If these Wiki sites want to redeem themselves, they should lean into the "clickhole" effect that Wikipedia tends to foster. A link-map (like Obsidian or Logseq) would be an actually useful UI addition. Maybe a sidebar would also be nice for navigating grouped articles.
The community largely followed to the new domain, leaving the Wikia version in a sort of dormant state filled with spam and weird "original fan-creation" pages.
https://www.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/44prw7/what_went_wr...
https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Talk:Touhou_Wiki/Archive_3#Wa...
The accusation was that Jimmy Wales favoured the deletionist faction on Wikipedia in order to push as much content as he could get away with over to Wikia, where he could monetize it. Once a wiki had been created there, it would be very hard for a different wiki to compete, since Wikipedia lent a huge part of its SEO juice to them.
Wikia/Fandom regularly takes over wikis that try to migrate off the site and scrub the attempt. The biggest recently was the Terraria wiki. The fandom wiki still outranks the official in Google.
People have been warning for years what a roach motel wikia/fandom is. But they zealously censor that discontent from wikia/fandom itself, so community after community has to learn it for themselves.
It is included in the Libredirect extension by default https://codeberg.org/LibRedirect/libredirect
Then again, this is part of the eternal dance between walled gardens and the distributed internet. We went from self-hosted platforms like wikis and forums, to centralized hosts like Facebook Groups and Fandom. Centralization is appealing at first, because all of that Venture Capital money leads to slick modern UIs, tons of traffic, and ad revenue. But eventually the platform starts to become greedy, wasteful, and starts putting dark patterns ahead of the user's interest. Then it's time to leave.
Assuming the fans keep linking to the new one, the Fandom one should get buried as a result.
https://zeldapedia.wiki/wiki/Community:Nintendo_Independent_...
I wonder how this group will fare in 10 years.
But it makes me realise that we really need to support hobbyist/fan run services as much as possible if we wanted self hosting to be rewarded. Is there an extension or something that tries to block sites owned by large companies (whether they be Wikia, Alphabet, Meta, etc)?
