Wikis killed the elaborate one-fan website

Today I stumbled across a link to this fan page offering a detailed analysis of the (great) anime series Serial Experiments: Lain (which I first watched ten whole years ago - yikes!). It's a real pleasure to see sites like this still online, because I think they're very much becoming a relic of a bygone era. I'm talking about elaborate, detailed websites with a lot of content written entirely by one person, out of love for the subject at hand. Other examples I know of are this Patlabor site, and this William Gibson site. I assume there are plenty of other less geeky examples out there, too, but I'm linking to what I know.

These kinds of sites feel like a distinctly 90s phenomenon, probably leaking into the early naughties too, but not very far. Now that the web is becoming (has become?) dominated by user-submitted and -edited content, this sort of thing just doesn't happen anymore. Popular shows, authors, whatever nowadays have wikis set up for them (probably at wikia) and exhaustive and extensive repositories of content grow in a piecemeal fashion out of the collective contributions of hundreds or thousands of fans, of varying levels of knowledge and devotion. Even if one person does decide to make a solo effort, chances are they'll do it in the form of a Wordpress blog (who creates websites anymore, anyway?), which is fundamentally different in nature from a more encyclopedic site. It's composed of relatively short, relatively independent entries which are unlikely to be updated or expanded overtime (new or revised material will appear in separate later entities, possibly without links in either the forward or backward directions between old and new entries).

This change isn't necessarily a bad thing. Under the wiki approach, information presumably accumulates faster and inaccuracies are presumably discovered and corrected faster and more often. From the pure point of information centralisation it's probably superior. But at the same time, man do wikis come with so much less character. A good one-fan website has a consistent tone and writing style, and probably a relatively unique visual design. Neither of those are common with wikis, because everything is written by committee and because there are only a handful of dominant wiki platforms which leads to them all looking the same because nobody bothers to personalise them very far. And, of course, when an entire fan site is the work of one person, you can clearly feel that person's passion for the subject matter. One person took the time to write everything there, whereas wikis just kind of materialise from the ether (which is cool too in its own way).