All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXXIII

[Labster]

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.

I guess a lot of my opinions on this were already expressed in the template design.  I'm a fanfiction writer, so I want it easier to find resources about a story.  But tropers can also find it useful.  So I want to get All The Wikis™ in general.  This is a tool to be useful to people.

But it's also a way to help circumvent Fandom's SEO.  A way to introduce them to smaller wiki projects that might need help.  Whenever there is a community fork away from Fandom, we should not link to Fandom.

Links to fandom get a special CSS class.  I was thinking of putting the Fandom icon in, but if you want to use the icon for a dumpster fire, that would also be fine.  Fandom seems to be deep in the enshittification phase of its life-cycle.  You know the same company owns DirecTV and TV Guide?  Squeezing out whatever income is left in a dead product seems to be their thing.  They bought Washington Mutual six months before the government shut it down and lost a heap of VC money.  In any case the product has so many ads that it's getting legitimately unuseble without an ad blocker.

In terms of official game wikis... most of the contributors are still fans.  Largely it is made by the spades, who want to plumb the game's depths.  Largely it being official just means that it's better moderated and the games authors will steer people to contribute there, so it gets better overall coverage. Plus, in general, fan wikis are not where you go if you want criticism about something anyway, since they are filled with fans -- so it's not like being official changes the content very much.  (It might miss on documenting the fandom itself.  EU4 streamers often refer to the Ottomans as "kebabs" but this is forbidden on official wikis/reddit for being racist... in a game about historical nationalism.)

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One thing I've been thinking about was trying to kill Category:Index Index which is generally useless except for keeping pages off uncategorized reports.  We have Template:Main, which could easily add a category.  But it would make more sense to do some organization, like "Work tabs" or "Creator tags" or something like that for each page type (please help me name this), otherwise we end up with a slightly more complicated Index Index.  We could do this from Template:Main, right?  We have the technology.

So I think I would go about this with Bucket, again.  There's no easy way to check the categories of another page from Lua, though maybe DPL could do it.  Just save the name of the template used on the main page, and we can look it up with a cheap indexed query.  But then, if we have this... all of those subpages with the wrong template on them I indicated before... I could make them just work?