Fandom purchasing Gamepedia and moving everything onto Fandom Wikia was so awful. I’m so upset the Dota2 Gamepedia wiki is now on Fandom, and I’m sure many other communities feel that way for their own community run and community led wiki pages.
Not that I was particularly warm about Gamepedia either, but at the bare minimum I didn’t feel like the page was all ads and no information. Fandom wikis are explicitly set-up to drive as many eyeballs as possible onto advertising and engagement, and are holding actually relevant information for the visitor as a hostage to get those eyeballs. It’s information masquerading as a social media site.
The Runescape community convincing Jagex to cover the hosting costs and moving all their wiki pages to their own set-up has been such a huge boon for their community. It is super unfortunate that for many communities, the community-led wiki pages are a huge trove of information but the companies/games/groups these communities coalesce around have shown little to no interest in merely just financially supporting the endeavor.
I’m certain that Jagex wasn’t necessarily doing that out of the kindness of their hearts. RuneScape community sites have had a history of advertisements that border on malware at worst, are paid phishing attempts at best, and benevolently full of grey market account services and real world trading platforms.
Best case scenario was them hosting the platform to protect the integrity of their game, and the community.
Not to distract from the good move that it was, of course.
Wait a multibillion corporation hosts an official wiki on fandom???
it’s not official in that way no. “official” in this case is being used to mean “this is the wiki everyone uses, and which is acknowledged to be the Minecraft wiki”―but it has no formal ties with Mojang or Microsoft. some people have suggested they finally make the relation official to get the hell off Fandom, but i’m not sure how much Microsoft cares.
The real reasons why the wiki is no longer official (because everyone seems to have their own version of events) is here, but here’s the cliffnotes:
Mojang/Microsoft’s legal team contacted them notifying them that the contract they signed with Curse in 2011 is being terminated (probably because Curse was no longer the owners after being bought by Fandom)
As a result, all of the official logos/artwork/anything copyrighted by them could not be used legally.
Wait a multibillion corporation hosts an official wiki on fandom???
Just install MediaWiki on a spare azure server…
If I recall correctly, the official Minecraft wiki used to be a custom/self-hosted MediaWiki installation. They moved to Fandom at some point.
It was hosted on gamepedia and it was called official, but when fandom bought gamepedia and moved the wiki to their site it lost its official status
Fandom purchasing Gamepedia and moving everything onto Fandom Wikia was so awful. I’m so upset the Dota2 Gamepedia wiki is now on Fandom, and I’m sure many other communities feel that way for their own community run and community led wiki pages.
Not that I was particularly warm about Gamepedia either, but at the bare minimum I didn’t feel like the page was all ads and no information. Fandom wikis are explicitly set-up to drive as many eyeballs as possible onto advertising and engagement, and are holding actually relevant information for the visitor as a hostage to get those eyeballs. It’s information masquerading as a social media site.
The Runescape community convincing Jagex to cover the hosting costs and moving all their wiki pages to their own set-up has been such a huge boon for their community. It is super unfortunate that for many communities, the community-led wiki pages are a huge trove of information but the companies/games/groups these communities coalesce around have shown little to no interest in merely just financially supporting the endeavor.
I’m certain that Jagex wasn’t necessarily doing that out of the kindness of their hearts. RuneScape community sites have had a history of advertisements that border on malware at worst, are paid phishing attempts at best, and benevolently full of grey market account services and real world trading platforms.
Best case scenario was them hosting the platform to protect the integrity of their game, and the community.
Not to distract from the good move that it was, of course.
it’s not official in that way no. “official” in this case is being used to mean “this is the wiki everyone uses, and which is acknowledged to be the Minecraft wiki”―but it has no formal ties with Mojang or Microsoft. some people have suggested they finally make the relation official to get the hell off Fandom, but i’m not sure how much Microsoft cares.
The real reasons why the wiki is no longer official (because everyone seems to have their own version of events) is here, but here’s the cliffnotes: