Comment by benguild

1 year ago

I feel like Wikipedia is one thing that helped take down a lot of topic-specific indie sites or home/about pages. Before, you could make a site about anything and find it via a search engine. That was part of the exciting surprise factor of the old web.

Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very highly for search terms, that was the beginning of this shift

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benguild

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Whoppertime  1 year ago

And this is where we get hybrids. Topic specific wikis. If I want to know about quests in a Fallout game I check one wiki if I want to know about alternate universe Lex Luthors I check another wiki.

  • didntcheck  1 year ago

    And of course they themselves have experienced the same phenomenon, with 90% of fandom wikis being absorbed into the blob that is "Fandom (tm)". It's turned fan wikis from what felt like niche non-commercial projects into yet another corporate entity trying to sell me more Marvel movies

    • piperswe  1 year ago

      There's been a growing pushback against Fandom (tm), with contributors to quite a few Fandom(tm) wikis moving back to a self-hosted MediaWiki instance. The Minecraft Wiki (https://minecraft.wiki) is a major example.

  • chasd00  1 year ago

    my kids pour over the SCP foundation wiki. All fan made up content, very detailed and a lot of it. It's pretty amazing really what a community has put together and maintained without a profit motive behind it.

    on an aside, i think a lot of regular websites are considered failures because the definition of success has radically changed. Unless you achieve complete internet domination in your domain then your site is failure.

ricardo81  1 year ago

Great point imo, not an easy point to make given how altruistic wiki is generally seen.

Another angle is Google's algo making people too scared to link out to other sites which was happening around the early 00's.