If you search for a wiki for your favorite fandom you'll very likely end up at one running at Fandom, formerly Wikia. Fandom is the fan wiki as a dark pattern of platform decay, user-contributed nonsense, bad design and Google's preference for those things over correct, official, accessible sources. Weird Gloop is helping fandoms stuck with Fandom escape it: "I will give you (free, very specific) advice on how to get your wiki off Fandom, and make a kickass wiki somewhere else"
Weird Gloop is now hosting the official League of Legends Wiki. We've spent the last couple months working with the Riot folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom, and turn it into something the players will (hopefully!) really dig. I also love that it got started because one of the Riot guys plays a ton of Old School RuneScape and thinks our wiki is awesome. How cool is that??
I want this to kick off a new era where communities and developers take control from Fandom, and make some really great wikis. We've already been doing a bit of this, starting when we helped the Minecraft Wiki leave Fandom, but I think it's time for me (and the rest of our group) to be more explicit about what we want to do.
They have credentials: Weird Gloop was instrumental in exfiltrating the Minecraft wiki. When Minecraft left Fandom, it had to "fight its own zombified corpse" in the form of the old, out-of-date but always SEO-optimized Fandom wiki left there. The new one now has top spot in search, though the Fandom one remains close behind.
One interesting element of the problem, I think, is that the nature of "wiki" honors a formal canon and effectively requires centralization and author-adjacency to be credible. But the nature of "fandom" summons the headcanonistas, etc. What sort of platform thereby prevails? It's a case study in the "Geeks, MOPS and sociopaths" model of fandom.
