47
votes
Despite its founding promise to be ad-free, the Baldur's Gate 3 fan wiki is going to put up ads, because its creator thinks he can make a lot of money
Link information
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- Title
- bg3wiki:Ads Announcement 1
- Published
- Jul 27 2024
- Word count
- 1811 words
Some may remember the Tildes post about this fan wiki from about a year ago:
@Casocial's comment gives a pretty good description of why the community wiki was started:
There's also this article from Polygon:
Now, the wiki's operator, Taylan, is planning on putting ads on the wiki because he "never knew just how much money ads can apparently make".
The costs of operating the wiki were already covered for 2023 and 2024 by donations. Taylan's literally just doing this to make money.
I've been lurking in the wiki's Discord server for the past week or so. As far as I can tell, Taylan got an offer from Publift, claiming that ads on the wiki would pay Taylan enough to make it his full-time job, while also being able to give 60% of ad revenue back to previous contributors to the wiki.
Does Taylan provide any actual numbers from Publift's projections, or any details about how he is going to pay previous contributors? Of course not.
I'm 99% sure this entire thing is going to end up being one big grift. Taylan isn't going to make nearly as much money as he thinks he will. Previous contributors are absolutely not going to get paid. Publift stands to at least make some money though. Taylan's reputation will (hopefully) be ruined.
This fan wiki was founded on the promise of not running ads, and has never needed to in order to operate. What a waste of everyone's time and talent, all because of greed...
There's nothing stopping folks from walking away with the wiki's content and restarting somewhere ad free though, is there?
https://bg3.wiki/wiki/bg3wiki:Licensing
...
I haven't read up on what the difference is, but it's still a creative commons license. If the bg3 wiki is anything like our regular wikipedia, vast swaths of it were written by a very very few people. Those folks have every right to take their own stuff with them.
I wonder if there should be some kind of yearly extending binding agreement that folks should enter into before accepting donations. Eg, for this year's funding drive I will promise to not monetize the site for at least one more year.
Edit: Taylan is absolutely not going to be making anything like wages from this partnership. They'll out-lawyer him somehow.
I wonder how difficult it would be to scrape the contents and re-host them on a new wiki under new management, in the event that things do take a nose dive.
Not hard, relatively speaking. You'll need some know how but there's more tools than ever for hosting a static site like this.
The hard part is always maintaining and continuing to produce content. Many wikis that break off remain incomplete for that reason.
Personally speaking, these hyper-specific wikis have become really annoying to me. If I'm looking for information about a specific thing in a game, they always come up with something that is almost but not entirely like the thing I am looking for. Say, for instance, I'm looking for strategies to beat a boss; instead, I'll find a page on the boss's backstory, the lore surrounding him, earlier drafts of their design, and speculation about upcoming or cut content. That wouldn't be so bad, if they also didn't have possibly the worst advertising campaigns on the internet. I swear, if I turn off my adblocker, the page is more than half full of flashy, irritating advertisements that makes the actual content difficult to comprehend.
In other words, I find these kinds of wikis to be unwittingly crowd-sourced SEO spam to sell advertisments with, which is another level of frustration entirely.
Well we're past the days of quality strategy guide and professional sites aren't much better on that end.
The best content is unironically YouTubers who make this segmented guides. At least their ads are easy to skip.
Past that, discord /reddit may or may not have what you need. But it's touch and go and not much easier to search (especially discord). But if you do strike gold you find some of the best visuals and tables out there.
But if you want something quality, free, and in the written format, you're up a creek without a paddle. There's just too many games and not enough volunteers like say, the gamefaqs days.
I actually find that Steam guides can be quite good. Screenshots, discrete chapters of information, and a small enough pond that no one really bothers trying to cheat the ratings. All together, it means the good stuff floats to the top most of the time.
It's really dependent on the game and the individuals making the guides for Steam, in my experience. I've seen discussions that fully explain a game mechanic in concise terms, and I've seen bloated, near-incomprehensible walkthroughs for the simplest, dumbest non-problem. With no consistency in quality, I'm not likely to waste time looking in Steam for answers unless I'm really at a loss to find something better.
I still to this day use GameFAQs as my first stop for all fan-made guide content. It rarely lets me down, and there are some top notch guide writers still plying their hobby there. It's an old format, sure, but it I've used it so long that I'm used to it and it's great.
When that fails me, I search gamepressure or neoseeker. A few years back I didn't know those sites existed, but their content kept popping up and was very helpful. They don't always deliver, but when they do, it's usually good stuff. And only when those fail, do I search (argh) Fandom, but only after making sure my adblocker and scriptblocker are locked, loaded, and up to date. That site is absolute cancer without such protections.
But all that said, I still prefer a good ol' fashioned hardback collector strategy guide at hand whenever possible. My collection of such books for the various Bethesda games has seen so much wear, tear, and markup, they're almost like family.
I've definitely run into LLM-generated content for BG3 things. I recall being stuck looking for an item needed to progress a quest, Googled it, and one of the first results had a weirdly vague summary of the plot of the quest...and said that the item could be found in the basement of a building that definitely had no basement in the actual game.
In the gaming wikis I've seen, they tend not to have guides per se. Maybe point out some synergies between some game objects. But mainly just lots of item stats and lore.