UESP Forums

The other day my sister was looking something about Oblivion and went on the Elder Scrolls Wiki. I told her to use the UESP because I think that it's better, but it got me thinking.

What is the difference between UESP and the Elder Scrolls Wiki? Why do both exist? Which one was started first? Is there any sort of rivalry between the two?

Thanks, I'm just curious.

UESP has been around in some form since 1995. The wikia was created in like 2011 by merging the Oblivion wikia and some other TES wikia.

There's a bit of friendly rivalry between the two, especially when it comes to search results. I tend never to use the wikia personally since every time I do I come across inaccurate or wrong info.

The wikia gained traction for four reasons: undue preference in search engine results, comparative ease of participation, and alienation of editors from participating in the UESP. The fourth is, of course, that wikia editors had the UESP and the Imperial Library to guide them.

Many people are familiar with wikia editing thanks to participation in other wikias, and some newer fans of the series may find it easier to participate there for this reason alone. There is also a lot more low-hanging fruit, a lot more ways for people to easily participate, and the standards are laxer, so contributions are less likely to be questioned. And unfortunately, many people, especially it seems among game wiki contributors, equate lack of interference with a welcoming environment.

Childishness is the heart of the alienation problem. People overreact to policy decisions they don't like, or personalities they don't like, and lose sight of the big picture, or fail to seek accomodation. Some editors can be obnoxiously insulting, and others can be obnoxiously sensitive. And frankly, the latter is more of a problem. Because while we have an Etiquette policy with which to villainize anyone who ever expresses an uncomfortable amount of frustration, and we can ostracize the jerks pretty easily, we don't have a "This Is The Internet; Don't Be A Thin-Skinned Brat" policy. And the UESP's history demonstrates that tolerating unreasonable sensitivity can drive good people away just as easily as tolerating unreasonable rudeness would.

Anyway, I have nothing against wikia editors in principle. I've chatted with many who are awesome, and they all clearly love the series. What I think is a huge shame, though, is the needless division of labor, which creates duplicative work overall and retards the fan community's ability to develop and share our knowledge base of the game. If everyone was on the same page, we could be refining a single, better product for the community.

The TES Wikia tends to post a heap of incorrect information (such as the existent of "Half-Breed" people, like Mankar Camoran), include OOG works and assume they are canon when they're not (Michael Kirkbride's C0DA), and add fan-made pictures to some pages and act as if they're also canon (like a map of Pyandonea or Akavir).

Rezalon wrote:like a map of Pyandonea

After some struggle, I finally got that removed. Apparently it's a common misconception that ArthmodeusD's Pyandonea outline is official.

^At the risk of sounding extremely rude, do they fact-check... anything... like, at all?

In their defence there was an active discussion going on in the chatroom about removing it when I dropped in. UESP isn't immune to legacy misinformation either!

Yeah, you're right. (I hate it when I forget to be nice and don't give people the benefit of the doubt)

Rezalon wrote:The TES Wikia tends to post a heap of incorrect information (such as the existent of "Half-Breed" people, like Mankar Camoran), include OOG works and assume they are canon when they're not (Michael Kirkbride's C0DA), and add fan-made pictures to some pages and act as if they're also canon (like a map of Pyandonea or Akavir).

Elder Scrolls Wiki was not made by God, it was made by plain old humans as ourselves.

I think a lot of it also has to do with ease of access and finding relevant information without it being categorized and subcategorized to death. For example, certain console commands such as getcurrenttime or set gamehour to X, which are listed clearly in the wikia console commands list, are not just buried in another category here, but the only mention to them is a sub-subcategory of raw data from a TES3 modding template.

I understand why it's there. But it frustrates two fold. It's not found easily (or easy to understand for the average layman) and that the data there has the potential to be obsolete/incompatible.

This is just an example, please don't get defensive and hyperfocused on this particular one.

To hyperfocus on your particular example, I highly doubt that someone who is looking for more information about using the MW console command getcurrenttime or set gamehour to x is going to be the average layman (unless of course they actually are a Layman)

One thing I really like at the UESPWiki are the game namespaces. If I'm currently playing Morrowind, I don't care what the xyz item does in arena, daggerfall, battlespire, oblivion, or skyrim. The namespaces are a great way to separate game-specific information for different games. I haven't found this feature on any other wiki I have browsed so far...

It's because UESP doesn't follow the tired Wikia format. Speaking of formatting, Wikia is generally in my experience the HTML equivalent of Frankenstein's monster. UESP is actually... Stable

I say this from a mostly-mobile browser of UESP. TESWiki fails to load images 90% of the time on mobile, fails to load new pages (the page title will change but the article content will be the previous article you clicked out of), and is just generally an ugly mess. UESP is nice and easy. I look up a thing and it's done (and CORRECT). Plus UESP doesn't use up an obscene amount of memory like wikia can do sometimes.

Call it brand loyalty but UESP has never let me down while Wikia sites have let me down too many times to count.

Yeah.. alot of wikis tend to crash or have issues with my browser. Too many things to load, too much clutter. Heck, i love that uesp is one of the few wikis I dont get harassed by ads, and even then they're low maintenance