Good to see we're finally fighting back against Fandom
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Fandom is icky. A few years ago, my mom was getting scammed by some conspiracy guy from LinkedIn who offered her a “job.”
These dudes set up their own fandom wiki to try to make their bullshit seem real. I can’t remember the name of the people involved but one guy was claiming that he was owed 300 trillion dollars by the government. (Can’t remember the exact number but it was astronomically high. More money than exists kinda high)
A lot of devs of "wiki games" have been doing this lately.
Digital Extremes/Warframe did it a month or two back. And a lot of people have speculated that https://wiki.warframe.com/w/WARFRAME_Wiki:Stakeholder_Analysis and the old fandom equivalent "explains" it but that is inherently tinfoil and biased speculation.
We did the same for The Talos Principle Wiki.
The community is hosting its own MediaWiki rather than rely on Fandom.
The Monster Hunter community just did the same: https://monsterhunterwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
Folks finally got tired of the several horrible options and did it themselves. There’s also a discord for coordinating contributions if so inclined.
Honorary mention of Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, which existed as a fan documentation hub since the mid 90s.
ublock origin and firefox.
no ads, no popups. game wikis are a breeze to use for me.
Breezewiki?
Good! Hopefully more devs follow suit and pull traffic away from Fandom.
Also hopeful that they manage to fix the SEO on the site, as Fandom is still the top result for "Vampire Survivors wiki".
Try the browser add-on Indie Wiki Buddy.
It suggests a better wiki when you browse one on Fandom.
edit: there is an open issue to add the official Vampire Survivors wiki: https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy/issues/1102
Just to add on to this, in those unfortunate cases where there really is only Fandom, you can use an extension like LibRedirect which will redirect any Fandom pages to a breezewiki instance, which is a stripped down, privacy respecting, no BS front end for Fandom.
Same with the Terraria wiki. Afaik the fandom wiki is mostly abandoned and people moved to the much better gg wiki.
The Oxygen Not Included wiki made the jump a few years ago and the gg wiki seems to finally be better referenced
Why make a Wiki when a shitty Discord server with a clunky search function is easier to set up? Of course it‘s also much less useful, more work to maintain in the long run and a never ending source of drama, but most devs don‘t think that far because they kinda only do it to build a community anyway. Being a source of information is just slapped on but enough reason for them to not set up a wiki or proper forum it seems. Ugh.
I assume Google prioritizes the wikis that bring in the ad dollars. Not sure if any amount of SEO can change that.
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Just wanted to point out that wiki.gg is out there as a replacement. There's even a wiki.gg Redirect plugin for Firefox that takes you to the right place, if you hit a Fandom link.
and then wiki.gg gets bought, as other wikis got. No thanks.
Write content in a community mediawiki maintained by the community instead.
Instructions unclear.
Locked it behind a Discord community instead. 🤡
I know this is a joke.
But seriously from my heart
Fuck you.
Guess whose doing an IPO and will sell all its data plus get advertisements everywhere? Yep, Discord..
For anyone looking for a wonderful example of this, check out the RuneScape wiki. It’s hosted by a company that is partnered with the game maker, and is fully maintained by the community. It is the single most expansive and in-depth wiki I have ever seen. It is truly the gold standard for what a wiki should aspire to be.
It has everything you could need to play the game, all the way down to automatic calculators (with built in character lookup functionality, using the game’s high score leaderboard system) to tell you things like how many of [x] resource you’ll need to get [y] experience, or what your estimated return on investment will be for turning [x] resource into [y] product.
The game has over 250 quests, (and not just basic fetch or kill quests like most MMO’s have) and the wiki has in-depth walkthroughs (including in-game screenshots) for every single one.
You can even open the wiki directly from the game. There’s a “Wiki” button on the chat box, so you can search the wiki directly via chat, and it opens in your desktop browser.
It took many years and plenty of iteration to make it there. It feels like a fever dream remembering the days Sal's realm and tip.it were king. Remember when the game map wasn't even in game, they just had a image linked at the top of the webpage?
