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Comment by chungy | Hacker News Reader

Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki from Fandom servers. For several communities that decide to cut ties with Fandom, they effectively have to "fork" the wiki to a new domain and hosting provider, and all the while, search engines will almost always show the Fandom version first. I know it's happened with Doom, Simpsons, Futurama, Minecraft.

It also draws would-be contributors to the Fandom site, make changes there, and since they are no longer supervised by the community 'elite', the quality of the Fandom version rapidly declines.

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> Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki from Fandom servers.

The IP owners can request a takedown though & they'll usually comply, some game studios have done this

No, Fandom does not shut down wikis over takedowns. They will push back on any takedown attempt in order to remove the least amount of offending content as possible, then claim the rest as fair use.

Their legal department is willing to bet that the IP owner's legal department does not care enough about the abandoned Fandom wiki to put the time and effort into finishing the job.

By IP owner I mean the video game publisher/studio, not wiki admins. In this case they do at least some of the time (I work for wiki.gg and we've had wikis migrate and then get the Fandom one taken down cos the game devs sent a request)

> By IP owner I mean the video game publisher/studio, not wiki admins

So do I; they're one in the same in my case, for a wiki that exited Wikia in 2010. The only thing Fandom even responds to are takedown requests for copyrighted visual artwork.

Sincerely, congrats on getting one through, but I think that's the exception and not the rule, and something you might get that standalone indie wiki admins and game publishers don't necessarily have.

You can email me more details if you want, but maybe try again now. Make sure you're contacting them from a company email and send a support request that makes it clear you're the rights holder and you want the wiki about your IP taken down

I feel like most video game wikis would be pretty clearly fair use. Otoh maybe fandom would just feel its not worth fighting about.

I'm not sure why Google hasn't straight up blackholed them. Consider the situation with the Warcraft Wiki:

1) Started in 2004 as independent "WoWWiki", then "moved" in 2007 to Wikia aka Fandom

2) Forked in 2010 due to Fandoms blatant disregard to Wowpedia, under Curse

3) Fandom acquires the Wiki part of Curse and with it Wowpedia in 2018

4) Forked in 2023 as Fandom made the site practically unusable

The biggest fuck you of it all? They continued hosting WoWWiki all this time for the sweet SEO, even if it hasn't been relevant for decades. Even when they started owning the new version in 2018, they would not disable the old one - you know, it was still ranking in that Google algorithm!

For all these years, there has been a single correct choice for what link to show a Google user searching for relevant content. And yet going on 20 years Google doesn't manage to do it, instead rewarding these utter dickheads.

Google isn't on our side. Google is the bad guy as much as Fandom is. They both ruthlessly extract wealth with no regard for users.

Google is an ad company, listed on Fandom's GDPR notice, they're not going to block a site that is sending them a ton of user data in favour of the official wiki that isn't.

Yep, enormously frustrating. Search 'minecraft granite' and the top result is still Fandom.

EDIT: Hell, even 'Minecraft Wiki' still goes there.

Will they allow the bulk overwriting of pages?

From experience, Fandom will block and revert any attempt to do this. They assign employee admins for abandoned wikis who do nothing but revert any attempt to do this.

They have moderators who revert overwrites. However, one thing they don't do is fact check new pages. Some fandom pages are majority junk because the moderators aren't going to boot up the game and see if some new boss that supposedly appears 300 hours in to Terraria's calamity mod is actually real. It just isn't feasible for paid labor to do, and all of the community gardeners who give a shit have moved elsewhere.

Sure, until someone (anyone, since it's a wiki) notices the vandalism and reverts it and reports your account to probably get banned

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