Apparently AI-made fake wikis are crowding out fan wikis for indie games

A Eurogamer writer went looking for basic facts about the companion characters in Nighthawks, clicked the first Google result, the "Nighthawks Wiki", and found it was not a wiki at all. Instead of being editable by anybody, it only invited "corrections" by email. It was also full of false information that did not look like fans getting facts slightly wrong: it listed companions and skills that do not exist, and it regularly mixed in unrelated material about the 1981 movie and the Edward Hopper painting of the same name, even listing them as "sources" on pages where they had no relevance.

The author says they dislike accusing anybody of using generative AI, because its hallmarks are hard to pin down and are often misattributed to the LLM rather than to the human writers it copies (the em dash is the example given). But prompted by the rate and intensity of apparently made up facts, the author traced the domain name to Spaceship, a website building service that also offers an "AI Website builder". The email address on the "wiki" bounced. A quick search turned up many similar sites; some were really editable wikis, others only called themselves wikis. They typically targeted indie games without gigantic playerbases, the kind where players seek help and find no thriving community to provide it.

Tim Bender, CEO of publishing company Hooded Horse, knows the problem well. Unlike most publishers, Hooded Horse creates wikis for its own games, working with fans to fill them with useful information. Lately it has had to "play whack-a-mole" with AI-generated sites that compete for search results and give inaccurate information. One appeared for the game Corsair Cove but was part of a collection of more than 20 games run by a site called GameDB, whose creator admitted to using generative AI to make it. GameDB's public contact email returned an error saying "the remote server is misconfigured". Bender says generative AI "enables a run of basically commercial enterprises to mass produce and try to flood the search engine results of games to soak up their traffic". The result, he says, is that the company keeps hearing from confused players who stumbled onto these sites.

The GameDB collection includes a wiki for the 100-player FPS Wardogs. It was one of at least five AI-generated Wardogs wikis that FlamingMojo, a member of the Independent Game Wiki Network, saw appear in the days after the game's release in September. FlamingMojo says the confusion also hurts the volunteers who make legitimate wikis: players are misinformed by the fake sites, and when the real wiki has not yet created or updated the relevant page they "bounce off [wikis] entirely", which he says has hurt the volunteers' reputation.

Fan wikis were already a contested part of games culture, the article notes. Hosts such as Fandom dominate the space and have introduced AI features that had to be rolled back because of inaccuracies and unpopularity. Many groups have left those hosts, but independent wikis often struggle to rank in Google beneath the umbrella sites. Fans rarely make money from their wikis either: they give up ad revenue to the bigger platforms or pay for their own hosting. FlamingMojo, for example, pays for the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki out of his own pocket and runs no ads on it. Bender argues the low profitability makes things worse, not better: "There's not that much ad revenue, but there's going to be a little bit and that's all it takes." With such a low barrier, he asks, why not flood the results?

The aims may go beyond a little ad revenue. Bender says of some of these sites, "you don't know what data they're collecting". In at least one case, a generative-AI site pointed users to download extra software that offers a paid subscription; the software had been reviewed poorly online, and opening the site made the author's malware software warn that it was flagged as "potentially unsafe". None of the sites the author contacted for comment responded.

Independent wikis also carry a second burden: generative AI scrapers send them huge amounts of traffic, potentially affecting stability. Publicly available internal data from the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki shows 7m requests from AI crawlers in a 30 day period, 5m of them from Meta alone. FlamingMojo can tame other scrapers with files that direct them to real pages instead of brute-forcing every link, but he says Meta's crawler "hammers every page multiple times per second" with no care for "any sensible ratelimits". Smaller wikis are hit hardest because their maintainers do not expect big spikes and lack the compute to handle them. FlamingMojo says server costs for independent gaming wikis have risen between three- and ten-fold, again because of generative AI, on top of the search competition from corporate sites and now AI sites.

The article ends on a more hopeful note. The Dune: Awakening Community Wiki has had success with gamified contributions, in affiliation with the developer giving out in-game rewards. Bender places the whole episode in a wider context: generative AI tools have made it easy for bad actors to flood things and crowd out good information that people put dedicated time into, and this is one example of a much broader struggle. FlamingMojo's answer: "The way we survive the AI pollution is with community."

Key facts

A Eurogamer writer found the top Google result for Nighthawks, the "Nighthawks Wiki", was not editable (corrections by email only) and listed companions and skills that do not exist; its domain traced to Spaceship, which offers an "AI Website builder".
GameDB, whose creator admitted using generative AI, runs a collection of more than 20 game wikis; it includes one for Hooded Horse's Corsair Cove and one for Wardogs, one of at least five AI-generated Wardogs wikis seen after the September release.
Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender says the sites are commercial operations flooding search results for a little ad revenue, and some may be collecting data; one site pushed users toward paid-subscription software and was flagged "potentially unsafe" by the author's malware software.
Independent wikis also face AI crawlers: the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki logged 7m AI-crawler requests in 30 days, 5m from Meta alone, and FlamingMojo says server costs are up between three- and ten-fold.
FlamingMojo's proposed defence is community, and the Dune wiki has had success with gamified contributions and in-game rewards from the developer.

Why it matters

Fan wikis are where players go for help with a game, and the article describes sites that imitate them, rank high in search and give wrong answers. Indie games without big communities are the typical targets, so they are the ones that can least afford the confusion. The piece also shows a second cost for the real wikis: heavy AI crawler traffic that pushes their hosting bills up. Bender frames it as one example of a broader struggle over good information being crowded out.

Who it affects

Players looking for help with smaller games, who land on pages with invented companions or skills. Volunteer wiki maintainers, who say they lose players and reputation and pay more for servers; FlamingMojo pays for the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki himself. Publishers such as Hooded Horse that build wikis with fans and now chase fake copies. Fandom and similar hosts are part of the background: the article says they dominate the space and had to roll back AI features of their own.

How to use it

The article is a field guide of warning signs more than a tool. The author's tells were a "wiki" that cannot be edited and only takes corrections by email, facts that do not exist in the game, unrelated sources listed on pages, and a bouncing contact address. Bender's account of players getting confused shows why checking the source matters. One site pushed a download of paid-subscription software and was flagged as potentially unsafe by the author's malware software, so downloads from such sites deserve caution. For wiki maintainers, FlamingMojo describes files that steer scrapers to real pages and gamified contributions with in-game rewards as things that have worked for him.

How solid is it

It is a single reporter's investigation with named, on-record sources: Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse, and FlamingMojo, a member of the Independent Game Wiki Network. The crawler numbers come from publicly available internal data of the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki. The AI link is the soft spot. The author declines to accuse anyone outright and only traces the Nighthawks Wiki domain to Spaceship; the owner did not reply. Only GameDB's creator is said to have admitted using generative AI, and that admission is relayed by the author with no direct quote. None of the sites contacted for comment responded. The three- to ten-fold cost increase is FlamingMojo's own account.

Risks and caveats

The source gives no figure for how many fan wikis are affected overall or how much traffic the fake sites take from real ones. It does not say Meta's crawling is deliberate or what Meta uses it for, and it carries no comment from Meta, Fandom or Spaceship. The malware warning is from one reporter's software, and the source does not tie that site to any named wiki. The 7m and 5m request figures describe one wiki over one 30 day window, with no year given. The Wardogs release is dated only as September.

“The way we survive the AI pollution is with community”

— FlamingMojo, a member of the Independent Game Wiki Network