User:ManyOursOfFun/sandbox/summary of forking discussions

Editors have expressed discontent with the current state of the Minecraft Wiki under Fandom. For example, user experience is generally negative, caused by intrusive ads, pop-ups, and overall web design. Additionally, users generally distrust Fandom as a company due to their actions; one notable example is the recent Grimace ad campaign on the McDonald's Wiki.

From this, many from the community have raised the idea of forking to another platform/host. Forking would allow us to circumvent the issues raised above. Furthermore, depending where we fork to, the wiki may be allowed more freedom and control over itself. The available hosting options are wiki.gg, ABXY, and Bulbapedia. Wiki.gg is a wiki-farm, whereas ABXY and Bulbapedia are semi-independent hosts.

Although wiki.gg is a wiki farm, it affords more editorial control and slightly more skin control than Fandom, as well as offering more wiki extensions. Anonymous editing is allowed. Some have also described wiki.gg as having better SEO than other forking alternatives. However, as of writing, wiki.gg does not support notifications of any kind. Additionally, while each wiki can create their own mobile skin, wiki.gg does not have an official responsive mobile skin.

Meanwhile, semi-independent hosts provide more freedom than wiki farms. ABXY and Bulbapedia offers more wiki extensions, better skin control, better extension control, and good mobile support. They even require the wiki to have a custom domain. Some differences exist between the two, though. Bulbapedia doesn't allow anonymous editing, and some legal responsibility has to be shouldered by the wiki itself. However, it does allow the Widget extension to be used, which is useful for the Minecraft Wiki as it allows the sprite templates to function. In contrast, ABXY holds all legal responsibility and allows anonymous editing, but has a worse content delivery system (CDN), and does not allow the Widget extension to be used.

All options display advertisements on their websites in varying quantities. Wiki.gg displays small banner ads at the top and bottom of every page, as well as three small ads that take up the right side of content pages. Bulbapedia has a sticky ad that takes up the bottom portion of the screen, one ad on the right side, and an in-content video ad that becomes sticky after scrolling down. ABXY has two banner ads on the top and bottom of each page. In addition, wiki.gg and Bulbapedia display no ads to logged-in users, while ABXY displays ads to everyone regardless of whether the user is logged in.

It is recommended to visit respective wikis for wiki.gg, Bulbapedia, and ABXY to gain a fuller sense of how advertisements are organized, as well as to get a rough idea on the overall design and layout of each wiki. And for a more exhaustive treatment of other differences between forking options, please see User:MarkusRost/fork and this Google spreadsheet.

Regardless of what forking host may be chosen, one major issue arises when forking. Fandom's forking policy states that the original Fandom wiki must stay intact and separate from the forked wiki. The forked wiki must not link to and from the Fandom wiki, and you cannot advertise the forked wiki in the Fandom wiki in any way.

In addition to any possible splitting within the community, search engine optimization (SEO) is commonly cited to be a major issue. Fandom currently has superior SEO out of the other forking options, meaning that the Fandom wiki will outrank the forked wiki in search results for a significant period of time. Additionally, Google will consider the forked wiki a "duplicate" of the Fandom wiki, meaning it will be hidden from search results. Major amounts of edits across large amounts of articles will need to occur for the forked wiki to no longer be considered a duplicate by Google. This sentiment is most common in smaller, non-English language wikis. They worry that their small size may not be beneficial to their survival after having forked.

Many people have suggested ways to mitigate the effects of poor SEO. Most commonly, the forked wiki may be advertised through social media (e.g., YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit). The sentiment of the general Minecraft community toward the current Fandom wiki is generally negative, so it's possible that an announcement of forking might be seen by numerous people. (It should be noted that the perceived negative sentiment might be only from a vocal few people and not representative of the Minecraft community at large.) Another way is mentioned in the previous paragraph, where each article will be edited to prevent being a duplicate of the corresponding Fandom article. However, this would entail having to edit about 9,000 pages individually.

It is requested that all editors vote on this matter, as it is a drastic change for the Minecraft Wiki and will affect all editors and readers in some way or another. Your opinion is important and valued.