I think this logic falls apart if you realize that wikis only "work" when you're able to get some of the readers to turn into long-term contributors, and losing 90% of your traffic by not showing up on Google is a great way to kill that funnel.
There's a ton of historical evidence of wiki migrations (1) starting out with all of the editors and none of the readers, (2) not doing anything to get those readers to the new site, and (3) ultimately losing the whole war because the reader->editor flow was still happening on the Fandom wiki. "Invisibility" is absolutely not desirable here, even if your only goal is maximizing the amount of good contributions.
Yes, but the point is that maybe in 2026 we should be looking at ways to pay contributors/creators, rather than steal from them (slightly hyperbolic, but you get the gist)
The financialisation of all hobbies is extreemely toxic and that's what you're perpetuating here.
Interestingly since people brought up the RuneScape wiki, RuneScape is a demonstration. They financialised the game around 2011, it went down the shitter, player numbers dropped, then plummeted once they turned it into a shitty WoW clone. They revived an old backup one day as an experiment and it grew to actually have 5 times more players than the enshittified original. It's not still running the backup - they've evolved it alongside the main game but with players having veto power over almost every single decision. Turns out they know what they like in the game, who knew.