wut. I thought Wikia was good?
wikia is not good.
wikia is a hypercapitalist monopoly that's crushing independent wikis and it's an adware-infested hellscape that sucks ass and has a horrible user interface.
wikia is a for-profit corporation that does not care at all about fandom, stole and trademarked the fucking word "fandom", and is actively monopolizing the fanwiki world while either buying out or outcompeting actual legitimate independent wikis.
they manipulate google results to drive searches toward their much shittier wikis rather than towards the actually helpful and worthwhile independent wikis.
if you google the word "fandom", the top result AND the wikipedia page they suggest are both wikia.
their user interface is horrifyingly terrible for a wiki and they allow almost no customization at all to the wikis who have to use their platform. you cannot run a wiki on wikia without forcing people to see a huge, obnoxiously bright yellow WIKIA!!! banner along one side, a huge header filling up the top of the page, a massive useless sidebar, and often a fucking video above the article, not to mention the literally endless wall of completely fucking unrelated ads that scroll up under every article, and instead of talk pages they have fucking comments sections.
this is an actual wiki:
and this is the equivalent page on a fucking wikia wiki:
neither of those screenshots are edited.
you cannot see the information on the wikia page upon opening it.
but you know what you can see?
fucking ads.
have you ever heard of NIWA? it's the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, a group of independent wikis that are each around a specific Nintendo fandom (Super Mario Wiki, Bulbapedia, etc). a couple years ago there was a huge controversy because ZeldaWiki, one of the founding members, shifted to Gamepedia, a wiki farm and possibly Wikia's biggest competitor. people were annoyed, and were occasionally making jokes like "what next? are we going to start including Wikia wikis?"
then gamepedia got bought and merged with wikia.
this is what zelda wiki used to look like:
and this is what zelda wiki looks like now:
terraria recently changed their official wiki to an independent one since Gamepedia got bought out by Wikia, which is good, but it's drowned out by the literal thousands of crappy, hard-to-navigate wikia-owned wikis. I've seen wikia wikis that have to append each article with a tag at the top saying "we're sorry about that huge video ad above the article, we can't do anything about it, wikia's in charge."
and wikia gets away with it because site hosting is expensive and difficult so many people, especially younger people, have no choice.
and nobody cares.
support independent wikis wherever you can.
And just try to find a COMPETENT Dragon Age Wiki is laughable, the best you can find are build sites subreddits and/or threads, Wikia has been choking the competition to death, literally almost every game has been on sites like fextralife or Wikia and the only reason fextralife has stayed around so long is because it is good on the hardest and most complex aspects of games. Serebii has only been around because some people like the format to bulbapedia. Either way, these few examples are the exceptions that prove the rule. The rule being that wikia has been a menace to gaming communities for ages. We've only put up with it because we've had to, the fact that it's crumbling now is a blessing, finally more populated subreddits, gameFAQs, genuine wikis for the games with good interfaces, and lesser known sites will pop up from the ashes for Wikia's bankruptcy. This is only good news for everyone except Wikia employees and owners.