Relative to a fandom wiki: I guess? Although you are inherently going to have the same content theft problems where the vast majority of modern wikis are just ripped from the game guides that games media are still paid to prepare.
Relative to an official wiki with developer backing? No, it is not a replacement.
Also: I would generally be very wary of any of the plugins to redirect you since they have VERY broad permissions to... hijack your browser traffic. If you are keeping up to date and monitoring them you are probably fine but that feels like a great example in waiting to find out a bad actor pushed some code last week...
Based dev. Fuck fextralife and fandom
fextralife
Sometimes it feels like fextralife is filled only with stub articles.
me: "Hmm, I wonder about [a thing] in [a game]"
fextralife's entire article: "[A thing] is a thing in [a game]"
brilliant, thank you.
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Best thing that happened to path of exile too, the devs provide the wiki platform for the community
Very based
The Guild Wars 2 (and 1) wiki is also hosted directly by the devs. It's even accessible via chat command.
The fact that in GW2 you can just type
/wiki subject
and get taken to the wiki page for subject is such an amazing and obvious command I'm surprised more games don't do it.
Not only that but GW2 also can link items and skills in the chat so that someone else can view them. And the best part is that this also works with the wiki command.
So, for example, you found an item and want to know what it is and what you can use to for, just link it after /wiki and you are redirected to the full page of that item.
Unfortunately, I lately have issues with firefox in which the first wiki command somehow screws with my firefox and thinks that it needs to restart before being able to work correctly.
Goddamn that's awesome. Had no idea after hundreds of GW2 hours.
Here's the most useful one, IMO:
/wiki et
It takes you to the event timers page, so you can see when the world events are going to happen.
I also like /wiki ezd which opens a page telling you how to quickly do the daily and weekly objectives.
Same thing happened with minecraft.wiki too, people finally got fed up with fandom's bullshit
That's not the same, Mojang isn't affiliated with the wiki at all.
Same with doomwiki.org and a bunch of others.
osrs.wiki lets just list them all
I'm surprised the OSRS wiki isn't mentioned more. The game itself is very community oriented as well.
Warframe just did it too. Fantastic move.
I avoid using fandom like it’s contagious. It’s so cluttered, when my blockers on images don’t load half the time. It’s a slow site.
It’s really the worst, I’d rather scrub through a YouTube video to find the answer I’m looking for rather than go to a fandom site.
You might like the indie wiki buddy extension, it can automatically redirect you to a independent wiki when you go to fandom (if there is one), remove fandom search results, and redirect you to a 'breeze wiki' page if there's no fandom alternative
(Breeze wiki is an alternative frontend for fandom, much like invidious for YouTube. It guts all the ads and banners and garbage, and gives you a much simpler wiki page)
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I've often been like "I don't know why people complain about Fandom, this is fine". And then I saw what the site looks like without uBlock. Sweet merciful heavens. Hey, there's some ads. Let's cram some ads in the ads. Some prime blank space? Shove some annoying video things in there. Autoplaying. See that navigation bar over there? Let's make it pointless. (If you come to the article via web search, surely you want to read about some completely random stuff in another game!)
Fandom is garbage, Fextralife is garbage (and at this rate will probably be bought by Fandom one day). Indie wikis rule.
This pleases me.
I wouldn't be surprised if the initiative comes from the OG dev of the game, who is Italian: the efforts we go through since 1996 (all I can remember) to avoid ads and popups are of biblical proportions.
I can remember my father taking the PC away from me as soon as he saw I was exposed to one, going "I can take that away, it will be a minute". It wasn't a minute.
They have taken the survivors.wiki domain.
I wonder if they are planning spinoffs with other themes?
Edit: typo
Accountant Survivors coming in October.
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Love this, and the site looks great. Wonder what software that is. Is it just mediawiki?
Very nice to see. Might start playing again to 100% it (yet again) now that there's an actual useful wiki for it. Always love to see pure media wiki usage. I wish we could just scrub Fandom's one now.