Hi, as I’m sure everyone knows the Fandom Wiki is still around (and isn’t going down any time soon because of Fandom’s greedy practices) so what’s the plan to beat it out? If you search up anything related to Undertale or Deltarune, that Wiki shows up first, which means it will continue to get much more traffic. The Minecraft Wiki moved about a year ago and received a lot of community support, but search results still show the old Wiki and not the new one. I know chapters 3-4 will be coming out in a little over a month and that could be an advantage if the old Wiki isn’t updated, but from what I’ve heard Fandom staff will often copy+paste content from the new Wiki to the old one to maintain activity. In the past I encouraged vandalism and I now really regret that because I don’t think it helps in most scenarios, but are there any other strategies at all to get this Wiki ahead? Sorry if this is a question that’s asked a lot but it really hurts to know that so many people will continue to use the old Wiki not knowing there’s a new, better one.
I don’t know where you heard that. If Fandom Staff copy paste content from this wiki to the old one, we legally have the right to take it down, as they would be violating our license.
The current wiki projects are one part of the plan. We split some pages into more meaningful chunks for better ranking and we have a bunch of new content to add even before the chapters release.
More direct way of helping the wiki’s searchability is to get as many websites as possible to link to it, signifying to Google that it is used. However, you should be careful when doing this, because I don’t want anyone to think we’re sending spambots to other websites to spam the link to our wiki. If the link is relevant and useful in the context of that website and page, you could add it. Also, if the website was previously linking to the old wiki, you could change it to the new wiki. This obviously won’t work very well for Fandom wikis, because Fandom Staff will likely notice you doing that eventually and consider it spam, but any other wiki network may be willing to change where they are pointing to.
Less direct way of helping the wiki’s searchability is to get all willing contributors over here. More contributors means more new content, and better ranking in search engines. I think the amount of contributors we have now is already very good! We preserved the vast majority of contributors that we had on the old wiki. But if you spot any contributors who don’t know we’ve moved, you can point them to the new wiki. Obviously, if they don’t want to move, that is also fine.
Ultimately, this is the hardest task we have of all on this wiki. I don’t have a 100% working plan that will definitely help us beat Fandom in X amount of months. If Minecraft Wiki haven’t succeeded yet, and with a game that is constantly updating, that means we still have a long way to go. But eventually, I think we’ll get there.
Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate this insight and am glad to hear about what the Wiki is doing. I will definitely see if other sites can have their old links replaced. On the subject of the copy+pasted material, I’ve seen it before on several Wikis but I’m guessing it was just individual users doing the copying and not the staff like I assumed. Hopefully at some point Toby Fox can officially endorse these Wikis, I know that really helped the Runescape Wiki when they moved. Anyways, I just wanted to thank you and the rest of the Wiki team for the all the work you’ve put in migrating the Wiki, it’s so nice seeing control put back into the hands of the fans.
Also, I’m not sure if you’ve already pursued this but I think joining the Nintendo Wiki Allliance (https://www.niwanetwork.org/) could help to give this Wiki a boost in awareness. Their requirements do not state the Wiki has to be a Nintendo-owned franchise, only closely related to Nintendo, and given Undertale and Deltarune’s history with Nintendo (Sans in Smash Bros, special Nintendo Switch versions, Toby Fox composing for Pokemon) I think they might consider it. Many of the Wikis in the alliance used to be on Fandom, so I’m sure they would want to help!
Edit: Even if they don’t feel it falls into the scope of a Nintendo Wiki, they have plenty of unrelated independent Wikis listed as “affiliates”, and even that would probably help a bit.
We can also make videos or posts about this wiki. For example, I found about this wiki through Shayy’s post announcing the fork, so I can see this working, especially with popular lets players and theorists.
Another thing, there is a whole section about the fandom if you look up undertale on Wikipedia, so that isn’t helping
That section is just talking about the fandom (as in the fan base) not Fandom the company. It’s confusing but neither Wiki is mentioned in the Wikipedia article at all.
And I mean it. Unless you pay the search engines, that is