ensuring

The Independent Fallout Wiki and the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) have announced a new partnership joining the two endeavors. Both sites’ curation, expansiveness, and, crucially, user experiences with minimal/unobtrusive ads make them cherished resources on the internet of 2025.

“We’re now proud to be the host of the Independent Fallout Wiki,” UESP wrote on Bluesky. “We don’t want to become one of those wikifarms that tries to trap sites, so we’ve also set things up to allow for them to freely change hosts in the future if they ever wish, without us leaving a zombie site behind.”

That last bit was a fairly direct jab at Fandom, formerly known as Wikia, the hosting service behind the majority of well-trafficked pop culture wikis on the internet. Fextralife is another prominent wiki host gamers will be familiar with, with a specific focus on RPGs and Soulslikes.

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There’s a long, complicated history behind the hosting of wikis, but as a reader, it’s impossible not to notice the way their user experiences have degraded in the past ten years.

Fandom wikis tend to be saddled with enough ads that they become slow to load, particularly on mobile, with autoplay videos taking up half the screen—and that’s when they load in after a delay, partially resetting the page.

Fextralife, meanwhile, has more user-friendly pages but a serious curation/manpower issue: I’ve found incorrect information, links to missing pages, and placeholder text on its wikis years after games launch. Wikis for Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and even explosively popular games like Elden Ring and Divinity: Original Sin 2 all have frustrating gaps in information.

These detriments allowed the more well-maintained BG3.wiki to supersede Fextralife’s pre-existing Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki, which was started at the time of early access, after the game’s 1.0 launch.

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Both Fextralife and Fandom tend to dominate the search engine optimization (SEO) of properties in their portfolios (Google search: [Insert Game] Wiki), making it difficult for competitors to become visible. There’s also a legitimate question of long-term maintenance.

Many wikis turned to Fandom hosting in the first place for the stability and continuity of a large organization. For more niche games and topics, a wiki farm is insurance that a site will not be entirely abandoned if interest in the subject wanes. There’s also the question of upkeep costs for hosting such large websites.

Even still, many wikis have chosen to migrate away from Fandom in recent years, a process outlined in a Medium editorial from 2023 by Wikipedia enthusiast Linden Clayton.

A previous great migration from Fandom to the hosting service Gamepedia had an awkward ending, however, when a portion of parent company Curse was bought by Fandom in 2018, bringing the schismatic wikis back into the fold. We come full-circle back to Fallout, whose Fandom wikis seem to have had a particularly long and complicated history.

UESP, meanwhile, has been independent since 1995, and has recently expanded its offerings to include podcasts, a fan Discord, and Elder Scrolls merch drops while accepting reader support through Patreon.

UESP’s retro, no-frills interface looks much as it did when I first went there around the releases of Skyrim and Oblivion, a stalwart old friend who has survived the years unchanged. The Independent Fallout Wiki looks to be in good hands.

PCG weekend editor Jody Macgregor shouted out Bulbapedia and the Team Fortress 2 Wiki as notable independents in his recent love letter to UESP, and I’d also like to praise the Baldur’s Gate 3 Wiki one more time: It really is an amazing resource. I’ll also always carry a torch for the Souls series Wikidot wikis, even though Chrome flags them as a security risk⁠—I still haven’t gotten a virus there yet!

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