Wiki websites for Oblivion

[Igiss]

Some time ago, I started a thread on Elderscrolls.com forums about how nice it will be to have a wiki site specially dedicated to Oblivion. The thread quickly got lost in the busy forum, so I doubt that creators of several wiki sites that appeared afterwards actually read it - but who knows?

Anyway - here is the overview of those few out of numerous Oblivion fansites that are in actual Wiki format, allowing users to edit information freely (to a certain extent).


OblivioWiki

This site is run by creators of Gamewikis, surely quite experienced in creating successful wikis for games.

Here's what they tell us:
"Welcome to OblivioWiki, a wiki and guide to Bethesda Softworks' single-player role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. We aim to be the #1 resource for your continuing adventures in Tamriel."

Site has standard MediaWiki design that we've seen many many times, but still it looks good. And, of course ad banners - OblivioWiki has Google ads displayed on its pages, just like the next site, TESWiki.

Currently contains 145 artices, started 24 February 2006.


TESWiki.com

Description posted on its main page (why invent something new if author described everything here):
"Welcome to TESwiki! We are a user-driven information site for the entire Elder Scrolls universe, including both lore and in-game info for the most recent addition to the series, published by Bethesda Softworks: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

We aim to provide the most info in the easiest-to-retrieve format possible. Unlike other sites, however, we are a wiki - that means that YOU can help us by editing our content and improving it! On any page you visit, you'll see a 'Modify this page' link at the top of the page - click it, and you can change anything you want!"

This wiki is run by EnterWiki engine, in many ways similar to standard - MediaWiki. How they compare in action? We'll surely see when sites will be filled with content.

Currently contains 111 articles, started... I don't really know when, should be beginning of March 2006.


Wikiscrolls

Wikiscrolls? A very nice name, I wonder when wikiscrolls.com domain will be registered.

This site, however, is Wikiscrolls.de -  it's German, so you won't find any texts in English there. The site is powered by MediaWiki and surely has the best design of all three wikis that we've got here - with appropriate 'old style' colors and a great logo.

Currently contains 180+ articles, started 17 November 2005.


And of course we should never forget (though it's not exactly Oblivion-exclusive)
UESP

Arguably that's the best fansite on The Elder Scrolls that was ever created, with a long history and great content. But guess what - it also became a wiki some time ago, named UESPWiki.

The site is MediaWiki-based with design close to default. Looks neat, loads fast (that's important for a large site) - what's more to wish?

Currently contains... probably thousands of articles, started 28 February 2005 (actual UESP was started many years ago, but we are only talking about wiki).

[Lord Sunnycool]

That's nice. It's cool to be able to participate in the site. Interesting. http://oblivion.gamewikis.org looks very good, and I guess new info will come up there pretty quickly, so it is on my favourites now. Can ANYONE participate? Or are there restrictions?

[Peerless]

Why, out of curiosity, did you bookmark oblivion.gamewikis instead of TESwiki? TESwiki has far more content (sheer database size not counting anything out of the main namespace, so only actual article content, not counting talk pages, meta information pages about the wiki(s), nor counting templates - usually an accurate measurement). Is the layout harder to navigate? I've been working on it, and would appreciate some feedback!

[Peerless]

This site is run by creators of Gamewikis, surely quite experienced in creating successful wikis for games.

Umm. No. Enterwiki has 12 wikis (albeit some of them with very little content... BECAUSE the games they cover aren't even in bet yet)... 'gamewikis' is a new brand applied to an old wiki (guildwiki) so they could start a second wiki to keep their community for a dying game a new life. As you can probably tell, I dislike their exploits.

Site has standard MediaWiki design that we've seen many many times, but still it looks good.

I beg to differ. One more wikipedia clone? Great. Next site please. Oh, another wikipedia clone? My bad, next. Lets try something *new* folks. Again, you can probably tell that the standard wikimedia foundation skin is a pet peeve for me.

