Baldur’s Gate 3 fans have created their own ad-free wiki

Baldur’s Gate 3It’s a very detailed game and all players will want to know more about it at some point. Whether they’re searching for weapon stats or class builds, or trying to make their Astarion x Reader fanfic as accurate as possible, they’re probably going to end up on a wiki.

Wikis are some of the most heartening sites on the internet — repositories of knowledge collected, edited, and verified entirely by dedicated volunteers. The fan wikis in particular can become incredibly detailed. Countless hours of volunteer work are required to create and maintain huge quantities of information, even on the most minute details.

But most fan wikis are hosted by third-party companies, such as Fandom or Fextralife, which aren’t always popular among wiki contributors or fans in general. The people who build and maintain the wikis do it for love. However, their host sites are profit-making companies. This creates tension.

Reddit’s Taylan shared and created a video that expressed one of these tensions. Baldur’s Gate 3As an alternative site to Fextralife, wiki will replace it at the beginning 2022. “In my opinion [the Fextralife wiki] isn’t a particularly nice wiki,” Taylan wrote. “It shoves ads in your face, and claims copyright ownership over anything you write. (Essentially, if you add something to their wiki, you’re doing unpaid work for their company. This is not to say I’m a hater but it makes me uncomfortable.)”

Image: Larian Studios

Ads and other distractions, like Fextralife’s embedded Twitch streams, are annoyances to users, even if they use ad blockers to avoid the worst of them. Ownership issues are not always obvious in wikis. Fextralife’s wiki license states that contributors “give the site ownership over the content” they produce, although the site also returns rights to contributors to use the portion that they contributed. The agreement is more restrictive than that of the CC BY-SA used by many wikis including Fandom. This license states that copyright remains with the contributor, but they also must give permission to reuse and remix the content.

“Contributing to wikis is free.” This, Taylan pointed out in an email to me. “Contributing to [wikis] amounts to being an unpaid worker,” he says.

As wiki editors, we have seen a number of wikis move from Wikia to their own sites. Zelda wiki’s decision to leave FandomLast year. As far back as 2010, fans running independent wikis have banded together into groups like the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, under the belief that “fan communities should be run by the fans, and not corporate entities that don’t put the community first.”

Actually hosting a community-owned site isn’t as tricky as it might first appear, says Taylan. Although initially setting it up required his time and expertise, Taylan was spurred by his love of the previous Baldur’s Gate games. “I’m not that big of a gamer [but] I’ve played them so much as a kid, the nostalgia is intense, and I believe they’ve aged like fine wine too.” And once set up, the majority of the work of filling in the wiki is, like always, shared among a wide network of volunteer contributors, meaning no one has to do more than they want to. “[Now] it’s mostly smooth sailing,” says Taylan. “And the costs are surprisingly low if you go with a cheap hosting provider that’s ‘good enough’ for such a community project.”

Image: Larian Studios

Contributions Baldur’s Gate 3Community wikis are covered by a Creative Commons non-commercial license. This means that writers can retain their copyright on the content they create. It’s similar to the license used by Fandom, but it also prevents Taylan, or anyone else, from ever putting ads on the site.

Taylan’s community-owned wiki has grown in popularity, but it doesn’t have the easiest time spreading to potential readers or contributors. Corporate-owned wikis are able to make use of their parent sites’ good SEO — getting to the top of the Google results in the searches I mentioned earlier. It is harder for independent wikis to be ranked in search results. Even a search for “BG3 wiki” returns the Reddit posts about the site, and its associated Twitter account, before the site itself, thanks to social media companies’ prominence in Google’s algorithm.

“Google has been very unkind to us,” says Taylan, while noting that the site does rank better on other search engines, such as Bing and DuckDuckGo, which Taylan prefers. Since Google is the most commonly used search engine, the Wiki has found other ways to spread the word. As well as posts on social media and Reddit, they’ve been working with content creators and giving them room on the wiki in return.

“Judging by how fast we’ve been growing, and the number of visitors the site is getting every day, I would definitely say it’s been effective. We’re also slowly climbing up on Google again, and will hopefully hit the first page of results sooner or later,” says Taylan.

Image: Larian Studios

That’s Taylan’s focus, but some fans have voiced their discontent at corporate-owned wikis more directly. One smaller Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit accused Fextralife of vote manipulation and banned the domain, one of Fextralife’s creators posted on their own site to deny the accusations and explain their viewpoint. As well as stating that they are “a very small team working [their]The creators of the game buttsoff have created new content. [they] love,” they encouraged people who want to create their own sites: “Having more places making content is a good thing for any game.”

“I don’t condone the aggression some fans have directed at Fextralife,” Taylan says. “A business has to do what a business has to do. If we’re unhappy with their decisions, we shouldn’t let negativity take over, but rather direct our energy towards something constructive, like contributing to the community wiki.”

The independent has been around for nearly two years. Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki is extensive, and its contributors have been keeping up with the wealth of new information created by the game’s full retail release. It’s also building its own community, and adding to the growing number of alternative sites outside of the control of the profit motive.