Comparing Miraheze to Fandom

Comparing Miraheze to Fandom This community essay compares a few aspects of Miraheze and Fandom

The following is a comparison between Miraheze and Fandom, written by community members.

Aspect	Fandom	Miraheze
Accounts	Fandom uses its own custom login system. All accounts on Fandom are shared across all wikis. Users can see which wikis they've contributed to at Community Central.	Miraheze uses CentralAuth as its login system. All Miraheze accounts are global and shared across all wikis. Anyone can see a user's global contributions through Special:CentralAuth.
Advertisements	Fandom uses banner and inline advertisements, usually inserted at the sides of articles or at the very top of the page. Fandom derives its income from advertising and sold content. Some of these advertisements appear to collect extensive personal information for the purpose of targeting the advertisements towards specific people.	Miraheze does not use advertisements and relies on a donation model for funding.
Core principles	Fandom (formerly known as Wikia) is a wiki hosting service which offers free wiki hosting with advertisements. Fandom allows all types of wikis to be created on their platform but mainly focuses towards entertainment wikis. Fandom is operated by Fandom, Inc., a for-profit business.	Miraheze is a free wiki hosting service with no advertisements. Miraheze allows all types of wikis to be hosted on its platform, provided that they abide by the Content Policy. Miraheze is operated by Miraheze Limited, a not-for-profit company.
Editing	Fandom offers three editors: The VisualEditor, source editor, and 2010 WikiEditor.	Miraheze offers three editors: VisualEditor, the Source Editor, and the 2010 WikiEditor.
Extensions	Fandom offers 27 extensions by default, and around 11 extensions upon request. Fandom does not allow users to request extensions outside of the defined list, although they intend to introduce a new security review process for outside extensions soon.	Miraheze offers 51 extensions by default, and around 220 extensions that can be enabled via ManageWiki. Extensions may be requested and must be reviewed by Site Reliability Engineer first before installation. Extensions are installed after a thorough security review has been conducted on the extension and it is confirmed that the extension is compatible with its setup.
JavaScript pages	All sitewide JavaScript code published on Fandom (with the exception of personal JavaScript) must be reviewed by Fandom's JavaScript Review Team before they take effect. Fandom has a large repository of user-made JavaScript scripts that can be imported to other Fandom wikis without the need for review found on the Fandom Developers Wiki. These scripts can be easily enabled on Fandom wiki's via their ImportJS feature.	Miraheze does not enforce any restrictions on how administrators or users can edit sitewide or personal JavaScript pages on the wiki, respectively. Changes made to these pages take effect immediately after being saved. Miraheze does not offer a JavaScript repository but MediaWiki scripts from wikis like Wikipedia usually work. Through the use of a Content Security Policy, Miraheze mitigates the risk of dangerous JavaScript code, but still allow free editing of sitewide JavaScript. Miraheze users are still forbidden from embedding advertisements, malicious code, etc. in their JS pages.
Namespaces	Fandom offers the standard 16 editable namespaces that ship with MediaWiki by default. Custom namespaces can be requested and are usually limited to a maximum of three.	Miraheze offers the standard 16 namespaces and the wiki-style forum namespaces, and allows for custom namespaces to be created using ManageWiki. There is no limit to the number of custom namespaces that can be created.
Skins	Fandom offers one skin for desktop, FandomDesktop, and one for mobile, called FandomMobile. FandomDesktop and FandomMobile can be customized by local wiki administrators using their proprietary ThemeDesigner, along with custom JavaScript and CSS that comply with Fandom's Customization policy.	Miraheze offers 6 default skins but allows local administrators to enable more on their wikis. Local wiki administrators may customize their wiki's appearance freely.
SEO	Fandom has a team that is dedicated to SEO and as a result, generally fares well on search engines. Fandom applies specific SEO techniques on all their wikis to ensure they have a good search engine ranking, including specific tweaks to skins and page formats. Fandom actively uses their anti-spam filter to prevent wiki administrators from accessing the Google Search Console (this was tested some time ago and it may no longer be the case).	Miraheze does not have any dedicated SEO team. Miraheze applies a few techniques and offers users tools to help in their SEO endeavors, including access to the Google Search Console, but does not officially offer any dedicated SEO support. Some community members may step in to assist. SEO guides for Miraheze users are available on these pages: User:Collei/Improving a wiki's SEO User:NotAracham/WikiSEO - Improving Search Ranking
Software	Fandom uses MediaWiki 1.39.3 and has said that they intend on continuing to upgrade their MediaWiki version when possible. Fandom uses the Long-term support (LTS) branch of MediaWiki and deploys new versions of MediaWiki LTS once testing of new versions concludes. Fandom has many proprietary extensions and features, many of which are currently closed-source. Fandom employs these extensions to curate a uniformed look across all wikis, allowing local wiki administrators to tweak their wikis within their predefined mold.	Miraheze uses MediaWiki 1.39.4 (c2ed577). Miraheze offers many extensions, all of which are open source.
