I am very proud of the Wasteland Wiki as part of my portfolio. While it is not the largest or most significant of wikis I’ve worked on, it is by far the oldest and represents continuous learning and evolution as a content creator and community manager for me.
Though the wiki is presently located at the cherished wasteland.fandom.com address, it wasn’t always so. The wiki was originally a fork – a new wiki created using content from another wiki, copied over under the Creative Commons license – of the Fandom wiki (then Wikia), and one of the very first wikis created on the Gamepedia platform in 2013.
It was originally created under the leadership of Ausir, one of the original community managers hired by Curse. A separate site, wasteland2guru.com, spun up to be a social and news analog under my leadership (already as Tagaziel). I was a regular contributor to the wiki for months while working on the Guru (including a comprehensive Gamescom preview), before taking over as the wiki manager in the run-up to Wasteland 2‘s release.
Wasteland 2
As wiki manager, my job was to both create content, promote the wiki, and engage the community. As a firm believer in the power of content (Great content, great people, great communities, in that order), I was faced with stiff competition from the beginning.
The biggest concern was, of course, the original wiki that we forked from, due to overlapping content that would affect our SEO and game walkthrough sites that were beginning to experience a renaissance that lasts to this day. The first step, as usual, was slapping on a fresh paint of coat and updating the skin.
After that, I moved on to overhauling the content. My primary concern was building up a base of unique content, to reduce the SEO penalty for having duplicate, younger content (due to the fork origin of the wiki), improving navigation and access to the content, and of course, updating it with Wasteland 2 content. Although the game was built using the Unity engine, a lot of the tools that make extracting assets and data out of the game a breeze nowadays were either non-existent or suffered from teething problems.
Assistance from the tech team was invaluable. Requesting their help resulted in a detailed spreadsheet of virtually every data entry in the game. This allowed me to generate CSVs, which in turn allowed me to deploy a huge amount of content virtually overnight, including detailed entries on every character, item, location, and quest in the game. This proved to be an immense advantage, as the content was fresh, non-duplicate, and provided a strong foundation from which to start.
Consistent work in subsequent weeks to fill these articles out with more content, including detailed quest walkthroughs, interactions, and item locations paid off, leading to decreased bounce rates and increased user retention – even as player interest tapered off. In the first two years after release, the wiki received nearly 12 million page views.
This was a respectable result for a wiki centered on a 26 year old game and its sequel. Wasteland may have been the Skyrim of its time, but by 2014 it was a niche, old school RPG and one of the very first major successes for Kickstarter. It’s even more respectable considering the origins of the wiki and intense rivalry from walkthrough sites.
Interim
The wait for the sequel was far shorter, though quite long by modern standards. The funding campaign for Wasteland 3 launched in 2016, two years after release of the previous game and a year after the updated Director’s Cut that also brought it to consoles.
However, the game would not see light for another four years – twice as long as Wasteland 2, whose Kickstarter campaign concluded in 2012, with the game releasing in 2014.
In the meantime, I focused on overhauling the content on the wiki to remove the last of the duplicate content and broadening its scope, to document Wasteland-like games released in the wake of the original Wasteland‘s popularity: Fountain of Dreams and eventually Escape from Hell. In the process, I’ve also discovered that these sequels weren’t actually based on the original’s engine, but a recreation thereof, replicating the feel of the game.
I have also reached out to the community. My notable success is convincing an independent Wasteland wiki, hosted by Kayahr, to merge into ours. Obvious benefits aside, it also allowed his excellent coding to reach a much broader audience: For example, he reverse-engineered the surprisingly complex portrait code for Wasteland, allowing the wiki to show exactly how the animations appear: A static base overlaid with randomly animating fragments, rather than looping GIFs. See the 7mm Vulcan cannon, for example.
We have also archived a copy of the Definitive Deconstruction attempt that delved into the game’s code, preserving an awesome amount of content after Wikispaces shut down in 2019.
After Fandom and Curse joined forces and Project Crossover began, the Wasteland wiki came up against the original Fandom wiki. As it turned out, the choices made in previous five years were the correct ones, creating a small, but reliable community of editors, who together created a wiki that outperformed the original 3:1 in terms of page views (on slow months to boot!) and was eventually moved to the wasteland.fandom.com address, where it remains to the present day.
Wasteland 3
With Wasteland 3‘s release, I have once again focused on creating a reliable base of content (remember: Great content, great people, great communities). This time, the availability of tools like the Unity Assets Browser and the Unity Studio allowed me to open the game’s files and extract data, images, and other assets necessary for building a wiki myself.
I followed the same procedure seeding content as on Pillars of Eternity on release, filling the wiki out, aided by a group of excellent editors who took the wiki to the next level, particularly when it comes to covering gameplay elements and items. The end result speaks for itself: Wasteland Wiki nearly reached the 1 million page views per month mark in the months following Wasteland 3‘s release and continued driving hundreds of thousands of page views for the next two years.
All that once again despite stiff competition from rival wiki sites, which spun up dedicated Wasteland 3 wikis, and game walkthrough sites.