer, poor UX even with an adblocker.

        • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Yeah I find it completely unusable. I can’t use wookiepedia anymore because it is just awful to use. Like you said, it’s awful even with an ad blocker

      • jedibob5@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

        • DrQuint@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Man this was an issue already some 10 years ago when touhou wiki went self-hosted. It took a whole year for google to get memo and link the new one above the old.

          Nowadays I assume it’s pretty much impossible to reverse the flow unless if your game is huge and highly sought after.

        • ono@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          I wonder if this could be mitigated (or even nullified) by a cooperative game developer, through DMCA takedown notices sent to Fandom. There is a lot of art on these wikis, after all, and I imagine the copyright holder has some say in who is allowed to distribute it.

        • English Mobster@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          What are they going to do? Ban them?

          Honestly if I was migrating away from Fandom I’d do everything I can to burn every bridge. Go through and edit every page to have every link redirect to the better wiki. Ignore their 2-week period, and don’t inform the Fandom overlords that the wiki is being shut down (it’s not like they’re going to check without being prompted).

          I’d make them ban me, and then good luck finding an admin.

          • jedibob5@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            It’s not too hard to roll back changes on a wiki. Any attempts at sabotage wouldn’t be very difficult to undo.

        • Illecors@lemmy.cafe
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          1 year ago

          Thank you. I’ve been dabbling with the idea of establishing a non-profit for my lemmy instance. I’m not a user of game/movie/etc wikis, but I do love looking after my servers. I wonder if a non-profit owned wiki site bear any weight over time.

  • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • hightrix@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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”.

      • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Psythik@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Jabbawacky@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Youtube lets creators monetize their content, wikis don’t. Everything is a hustle now.

      • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Anomander@kbin.social
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        1 year 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.

        • DrQuint@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          There’s this guy who made maps of more than 200 games on GameFAQs and he’s my hero

        • HooPhuckenKarez@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I’m a mechanic irl, and I have this issue all the time. I don’t need a 12 minute 38 second video to show me how to get some particular bits apart, while text and long lost pictures don’t work very well either.

      • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        Do you actually keep ads on, on purpose? I know people turn Ublock Origin off for certain creators for youtube, but browsing the internet at large would definitely be a different experience.

        Wiki sites are free too so they’d have to be ad riddled…

    • sebinspace@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        How is it a monopoly when mediawiki is FOSS? Lots of fan wikis use that instead.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Monopolies aren’t defined by the availability of alternatives. It’s based on the market share captured by a single entity. We’d need to see statistics to determine if it’s a total monopoly, but I’m not aware of many other hosting platforms for game wikis. Maybe fextralife?

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Fextralife is utter shit. Always giving you the most unrelated information in the longest amount of time all while being forced to watch a stream you don’t care about.

          • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Yeah I think hosting is the thing that they’ve captured, far more than the notion of a domain-specific wiki. Of course, there’s nothing stopping an aspiring wiki admin from hosting on a platform that isn’t targeted at game wikis.

      • ryapric@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

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

        • bobbysq@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It used to be independent until Curse started Gamepedia and then got bought by Wikia.

  • ono@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    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/

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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

      • ono@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • ShadowRam@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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/Satisfactory_Wiki

    https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki

  • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    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…

  • Sabin10@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • LazyBane@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Jabbawacky@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      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.