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...

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.

Fandom ruined actual good wikis. God that site is so shit, why do people keep using it?

PSA for people sick of fandom: www.antifandom.com has the same content on an ad-free UI

its a mirror of www.breezewiki.com which has a search on the home page as well as a list of other mirrors

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/

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.

Because Fandom has ruined the interface, and most people just watch YouTube tutorials

I’m surprised you could tell, I can’t find the wiki content beneath all the ads

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

It does seem like we need kind of a federated network of wikis.

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...

Fandom, previously Wikia, a long with all game journalism sites with their SEO have ruined it.

Figure I'll just dump a list of non-fandom wikis I use here.

Tolkien Gateway - General Tolkien stuff

LOTRO Wiki - Lord of the Rings Online

UESP - Elder Scrolls

BG3 Wiki - Baldurs Gate 3

Halopedia - Halo

OSRS - Runescape

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.

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.

Reminder to get Indie Wiki Buddy to automatically be redirected to ad-free versions of fandom wikis or to be redirected to actual genuine wikis, for example, TF2 Fandom Wikis get redirected to the official TF2 Wiki.

They're all just ads

I get that wikis cost a little time and money to host and run them, but the studios/devs should offer up a wiki on release that could be moderated by a combo of employees and/or volunteers. They’re losing the opportunity to drive community engagement and keep it all close by letting these big wiki sites it up all the competition.