All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXXIII

[GethN7]

I populated a few fanwiki tabs, and just had a few questions that came up while doing that.

Fan wikis refers to wikis made for fans or editable by fans right? Because there are a few high profile wikis that are technically the "Official" wiki for whatever game or IP they cover IE (Hello Kitty Island Adventure, Old School RuneScape Wiki - seems more typical for weird gloop or wiki gg sites than fandom.)

Some Creators (IE: Nintendo) and Useful Notes (IE: The Playdate video game console) have fan wikis. Of the two, I think it’s more common for creators to have wikis.

Other questions/notes:

I noticed that the drop down for new pages no longer includes laconic, so I assume that we are good to go for Short description on works pages?

In favor of putting visual editor up to a vote again, particularly if it improves on wiki discussion tools.

When it comes to fan wikis, I recommend we favor non-FANDOM wikis when possible. Mostly because they are ad-free, generally given better upkeep, and tend to be more stable in terms of content.

As for the Visual Editor, if re-enabling it gives us better discussion tools, then I would support it.

I agree about disfavoring Fandom, although I am admittedly biased against it (Arguable mid 2000s COI with Wikia and Wikibooks, to Wikibooks detriment.)

For the time being on my first sweep, I have just listed the most prominent wikis for a subject, and intend to do another sweep and list all relevant fanwiki more often when I get back to my computer and can edit easier. But in general I find the Miraheze, weird gloop, and wikigg wikis to be higher quality, especially if they were the result of a fandom getting fed up and forking.

You are listing multiple wikis when they exist, right? The documentation that Labster linked to when he mentioned the new headers describes how to do that.

The comments here about showing a preference depending on the wiki server make me wonder whether folks think it's acceptable to list a small uninformative wiki instead of a large informative wiki just because of who hosts the larger wiki. (For example, the self-hosted "The H.P. Lovecraft Archive" has fewer than 70 pages, while "The H. P. Lovecraft Wiki " on Fandom has over 7,000 pages.) Let's not self-censor based on association.

As to the last point, I should clarify. The DoomWiki (self-hosted) version is generally preferable to the FANDOM one because it's far more up-to-date and is considered by most major Doom sites like Doomworld to be the authoritative wiki on the subject. 

Conversely, I would definitely recommend the Gundam Wiki on FANDOM because there are no alternatives and its coverage is extremely well curated and maintained.

In essence, I argue we should link to other wikis based on the overall quality and communal reliability of their content. I would argue most former FANDOM wikis that went independent (like the DoomWiki) would be preferable. Otherwise, if there is no other alternative and the FANDOM wiki is of excellent quality (like the Gundam wiki), we should link to that.