According to several current Fandom employees who spoke to Aftermath on the condition of anonymity, Fandom has laid off 11 percent of its staff. On the games media side of things, that includes many GameSpot video team members and GameSpot UK.
One thing that recently had me pondering was why do we need separate wikis, why not just add the information to Wikipedia? Unless your wiki has some feature Wikipedia doesn’t support, it just seems to provide a background image and ads.
For example, I was looking up some Dragonball information, and their wiki was really sparse and didn’t answer my question. So I randomly tried Wikipedia and it had all my answers
My only guess is some Wikipedia usage rules that say not to but I find that unlikely
Wikipedia has rules that a topic has to have some level of relevance to be added. While a major video game character can have enough relevance, an article for a random piece of scenery or for a “rusty dagger” item from some game would never be allowed.
Game wikis also often have unique features, for example for showing item stats or have a look and feel that fits the game.
Do you happen to know where in the rules it would list the “level of relevance”. I did a cursory read through of the content guidelines but I didn’t see anything that would necessarily exclude descriptions of specific video game content, levels, or assets, but I’m no master at Wikipedia - I can’t say I’ve contributed much beyond donations.
Also I did mention those unique features some wikis have. For example, the Old School RuneScape Wiki has some really great calculators, maps, and data collectors, so I’m very happy with those. But for less popular ones where nobody is putting in the work to make the wiki exemplary feels like we may as well save time and not give Fandom money by using Wikipedia
And look and feel I would say is good unless it’s a fandom, and then all the look and feel in the world doesn’t justify those ads
Thank you very much! I wasn’t aware of these guidelines so it’s interesting to read
I think the notability is a little hard to define, so I could see some discussion happening, especially about more minute details like individual items in games. But it seems like, based on the existence of a Krillin page, that there is at least some precedent for somewhat broader topics
Just added this to my browser this morning, coincidentally! Not sure what thread it was, but I thought it was this one. Thanks for the link though, it’ll be a big help
Yeah and why do we have more than one news organization, when we could just have one official news channel and you’d never have to go searching for news articles again. And we could have one central bank that holds all of our money, that would make sending money around much easier.
I see what you’re saying, but also I don’t think those analogies are necessarily fair. I don’t think putting Yoshi’s birthday on Wikipedia instead of Yoshipedia is quite as critical as a central bank failure
We’re on Lemmy, which is an aggregation source just like Wikipedia. Some knowledge is only stored here, while other knowledge is an external link. It’s not a bad thing to be a central point of information as long as it is a community-driven process with high levels of transparency, like Wikipedia.
Lemmy, however, works differently from Wikipedia or Reddit in that multiple services work together to be that aggregation source, which is great, and Wikipedia doesn’t have that, which is not great. So that of course could be better in an ideal world, and I would bet there is a federated Wiki service already out there
But, I’m not talking about life changing information here, I’m talking about what happened to Krillin in episode 700 of Dragon Ball Super, I think it’s okay if that information lives in one central location - especially since you can always just watch the episode again to verify
I don’t think the importance of the information stored changes the fact that storing it all in one centralized place is generally a bad idea. The latter is a bad idea, the former is a bad idea but with worse consequences. A decentralized internet is a healthy internet.
One thing that recently had me pondering was why do we need separate wikis, why not just add the information to Wikipedia? Unless your wiki has some feature Wikipedia doesn’t support, it just seems to provide a background image and ads.
For example, I was looking up some Dragonball information, and their wiki was really sparse and didn’t answer my question. So I randomly tried Wikipedia and it had all my answers
My only guess is some Wikipedia usage rules that say not to but I find that unlikely
Wikipedia has rules that a topic has to have some level of relevance to be added. While a major video game character can have enough relevance, an article for a random piece of scenery or for a “rusty dagger” item from some game would never be allowed.
Game wikis also often have unique features, for example for showing item stats or have a look and feel that fits the game.
Do you happen to know where in the rules it would list the “level of relevance”. I did a cursory read through of the content guidelines but I didn’t see anything that would necessarily exclude descriptions of specific video game content, levels, or assets, but I’m no master at Wikipedia - I can’t say I’ve contributed much beyond donations.
Also I did mention those unique features some wikis have. For example, the Old School RuneScape Wiki has some really great calculators, maps, and data collectors, so I’m very happy with those. But for less popular ones where nobody is putting in the work to make the wiki exemplary feels like we may as well save time and not give Fandom money by using Wikipedia
And look and feel I would say is good unless it’s a fandom, and then all the look and feel in the world doesn’t justify those ads
Notability guideline is here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_notability_guideline
Thank you very much! I wasn’t aware of these guidelines so it’s interesting to read
I think the notability is a little hard to define, so I could see some discussion happening, especially about more minute details like individual items in games. But it seems like, based on the existence of a Krillin page, that there is at least some precedent for somewhat broader topics
There are alternatives to Fandom which aren’t Wikipedia: https://getindie.wiki/
Just added this to my browser this morning, coincidentally! Not sure what thread it was, but I thought it was this one. Thanks for the link though, it’ll be a big help
Yeah and why do we have more than one news organization, when we could just have one official news channel and you’d never have to go searching for news articles again. And we could have one central bank that holds all of our money, that would make sending money around much easier.
I see what you’re saying, but also I don’t think those analogies are necessarily fair. I don’t think putting Yoshi’s birthday on Wikipedia instead of Yoshipedia is quite as critical as a central bank failure
We’re on Lemmy, which is an aggregation source just like Wikipedia. Some knowledge is only stored here, while other knowledge is an external link. It’s not a bad thing to be a central point of information as long as it is a community-driven process with high levels of transparency, like Wikipedia.
Lemmy, however, works differently from Wikipedia or Reddit in that multiple services work together to be that aggregation source, which is great, and Wikipedia doesn’t have that, which is not great. So that of course could be better in an ideal world, and I would bet there is a federated Wiki service already out there
But, I’m not talking about life changing information here, I’m talking about what happened to Krillin in episode 700 of Dragon Ball Super, I think it’s okay if that information lives in one central location - especially since you can always just watch the episode again to verify
I don’t think the importance of the information stored changes the fact that storing it all in one centralized place is generally a bad idea. The latter is a bad idea, the former is a bad idea but with worse consequences. A decentralized internet is a healthy internet.