this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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It's embarrassing that huge and ongoing successful games can't shell out to host official wikis, but instead leave it to the community to either pay out or pocket (not happening) or pick whichever crappy provider they can find willing to host it for ads.
A good wiki needs to have mosly text, a modest amount of pictures, no self-hosted video, and low computing needs. While an unpleasant expense for a private individual, it doesn't cost a company much to host.
While I agree that it's rather sad for developer not hosting their Wiki, I really never had any problem with the old hoster of the Minecraft Wiki. I certainly didn't perceive it as a "crappy provider". It did exactly what it needed to and there weren't any intrusive adds or at least not to my attention. But maybe I'm just really good at ignoring adds myself.
Edit: Or mabye my add blocker did help, hard to tell since I haven't seen the internet without it since years now.
Yeah Bulbapedia is fan-run and does exactly what it needs imo.
Ya, not all are the level of Fandom. The old one for Minecraft was somewhat tolerable without an ad-blocker. I don't really feel it is fair to blame the providers either - even Fandom. They are stepping up to offer something nobody else feels like paying for.
While fandom sucks (although I think it used to be fine before the redesign many years ago) and game companies/publishers are cheap, I still think 3rd party wikis is going to better, even shitty ones like fandom, because guess what?
Just like every other 'live service' (or even just old games!?! if you're Ubisoft) everything will be fine and dandy until one day some suit decides to shut down the wiki to cut down on costs and all that information and community work gets flushed down the toilet.
With that said, instead of them making some wiki website, it's nice when games lets you look up information in the game itself, without having to open the web browser and going to some wiki.
Maybe we needed a "Show wiki page for this item/quest/skill/monster" prompt, like Melvor Idle does (my recent example).
Arenanet provides a Wiki for Guild Wars 1 and 2. They are both amazing and the second one even integrates into GW2. When GW1 came out it started as a community service but Arenanet took it in officially.
Honestly, without the wiki and the massive work by the community I'd be very lost in GW2.
Huh. That sounds kind of like Lemmy, wonder if someone will try to modify the software to support a wiki.
Looking it up, there is WikiWikiWeb implements Federated Wiki, which Wikipedia describes its primary features as:
Gonna look more into Federated Wiki today, because this sounds super interesting to me c:
I don't think a built-in wiki should be a priority for Lemmy. The sysadmin of an
instance.cominstance can host a separate web app as a standalone wiki atwiki.instance.com.For example, you could host an mdbook at this subdomain to serve as a docs-style wiki.
Even Reddit has a built-in wiki system. Why not Lemmy too?
Or, you know, make sure the game actually has all the information in it you need to play it.
This is the best take on this whole thread imo