Baldur’s Gate 3 fans have created their own ad-free wiki

polygon.com:

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massively detailed game, and players of all kinds are bound to want to look something about it up at some point. Whether they’re searching for weapon stats or class builds, or trying to make their Astarion x Reader fanfic as accurate as possible, they’re probably going to end up on a wiki.

Wikis are some of the most heartening sites on the internet — repositories of knowledge collected, edited, and verified entirely by dedicated volunteers. Fan wikis, in particular, can get incredibly granular, with countless hours of unpaid work going into creating and maintaining huge amounts of information on even the smallest details.

But most fan wikis are hosted by third-party companies, such as Fandom or Fextralife, which aren’t always popular among wiki contributors or fans in general. Although the people building and maintaining the wikis are doing it out of love, the host sites are for-profit companies, creating tension between them.

One of these tensions was voiced by Reddit user Taylan, who created and shared a Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki as an alternative to the existing Fextralife site at the beginning of 2022. “In my opinion [the Fextralife wiki] isn’t a particularly nice wiki,” Taylan wrote. “It shoves ads in your face, and claims copyright ownership over anything you write. (Essentially, if you add something to their wiki, you’re doing unpaid work for their company. Not to be a hater, but I dislike that.)”

Ads and other distractions, like Fextralife’s embedded Twitch streams, are annoyances to users, even if they use ad blockers to avoid the worst of them. But the ownership issues involved in these wikis are less immediately obvious. Fextralife’s wiki license states that contributors “give the site