"The way we survive the AI pollution is with community," says FlamingMojo

A reporter looking for basic information about the companion characters in the adventure game Nighthawks found, among the first Google results, a wiki that listed companions and skills the reporter says do not exist. ^[1]

The reporter was Jay Castello of Eurogamer, in a report published October 27, 2026. The site, Castello wrote, also carried unrelated material about the 1981 film and the Edward Hopper painting that share the game's name. ^[1]

Here is my view. A fan wiki is a community's memory, kept by hand, and what is turning up beside it is a counterfeit that borrows the name and none of the duties. That is more than an annoyance. A wrong answer costs you a few minutes. A counterfeit that outranks the real thing starves the real thing, and then nobody is left to correct anything.

What the real thing is

A wiki is a set of pages anyone in the community can edit, with a history of every change. That is the whole trick. A player finds a boss pattern, a hidden door or a rule the game never explains, and writes it down. Another player corrects the number. A third notices the patch changed it all and updates the page.

Game Developer described these sites in 2024 as player-made resources for guides and information. It also quoted a professor and community-engagement consultant who called accurate, well-functioning fan wikis archives for games whose original versions may no longer be playable after years of updates and bug fixes. ^[2] That is the part that stays with me. The game itself is rewritten under your feet, and the wiki is where the old version is still remembered.

A game world is a small thing beside a life, but the principle holds. What nobody bothers to write down is lost, and what is written down carelessly is remembered wrong.

The Minecraft Wiki describes itself as publicly accessible, editable and maintained by volunteers through user contributions. It says it left Fandom in September 2023 and is now hosted by Weird Gloop. ^[5] Hollow Knight's community made a similar exit, after disputes that included an inaccurate generative-AI Quick Answers feature on Fandom, which the company removed within 24 hours after a backlash. ^[2] So this fight is not new. Players have been defending their libraries for years, mostly against the landlords.

The counterfeit

The Nighthawks site, according to Castello, was not publicly editable. It invited corrections by email, and Castello's email to the listed address bounced. ^[1] Think about that as a design. A library whose suggestion box leads nowhere is not a library. It is a shopfront.

The developer, Wadjet Eye Games, describes Nighthawks as fully voiced, with a cast of characters whose stories and skills players can explore. ^[4] The people who made it can say who is in it. The site that turned up among the first search results apparently could not.

Castello traced the site's domain to Spaceship, a website-building service that also sells an AI website builder. The report is careful here, and so should I be: Castello said the signs did not prove generative AI was used. ^[1] Nobody has shown who runs the site, and the report does not say every suspect site was machine-made.

One case is clearer. Eurogamer found a GameDB collection of wikis spanning more than 20 games, and its creator admitted using generative AI. ^[1] Other similar sites turned up too, some editable and some not, often aimed at games with smaller player communities. ^[1] That detail matters. Big games have armies of volunteers who will notice and complain. A small game has a few dozen devoted people, and a convincing fake can sit on its search results unopposed.

The best case for the other side

In fairness, the fakes did not invent bad wikis. Plenty of human-run fan sites are thin, stale or wrong, and an editable page is not proof of a correct one. Fandom, a large wiki host, shipped an AI feature that got facts wrong. ^[2] Nor is every odd-looking site machine-made, as Castello took pains to say. ^[1] If the question were only who is more accurate, a person or a model, I would not pretend the answer is always the person.

But accuracy was never the whole of what a wiki offers. A wiki can be wrong in public. You can see the edit history, find the argument on the talk page, post a correction and watch it stick. The error has an address. The knockoff can be wrong in private, with no way to fix it and no one to ask. When Eurogamer's reporter wrote to the one contact the site offered, the message did not arrive. ^[1]

What it costs

The damage is concrete. Tim Bender, chief executive of the publisher Hooded Horse, told Eurogamer his company has had to "play whack-a-mole" with inaccurate AI-generated sites competing with its game wikis. He said players had been confused by them, and described commercial operators mass-producing such sites to flood search results and capture traffic. ^[1]

FlamingMojo, a member of the Independent Game Wiki Network, said the sites had harmed legitimate wikis' reputation, because misinformed players may blame or abandon the volunteer-run resources. ^[1] That is the cruel part. The fake gets the wrong answer out, and the real wiki gets the blame.

Then there is the bill. Eurogamer reported that the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki's publicly available internal data showed seven million requests from AI crawlers in a 30-day period, five million of them from Meta. FlamingMojo said server costs for these wikis had risen between three- and ten-fold, and he attributed that to generative AI's impact. ^[1] Wikis written for love are facing a bigger bill, and the visitors running it up are bots.

Some sites may want more than ad money. In one case Eurogamer described, a site directed users to software with a paid subscription, and the reporter's security software flagged it as potentially unsafe. The report does not say all such sites do this. ^[1] It is a reason for caution all the same.

FlamingMojo's answer was not technical. "The way we survive the AI pollution is with community. Many people chipping in a small bit, and feeling a sense of shared ownership." ^[1]

What you can do

Start with the plainest test. Can you edit the page, or at least see who has? Genuine wikis show you a history. The Nighthawks site was not publicly editable and offered only an email address. ^[1] A closed wiki is not automatically fake, but a site that calls itself a wiki and does not let anyone touch it is borrowing a word.

Look for a community behind it: a Discord, a forum, named maintainers, a talk page with real arguments. Check whether the claims match the game. If a page lists a companion you have never met, check the developer's own materials. For Nighthawks, that means the developer's page. ^[4] A page that wanders into a Hopper painting is telling you something about itself.

Treat all of this as warning signs, not a lie detector. Odd phrasing proves nothing, and a site that fails every test may still be human-made and lazy. What you are checking for is accountability, not authorship.

If a game you love has an established independent wiki, bookmark it and use it first. Indie Wiki Buddy, a browser extension, says it supports more than 800 wikis in 22 languages and can flag or redirect you from certain large wiki platforms when an independent counterpart exists. Its own criteria say listed wikis should be publicly editable and of decent quality. ^[3] It is a project promoting its own tool, so judge it as you would any tool, but the aim is sound.

And then do the dull, decisive thing. Fix a typo. Add the thing you found at two in the morning that no page mentions. Shared ownership starts with one small edit, and it is the only defence these libraries have ever had.

The counterfeit wins when the genuine article looks like a chore and the fake looks like an answer. The record of a game is made by people who bothered. If you want it kept, bother.