malymin

I'm struck with how fandom community information-hubs-sites, as a phenomenon, largely only exist among fandoms that were born prior to modern social media.

Let's look at videogames alone. Starmen.net. Court Records. Serenes Forest. Shining Force Central. Serebii, as well as various alternative Pokemon fansites like Marriland.

Or anime? Empty Movement. Rumik World. EvaGeeks. Moonkitty.net and several other Sailor Moon fansites.

You'd think wikis would serve as an acceptable substitute for newer fandoms; by and large, they do not, especially not the ones hosted on Fandom. Even the wikis that are well-run and thorough often lack some of the resources I associate with informational fansites - strategy guides and build advice in the case of videogames, subjective analysis and meta in the case of anime and similar non-interactive narrative media. When I've suggested that an indie mons game like Monster Sanctuary or Cassette Beasts should have pages for basic build strategies, I'm told such things are totally out of the scope of a wiki. (At least Stardew's wiki has pages offering practical advice on the productivity of various crops, animals, machines, etc...) Likewise, the pretense of "objectivity" often leads to character descriptions that are fairly shallow, especially in media that is dense with subtext or narrative lacunae.

One of the only anime wikis I've seen that feels like it serves as a good information hub in the way fansites did is wiki.puella-magi.net, in no small part because it bothers to catalog early fandom history, at least as it existed in the anglosphere - 4chan threads (and a small glossary of memes and terms), theories and speculation from when the show was still ongoing, a big ol list of fanworks (obviously not exhaustive! but most wikis would not bother with this). Obviously this site is biased towards the fanculture as it existed on 4chan (rather than, for example, as it existed on Tumblr), but that's still more information than I can scrounge up for many other 2010's fandoms in one place.