796
Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
796 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
74331 readers
3114 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
jimmy wales is also the president and co-founder of fandom
to give you an idea of who that guy is
Obligatory plug for BreezeWiki. Makes that shit actually usable.
I mean, the Wikipedia page does say it was sold in 2018. Not sure how it was before but it's not surprising that it enshittified by now.
I guess in his defense it wasn't too bad before 2018, as far as I can remember. Most of the enshittification of fandom I can remember has happened since.
Oh gross
Why?
Fandom (previously Wikia) is an extremely shitty service with low-quality wikis mostly consisting of content copied from independent wikis and a terrible layout that only exists to amplify their overwhelming advertising.
my one weird trick for using fandom.com is to disable javascript for that domain.
While this is true, the majority of the wikis are not at all low quality. Some are the only ones existing for a topic. The wikis are community-based, after all.
But its easy to vandalize and is highly profit-driven. The fandom wikis are filled with ads that absolutely destroy navigation. Infamous is the video ad that scrolls you up automatically in the middle of reading once it finishes. You have to pause it to read the article with no interruption.
they captured the "niche wiki" market as wikia, then rebranded and started serving shittons of ads. the vim wiki is unusable these days because it runs like ass and looks like a gamer rgb nightmare
There's an addon for that, Indie Wiki Buddy.
It tries to redirect you to non fandom/fextralife wikis if they exist, and if not, it proxies fandom wikis through BreezeWiki which just displays the content.
And I'll take this opportunity to plug Hohser and the uBlock AI blocklist as well.
Oh yeah that website's pretty great It has really in depth wiki about games like https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Caesar%27s_Legion
So I guess you mean that Wales guy is pretty great then
The user content on fandom is generally pretty good, at least for the wikis I frequent. It's everything else about the site which is awful -- the pop-ups, the completely irrelevant auto-playing videos, how it's constantly trying to shove other fandom wikis into your attention.
I'm sure the site is improved with userscripts and such, and I am already using adblock, but it's pretty unforgivable IMO.
Oh, you mean the https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Caesar%27s_Legion ?
Yup, Fallout Wiki has a pretty crazy history. I don't remember if they were originally a Fandom wiki, but at some point they definitely went "well, we don't want to go with Fandom, we'll go with Curse wiki host instead." Then Fandom bought Curse wikis and put all of them under Fandom banner anyway.
The independent Fallout Wiki is basically where the actual community is right now, the Fandom wiki is just there to confuse passers-by with their high search engine rank. Fandom has the policy that the community can fork a wiki and go elsewhere, but they will not close down the Fandom wiki, so good luck with your search rankings.
Many game communities have opted for the "unbridled vandalism" strategy to push people away from fandom. Just replace all the articles with plausible lies.
The "fandom" one is much more complete ?
I mean, they're both pretty great,
From the search engine if I wanted to know about in-game faction,
I'd just pick which ever appeared first.
and it'd be fine either way
So why would "Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zone"
think they can just point at it and imagine any random people would even know
what she "who that guy is" means just because he's associated with that wiki ?
And that my innocuous comment
would triggers the nerds with such an unanimously negative response ?