review of Miraheze as a wikifarm
in this post I want to kind of, write down my thoughts about Miraheze as a wikifarm. when I first started out making my wiki on Miraheze, there wasn't a whole lot of information about Miraheze as a whole. most information I could find was reviews from people who had issues with individual wikis or users—run-of-the-mill wikidrama that you're gonna find everywhere. so if you're considering Miraheze to host your wiki (especially if you're moving away from Fandom), I hope this post can be helpful.
a bit of context about my "wiki journey": prior to starting my own wiki, I already had multiple years of experience editing wikiHow. It was mostly "basic" stuff like copy-editing, fixing broken links, etc. I didn't have any admin experience, and I didn't have any technical experience. It did give me a solid basis for understanding how wikis are structured (like the basics: templates, categories). I first started my wiki on Fandom because that was the only platform I was familiar with. Over the course of a couple of months I became more and more uncomfortable with the ethos of Fandom as a company. Additionally, I needed a platform that offered more control and flexibility than what Fandom offered. I imported my wiki to Miraheze in September 2021. This included a lot of stuff (templates, categories) from Fandom so I didn't have to truly start from scratch.
so onto the actual reviewing
Wiki requesting: you have to request a wiki on Miraheze and get it approved. As of writing this, the way this works is first an AI reviews your request and either approves it or sends it to a human for further review. They need to use an AI because they simply don't have enough human volunteers to manually review the enormous flood of requests they get. I feel like people are a bit intimidated by having to have their request "approved" but in my experience, it's not that deep. Just follow the instructions, use full sentences to explain what your wiki is about, and if you're not doing anything illegal then it's very likely to get approved
Dormancy policy: this is also something that scares people off. Miraheze has a policy that if your wiki is inactive for a long time, it will get turned into read-only mode and then eventually deleted. The important thing to notice is that any kind of edit resets the timer on this. If you just make an edit every couple of months (doesn't even have to be a constructive edit), you don't have to worry about your wiki being deleted.
Drama from other wikis: again this is something that I see a lot of people criticize but it's not something I personally have had any bad experience with. Yeah, there are shitty and toxic wikis. Miraheze has been trying to crack down on the worst examples (ones that just suck up moderation resources).
Getting help: Miraheze is like. 20% more technologically difficult than Fandom. There's less hand-holding and if you're completely new to wikis, this can be a bit of a learning curve. There's a Discord server for support and in my experience they've generally been pretty good at helping out with any kind of question or problem you may have. I'm not a mega computer person but like 90% of my problems I could solve by reading documentation (from Mediawiki, Miraheze, Fandom) and the other 10% were solved by volunteers from the Discord server. It's a learning experience like any other but it's not as massive as it's sometimes made out to be
Flexibility: you get basically a completely clean Mediawiki install. You can change permissions on who can read, edit, perform admin actions (e.g. so that people have to get approved to be able to edit), there are tons of extensions, tons of skins, you can modify it to look however you want. The only limit is your willingness to learn. My wiki is a bit more bare-bones, not a lot of custom stuff because I can make do without and I'm not super good at this, but even a basic wiki can look good with some extremely basic tweaks. You can also change the license, e.g. choose a non-commercial license so that Fandom can't re-use your content or choose a non-free license altogether.
Interconnectedness: there's not a whole lot of connection between wikis. This can be good or bad depending on what you want. I basically never interact with other wiki people, except on the Discord server every now and again. A lot of wikis are not really in tune with the runnings of Miraheze itself as in, few people participate in Miraheze elections or discussions, but I think that's kind of expected. Most people are just there to host their wiki and don't necessarily want to discuss the wiki platform itself.
Stability: Miraheze has weathered some tough waters but at this point in time, stability is good, the company is financially in a good place.
Hands-off approach: Miraheze leadership meddles very little with local wiki adminship. If you're not doing anything illegal or being a toxic cesspool of discourse, it's very unlikely they're going to intervene.
There have been hiccups in the past but overall I've had a very good experience with Miraheze and I'm very glad I made the switch away from Fandom.
I'm open to answering questions about my experience if anyone has any additional things they'd like to know.