System messages	Fandom allows wiki administrators the editing of a select number (i.e. whitelist) of MediaWiki namespace pages. Changes to any other system message must be reviewed by Fandom Staff.	Miraheze allows wiki administrators to edit the MediaWiki namespace freely by default like Wikimedia Projects. No change has to be reviewed by Miraheze Stewards or Site Reliability Engineering.
Staff	Fandom employs full-time paid staff that are not elected by the Fandom community. Officially, staff only intervene with local wiki communities in certain circumstances, such as ToU violations, but are known to take actions outside of that scope, including forcibly enabling extensions without community input, changing URLs for SEO purposes without notification, and removing local wiki administrators that object to forced changes. Wiki communities do not hold all the power over their wikis; if they migrate, they cannot close their old wiki and may only link to the fork for 2 weeks before having to revert everything back to how it was. Fandom Staff may appoint new administrators after removing old ones if a wiki community migrates. Employees of the company have anonymously claimed that users have been banned by staff members for disagreeing with the company's actions, and that employees have been fired for speaking out in a similar way. Additionally, they claim that the sales, HR, and marketing teams collaborated to write inauthentic reviews of the company on Glassdoor. Fandom does have volunteer staff in their Spam Obliteration and Prevention (SOAP) group, which works to cleanup advertisement spam and vandalism that is cross-wiki, taking place on inactive wikis, or on wikis that request assistance. They may also intervene when Fandom staff ask for their assistance in maintenance tasks. These volunteers have access to the ability to lookup personal information about users (IP address, email address, etc.), block users either from the entire Fandom network or on a local level, and other rights, but are forbidden from intervening in social issues such as harassment, admin abuse, and incorrect information being added to wikis. Fandom also has Global Discussions moderators. These are volunteers who moderate harassment, trolling, and spam in the Discussions features of inactive wikis, or on wikis that require their assistance. They have the ability to block users from editing a wiki, delete and undelete Discussions posts, lock and unlock posts, lookup user IP addresses, etc.	Miraheze does not employ any full-time staff and instead is run by volunteers. Some of these volunteers focus on the technical, behind-the-scenes operations of the wiki farm and generally do not involve themselves in on-wiki issues. Stewards generally fulfill many of the roles that the Fandom Community Team takes on; they are also unpaid and are elected by the community. Because Miraheze is a not-for-profit, Miraheze allows wikis to migrate away from the platform and will close a wiki if that is the consensus of the community. Miraheze volunteers may get involved in local communities when there are violations of the Content Policy and other global policies, such as spam, vandalism, defamatory content, illegal content, copyright concerns, etc., or when a wiki has technical issues that require interventions to address (such as system errors that make the wiki not function properly), but Miraheze prefers to give local wikis as much freedom as they can and allow them to resolve such issues without intervention whenever this is possible.
View permission	Fandom does not allow wikis to be private and has a policy against protecting a majority of the pages on a given wiki.	Miraheze offers a private wiki option and allows for a "page whitelist" which allows certain pages to be public in a private wiki, while the other pages are still private.
Social features	Fandom has a "Discussions" feature, a message wall feature, and a comment feature. The utilities of the Discussions feature can be observed here: https://community.fandom.com/f. Comments are also visible on Fandom pages such as https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Food, for example. The message wall feature can be observed here: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Message_Wall:Kirkburn	Miraheze allows the Flow extension to be enabled in ManageWiki to serve a similar function as Fandom's message walls, and offers comment extensions such as CommentStreams. A dedicated Discussions feature is not available, but some concepts for a Discussions alternative are being developed by a Miraheze user. Features similar to Discussions can be implemented, such as what is seen at https://www.polandballwiki.com/wiki/Polandball_Wiki:Community_portal or with WikiForum, but the exact function has not yet been re-created. Most of the functionality of Fandom's user profile pages can be replicated with SocialProfile, but to remove some unwanted features (such as the large number of different sections for a user's about page enabled by default in SocialProfile), CSS and system messages must be changed. The Miraheze-based Genshin Impact Wiki's common.css file is a good reference, along with other system messages on the wiki. If you are unsure how to use the linked pages as a reference, Miraheze's Discord or IRC can help.