Fandom has a major ongoing outage, tearing a not insignificant hole in the web. Seems like as good an opportunity as any to discuss what it is and the problems it presents.
“Fandom”, formerly Wikia, is a hub for anyone who wants to make a wiki but their subject matter isn’t a good fit for ur-wiki Wikipedia. It’s the perfect place for cataloging every detail of beloved media franchises and games. Notable Fandom wikis include Memory Alpha (Star Trek), Wookiepedia (Star Wars), and one for almost every video or tabletop game, from the popular to the obscure. It’s sort of replaced GameFAQs, and often your only alternative if you don’t enjoy watching a lets-play to get you unstuck.
There’s a huge amount of useful content on Fandom and I have nothing but respect for the editors who devote their time to maintaining these resources, but I’m here to argue that Fandom is bad for fans and bad for the web.
Intrusive Ads
Fandom devotes only a small section of the screen to content. The rest is intrusive, animated ads that move around the page, pop over content, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.
Browsing fandom is an utterly hostile experience. On mobile, it just gets worse:
Lousy Performance
I don’t know if it’s the ads or the auto play videos, or what. I’m not going to try and profile the site. But someone should; performance is a frequent complaint and it’s one of the few sites that will actually crash a tab; you don’t see that very often these days!
Why not just use AdBlock?
I refuse to participate in a two-tiered web of the power users who get to use free services uninterrupted and the bulk of everyday users who have to pay for it with ad garbage. Empathy is a critical skill for engineers, indeed it’s one of the things that makes good engineers good, and the lack of it is what has lead to the worst excesses of tech. As someone who still sometimes develops web things, I need to be able to see the web as users see it, not as some elite cadre of tech enthusiasts gets to enjoy it. Call it penance if you want to, but I think that power users using ad block (and subsequently tech failing to realize just how garbage top google results have become) is part of the problem, not the solution. I have an inkling that the people who have the pull to actually change things have hidden the problem from themselves instead.
What are we to do?
This would be an awesome article if I could end it with a call to action, a viable alternative with a great onboarding story that you could pick up and use. This isn’t that article. I do not have a neat solution.
Host your own?
Some Wikis are self-hosted. This allows for total control by interested parties, but can also be a burden for the hosts to administer. It also puts the (not insignificant) burden of SEO entirely on each individual wiki. Fandom is perhaps best understood as an SEO spam operation that crowd sources its content. Without the ability to share infrastructure and maintaience costs, there’s a major advantage in Fandom’s favor here. Not to mention the oft-underestimated hurdle of users needing to create yet another login (and expand their attack surface by one more some-day-compromised account.) Wiki.gg exists and is trying to centralize off-Fandom wikis and may be addressing this problem that way; one can hope they themselves don’t fall prey to the same perverse incentives that created Fandom in the first place.
Licenses as a solution?
Most Wikis use CC-BY-SA for their content, even when the content is directly copied from, for example, in-game text. This allows Fandom to monetize while still maintaining a facade that they’re merely hosting free content. You could take all of the text and images from a Fandom site and start your own, but because of the aforementioned economies of scale that isn’t a winning move. Likewise, if you create a wiki off-site, Wikia authors can happily copy all of your content into their own competing wiki. Perhaps it’s tome to write a new license for wiki content, one similar to AGPL or CC-NC, which would be impossible for Fandom to comply with; one that disallows commercial use or mandates releasing your source code.
I don’t expect this overnight
Wikia’s reign is entirely up to the folks who decide to put words on the internet. I don’t think it needs to be a one-site race to the bottom. But there’s massive inertia, even on days like today when it’s rendered entirely unusable by technical issues.
But examples exist! Check out the Sarna.net, the BattleTech (MechWarrior) Wiki. It’s using MediaWiki, but the ads aren’t nearly as intrusive.