And, of course ad banners - OblivioWiki has Google ads displayed on its pages, just like the next site, TESWiki.

There's a pretty little [^] button in the upper-left-hand corner. Click it, they disappear - currently, it doesn't save that setting across pages, but as soon as I have some extra time to dig through the PHP again, it will.

This wiki is run by EnterWiki engine, in many ways similar to standard - MediaWiki. How they compare in action? We'll surely see when sites will be filled with content.

Ours is simply mediawiki under constant improvement and new features - coming soon, a verification system and page moderators.

The site is MediaWiki-based with design close to default. Looks neat,

See above statement about wikimedia foundation's 'monobook' skin.

loads fast (that's important for a large site) - what's more to wish?

Does ours not? It loads in 0.20 secs for me. UESP is 0.17 secs. If it is loading slow for some people, I would like to know! I need to fix that if so.

[Igiss]

I didn't bookmark anything, actually. If OblivioWiki was the first in my list, that shouldn't mean that I recommend it or advertise it. That just means it's more popular.

To be honest, I liked design of TESWiki when I first saw it back when the site had no Google ads. Ads look real wrong; all other is fine but I guess that if there will be more links to actual content, like they've done it in oblivion.gamewikis. If you wish some extended feedback, I might try to look into it... though the only Wiki I made yet was for my Freelancer mod, and it's rather simple.

As for stats, well, look here, if I need to prove what I was saying...

TESWiki:

There are 1,538 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about TESwiki, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 111 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.

There have been a total of 12,265 page views, and 985 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 0.64 average edits per page, and 12.45 views per edit.

OblivioWiki

There are 1,638 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about OblivioWiki, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 161 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.

There have been a total of 49,219 page views, and 1,129 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 0.69 average edits per page, and 43.60 views per edit.

P.S. edit regarding the last post: again, I never said that one is better than another. Comparing to UESP... well, I doubt that any site will ever be able to compete with UESP about previous Elder Scrolls information.

[Peerless]

I didn't bookmark anything, actually. If OblivioWiki was the first in my list, that shouldn't mean that I recommend it or advertise it. That just means it's more popular.

To be honest, I liked design of TESWiki when I first saw it back when the site had no Google ads. Ads look real wrong; all other is fine but I guess that if there will be more links to actual content, like they've done it in oblivion.gamewikis. If you wish some extended feedback, I might try to look into it... though the only Wiki I made yet was for my Freelancer mod, and it's rather simple.

As for stats, well, look here, if I need to prove what I was saying...

Surprising similarity in the form of how statistics is calculated, by the way.

We run off of mediawiki, heavily modified, as I said (-:

and I was referring to the other user, not you lol - I would love some critique on the layout and such! Also, try hiding the ads - is the layout better? i was kind of assuming the user would hide the ads if he/she didn't WANT to click them to support us.

There is more content in TESwiki - as I said, database size, number of characters, not pages is the answer:
Some of their 'pages'... http://oblivion.gamewikis.org/wiki/The_Mage http://oblivion.gamewikis.org/wiki/Deer http://oblivion.gamewikis.org/wiki/Hand_to_Hand
Also, the statistics page depends on a small variable in localsettings.php that determines their stub limit. Ours is set to 80 characters, the default is 10 - so, if you total in all our content pages, there are actually a bit over 200. The problem is that all our skill pages, all our birthsign pages, etcetra are scanned as stubs - on purpose because they ARE stubs - and thus not counted in our page count. Their stub threshold is lower, thus similar low-content pages ARE counted, and their number is inflamed. Not that this is their fault - theirs is the mediawiki default - we merely set ours high, because i personally think this is a stub:

The Apprentice is a birthsign that confers a 100-point bonus to a player's Magicka attribute, but also gives a 100% Weakness to Magic.

That is 134 characters - a stub by our definition, more than 100 characters over a stub by their definition. Make sense?

