The Impartial Fallout Wiki and the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) have introduced a brand new partnership becoming a member of the 2 endeavors. Each websites’ curation, expansiveness, and, crucially, consumer experiences with minimal/unobtrusive advertisements make them cherished sources on the web of 2025.
“We’re now proud to be the host of the Impartial Fallout Wiki,” UESP wrote on Bluesky. “We do not wish to turn out to be a type of wikifarms that tries to entice websites, so we have additionally set issues as much as enable for them to freely change hosts sooner or later in the event that they ever want, with out us leaving a zombie web site behind.”
That final bit was a reasonably direct jab at Fandom, previously often called Wikia, the internet hosting service behind nearly all of well-trafficked popular culture wikis on the web. Fextralife is one other distinguished wiki host players might be conversant in, with a particular deal with RPGs and Soulslikes.
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There is a lengthy, sophisticated historical past behind the internet hosting of wikis, however as a reader, it is not possible to not discover the way in which their consumer experiences have degraded previously ten years.
Fandom wikis are typically saddled with sufficient advertisements that they turn out to be gradual to load, significantly on cellular, with autoplay movies taking on half the display—and that is after they load in after a delay, partially resetting the web page.
Fextralife, in the meantime, has extra user-friendly pages however a critical curation/manpower difficulty: I’ve discovered incorrect info, hyperlinks to lacking pages, and placeholder textual content on its wikis years after video games launch. Wikis for Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and even explosively well-liked video games like Elden Ring and Divinity: Unique Sin 2 all have irritating gaps in info.
These detriments allowed the extra well-maintained BG3.wiki to supersede Fextralife’s pre-existing Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki, which was began on the time of early entry, after the sport’s 1.0 launch.
Each Fextralife and Fandom are inclined to dominate the search engine marketing (search engine optimization) of properties of their portfolios (Google search: [Insert Game] Wiki), making it troublesome for rivals to turn out to be seen. There’s additionally a reputable query of long-term upkeep.
Many wikis turned to Fandom internet hosting within the first place for the steadiness and continuity of a big group. For extra area of interest video games and matters, a wiki farm is insurance coverage {that a} web site won’t be totally deserted if curiosity within the topic wanes. There’s additionally the query of maintenance prices for internet hosting such giant web sites.
Even nonetheless, many wikis have chosen emigrate away from Fandom in recent times, a course of outlined in a Medium editorial from 2023 by Wikipedia fanatic Linden Clayton.
A earlier nice migration from Fandom to the internet hosting service Gamepedia had an ungainly ending, nonetheless, when a portion of father or mother firm Curse was purchased by Fandom in 2018, bringing the schismatic wikis again into the fold. We come full-circle again to Fallout, whose Fandom wikis appear to have had a very lengthy and complex historical past.
UESP, in the meantime, has been impartial since 1995, and has lately expanded its choices to incorporate podcasts, a fan Discord, and Elder Scrolls merch drops whereas accepting reader help by means of Patreon.
UESP’s retro, no-frills interface seems a lot because it did after I first went there across the releases of Skyrim and Oblivion, a stalwart previous pal who has survived the years unchanged. The Impartial Fallout Wiki seems to be in good arms.
PCG weekend editor Jody Macgregor shouted out Bulbapedia and the Staff Fortress 2 Wiki as notable independents in his latest love letter to UESP, and I might additionally prefer to reward the Baldur’s Gate 3 Wiki yet one more time: It truly is an incredible useful resource. I will additionally all the time carry a torch for the Souls sequence Wikidot wikis, despite the fact that Chrome flags them as a safety danger—I nonetheless have not gotten a virus there but!
