Every now and then I’ll get an email from someone higher up in Wikipedia asking for a donation. I don’t really mind a tenner but I don’t know if it pads the pockets of corporate management or actual contributors. Also, are they really short of money or is this tugging at emotional strings a play at something else? I wish Wikipedia survives but there’s a lot of projects I need to donate to and I have a budget.

  • @ShareMySimsEnglish
    39•11 days ago

    If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

    A bit of an aside, but breezewiki.com is a great open sourced way to get away from this (their internal search doesn’t always work, but a search engine search for fandom name + breezewiki should do it)

    • Badabinski
      12•11 days ago

      You’re an absolute hero. I’m easily irritated by ads, and fandom has driven me to genuine rage a couple of times when I’m on mobile and only have DNS-based adblocking some of the time. It’s a wiki, for Christ’s sake, so why does it need so, so many ads‽ It’s just static content most of the time!

      edit: to provide more context, this is a frontend for fandom wikis that strips out the bullshit.

      • @ShareMySimsEnglish
        12•11 days ago

        Happy to help! The fandom pages are absolute garbage, breezewiki really is a godsend.

        I found out about it on here: https://libredirect.github.io/, I’m not sure how up to date it is, but there are definitely some other useful links to explore

      • @[email protected]
        4•11 days ago

        If you want to hate them more, there were cases of wikis moving off the site and fandom just deciding to restore the content after the maintainers deleted it, claiming everything written on the site is their property. Absolute shithole and I refuse to use it if there are alternatives.

        • Badabinski
          1•11 days ago

          I do, but certain Android browsers don’t support plugins. I have to use a specific browser for compatibility reasons with some work shit (I do on-call stuff). I need that to just work, so I can’t use, say, Firefox for Android. I use multiple browsers on computers, but I just can’t be bothered on my phone. That leaves me with DNS-based ad blockers. Those work almost as well, but only when I’m home or VPNed home. I don’t want to use a hosted service for privacy reasons, and I don’t want to expose a DNS server on the internet. This means that when I can’t VPN or I forget to, I get fandom rage. I’m sure I could do something to address this, but I have bigger fish to fry right now. The nice ad-free fandom frontend sounds like a great compromise to me.