[Igiss]

Ok, you are sure what your stub limit is, but how can you be sure about others? Of course I didn't check, and you probably did... but I'd less care about competition if I were you. Actually, there are dozens of Oblivion websites, dozens of forums, and only a few wikis. Wikis surely have lots of place for living.

As for Google ads, this arrow on the top is real hard to notice - I didn't even see it until I looked for it specially. So most people just won't know how to hide it (or maybe I'm alone so blind, dunno).

We all hate them, but *ghasp* nobody donated. So we have no choice.

Well, unfortunately very few commodities can rely on donations - first, if there's a website about developing something like a useful software item or huge mod, and second, if the community is very solid, friendly and many people not only contribute but participate in administration, sort of influence how the resource looks like. Even on such sites donations are very rare - many thousands people can visit site and use its resources, but only 1-2 of them will donate, and not much money. Forementioned UESP costs its creator over $70 per month, generating some 150 Gb monthly traffic according to what the site reports, and although author of the site did post donation PayPal id, the website would die immediately if it would rely on donations or even advertising. I don't know how much money google ads bring, but doubt that for a gaming fansite it could be more than hosting costs.

And - returning to the subject - would be interesting if other Wiki creators would visit this forum. Maybe they'd have something more to add to this discussion.

[Peerless]

Ok, you are sure what your stub limit is, but how can you be sure about others? Of course I didn't check, and you probably did... but I'd less care about competition if I were you. Actually, there are dozens of Oblivion websites, dozens of forums, and only a few wikis. Wikis surely have lots of place for living.

As for Google ads, this arrow on the top is real hard to notice - I didn't even see it until I looked for it specially. So most people just won't know how to hide it (or maybe I'm alone so blind, dunno).

Well, unfortunately very few commodities can rely on donations - first, if there's a website about developing something like a useful software item or huge mod, and second, if the community is very solid, friendly and many people not only contribute but participate in administration, sort of influence how the resource looks like. Even on such sites donations are very rare - many thousands people can visit site and use its resources, but only 1-2 of them will donate, and not much money. Forementioned UESP costs its creator over $70 per month, generating some 150 Gb monthly traffic according to what the site reports, and although author of the site did post donation PayPal id, the website would die immediately if it would rely on donations or even advertising. I don't know how much money google ads bring, but doubt that for a gaming fansite it could be more than hosting costs.

And - returning to the subject - would be interesting if other Wiki creators would visit this forum. Maybe they'd have something more to add to this discussion.

TESwiki is riding on other sites now, mostly ddowiki. Google ads bring up the craziest stuff for my wikis, I dunno why, just really nothing better I guess - but there is a kind of unspoken agreement between the users and I - you click the ads or donate or somehow keep me running, and I'll keep the ads non-intrusive and hidable. I do my best. We bring in about 100$ a month ads and about 100$ a month donations, between the two we can barely cover monthly costs, but each flatrate payment we make takes farther into the red - which is fine! As long as the monthly payments themselves are balanced with the income, I can justify to myself the one-time payments for things like domain (a grand) and server(s) (first one was 2000$, will need a new one in a few months at this rate) as being for the good of the wikicommunity lol.

Also, that sitenotice up there is ooold - I already removed it for the high-traffic sites, just haven't had time to remove it for TES lol.

[Igiss]

You are lucky to be able to rise $100 monthly donations for your sites. I feel unimportant now paying only $100 for yearly hosting of CC, this forum and one more forum. Success has its cost I guess.

And good luck to your wiki. We'll see how competition goes after Oblivion will be released. For now, I won't make any conclusions - seems way too early for this.

*Thinks that he should make a similar brief review for Oblivion forums... but that would take much more time and space.

[illest503]

I'm choosing to contribute to the UESP wiki.  It's an old-school Elder Scrolls community site, and their wiki for Morrowind and its offspring has been very useful to me over the years.

Willie