Is the Wiki feeling OK?

I am reading over GOTY lists and quite a lot of the game wikis linked seem to have almost no content attached to them. Like:

• The Last of Us Part II
• There Is No Game: Wrong dimension
• Paper Mario: The Origami King
• Teardown

I'm sure there are more. Makes sense for the smaller games, but I thought nintendo and TLOU2 would have seen a lot of contributions.

TLOU2 was a page I intended to fill out after finishing the game but just never got around to it. The wiki doesn’t get as much attention as it did back in the day sadly.

I’ve done a lot of work on pages for some recent releases, like Metro Exodus, Death Stranding, Battlefield 1, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Some games still slip through the cracks though.

From what I can tell, there are wiki contributors that are pretty good about at the very least making a page for each video game release, listing its release date, throwing in some art for the page.

Filling out an entire wiki page with paragraphs of description is a lot more work, and there are only so many people contributing to the wiki to go around.

This will come across as very cheeky and shitty, but I don't mean it as sarcastic as I usually would.

You can edit the wiki.

Even basic stuff can be filled in. Overview, reception and reviews, quick story synopsis, etc. Just make sure you don't violate the wiki rules and you'll be good.

More than likely the Twitch association drove a lot of pages to be created but maybe didn't promote those pages to be filled.

hmmm, does this mean gb has slipped in popularity?

@xdeser2: I think it's more that video game communities have moved to other places, namely Twitter, Discord, and Reddit. Forums seemed way more active across different sites in the mid to late 2000s than they do now. You can say the same about the wiki.

@finaldasa: A fine point, well-stated! I've done a bit of wiki editing here in the past (though my editing history is gone from my profile, and the pages I contributed to, for some reason. I'm in the top editors for Path of Exile, but my history is gone). I was just surprised to see the gaps, I guess.

@xdeser2: GB as a whole? Not really. The wiki's popularity? Probably. GB also use to have more hooks to get people into editing the wiki including quests or bounties. Mods or staff could set a bounty for a page that needed filling or needed editing and reward extra points based on the task.

@benjo_t: Oh trust me that message was as much to myself as to you or others.

Think the thing I use GB wiki the most for is the associations with themes or features. For everything else, there seems to be a dedicated wiki for just about every game out there.

I remember noticing that Wiki activity must have really plummeted when I checked Gears 5 and saw it barely had anything on it - and indeed checking now it is nearly a blank stub. The quests were a big proponent of getting people to fill the pages out, but activity of both site and wiki have quite visibly diminished over the years.

@humanity: I really liked those wiki tasks. Was bummed when they went away.

Yeah, I think the Wiki seems to sadly slowly be dying. I used to do quite a bit of work (not as much as others, but still), but kinda lost all motivation in the last couple years.

From the random chatter from the GB crew on various streams it also seems that the Wiki just ain't a priority for them anymore either. They practically never mention it anymore, which is a shame, and probably also one of the reasons for the decline.

I think the wiki had some good incentives but now it’s just kind of dead. While this could have been the one-stop shop for all things games, the cool stuff about the site besides the videos kind of went away.

Sadly, googling or searching via any search engine “Last of Us wiki“ doesn’t even show Giant Bomb’s wiki for it on the first few pages (I didn’t want to keep looking for it after that). Note that The Last of Us DOES have a filled-out wiki on GB. But at least 3 other wikis show up for it on google for different websites. If people aren’t finding these there’s not even the base incentive of eyes-on-page to keep people writing for them, let alone staff interest or their incentives. It would be nice if they kept the quest stuff cause that’s pretty unique to this wiki, but as of now there just aren’t any parts that aren’t readily available elsewhere.

I’d imagine losing the personnel required to keep the wiki evolving just left it static, but who knows...

The internet having dedicated wiki sites cut GB's wiki intentions at the knees a long time ago. GB in general has shifted from a classic "full featured* site to a YouTube channel. That probably sounds harsher than I mean since it doesn't affect me much; it been years since I've had the time to enjoy GB's content other than the podcasts anyway.

When the site was new I tried contributing a bit but I always felt like I wasn't deep enough into any game to be able to contribute meaningfully.