General:Community Spotlight—UESP Reaches 100k Posts! - The Elder Scrolls Online

Originally published December 8, 2023. The original article can be found here. Questions are in bold.

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages recently published their 100,000th post [sic] on the longtime Elder Scrolls fan wiki. We chatted with the UESP team about their work, this new milestone, and ESO’s presence on the site.

We are thrilled to be joined by Dave (UESP’s founder and server administrator), ThalJ (app and front-end developer) and Alpha Kenny Buddy (social media manager) to talk about all things UESP and celebrate reaching 100,000 unique posts on their ever-growing wiki.

UESP has been around for quite a while. Could you tell us a little about its history and what inspired its initial creation?

Dave: Way back in 1994 I found a little game called Arena and quickly fell in love with it. I started the Daggerfall text FAQ on Usenet which turned into a web version and shortly turned into the UESP in 1995 (yes, we're older than Google).

How big is the team now at UESP? Are there different roles and responsibilities to ensure the site remains up-to-date and running smoothly?

Dave: We currently have three full-time employees. I do all the business and back-end/server development, AKB works on all the social media and wiki stuff, and TJ is our front-end/app developer. We've also just hired Lucien as a part time YouTube producer for Starfield. Besides that, we have many dedicated volunteers working all over on various projects.

TJ: I started off by making an unofficial app for the site during my spare time at uni. After I graduated, I approached Dave about making it official, and since then I’ve been doing bits and bobs around the site and our various services, including Starfield Wiki and reworking our interactive ESO maps to be mobile friendly.

As a site that covers both the single-player AND multiplayer Elder Scrolls games, what do you find to be the most interesting similarities and differences between them and their entries?

Dave: Our approach has always been to be an encyclopedia for the games and lore of the Elder Scrolls. So the game type (single or multiplayer) doesn't affect the wiki content that much. It does, however, affect how we are able to collect data from the games.

AKB: One of the first questions we discussed when ESO was publicly announced was how we would treat it, and I think our decision to treat it all the same was critical for avoiding Elder Scrolls lore as a whole from becoming impossible to keep track of.

Reaching 100,000 posts is a staggering achievement. What does such a milestone mean to both the team at UESP and the Elder Scrolls fan community in general?

Dave: Although there's never been any explicit goal to reach X articles, hitting 100k reveals the massive amount of work Elder Scrolls and UESP fans have done since the site was just a little text web page manually edited by myself.

AKB: At the moment we’re currently the 214th largest wiki by article count in the world. That may not seem as major as it is, but keep in mind that 125 of the larger ones are under the Wikimedia umbrella (Wikipedia/Wikisource/Wikitionary). So effectively being in the top 100 (minus Wikimedia) shows the sheer enormity of The Elder Scrolls and its fan community.

(Embedded here is a link to Sotha Sil's lore page) A UESP wiki page

How much UESP content is drawn from ESO in comparison to the other Elder Scrolls games?

Dave: My first guess was that ESO had a little more content than the other Elder Scrolls games, but I was a little off. Almost half of the content is ESO-related articles and ESO has almost four times as many articles as Skyrim.

In the era of streamers and video guides, UESP remains a valuable site focused on written articles. What do you think are the strengths of UESP’s approach, and how have you developed that approach over its long history?

Dave: We've tried to stay focused on the "encyclopedia" approach and I think that works well for written articles. The style and display of information continually changes over the years as we try new things and see what works and what people like. No matter how long we work, there's always something to improve on the wiki.

AKB: Wikis, by their nature, are always works in progress. What may be the perfect way of writing an article today can always be made better tomorrow. The comparative ease of editing writing over editing videos will ensure that there is always a usefulness to that format.

Information on Tamriel and Nirn is often told through in-universe narrators, who may get things wrong, be biased toward a particular conclusion, or outright lie to serve their own agendas. Does this make documenting everything more or less difficult for you?

Dave: We do take into account that some in-universe information may be imperfect, and we use that to try to help explain the inconsistencies in lore and information between games.

AKB: In fact, it makes it easier, as it’s truer to writing about the real world. A good approach is to make sure we’re specifying where our sources of information are coming from. So, for example, we try to avoid saying “[X] event happened because of [Y]” and instead try to say “According to this person, [X] event happened because of [Y].”

As a source of lore for Elder Scrolls series fans, are you ever tempted to put your own interpretations out for examination?

Dave: We do our best not to put our own personal opinions into the wiki, especially for Lore. We do, however, have a lot of "animated" discussions about various lore aspects.

AKB: It’s less a temptation and more a concern that we actively try to avoid. Was what we were writing a natural and unbiased way to present existing information, or did we unconsciously draw a conclusion from our sources? Presenting multiple sources without necessarily taking a stand on any of them can be tricky.

(Embedded here is a link to ESO Endless Archive Stream Clip)

As a longtime haven for Elder Scrolls fans, the community at UESP must have lots of opinions on ESO’s take on classic Elder Scrolls locations, creatures, and lore. What are some of your favorite examples of ESO taking an existing Elder Scrolls element and putting it into a new context?

Dave: Exploring the Second Era itself. If you go play Arena, even the very first sentence in the game (after the Gaiden Shinji quote) is about the Second Era. The Second Era stood out as this mysterious/nightmarish period in Tamriel’s history, arguably less understood than the even more distant First Era.

TJ: Honestly there’s just too many things. If I had to pick, getting to explore the Clockwork City, and see Sotha Sil, alive (spoilers!) in the flesh for the first time since Morrowind’s Tribunal DLC has to be my favourite. Nahfahlaar, from Redguard (best dragon) showing up in Elsweyr is also up there. Can we have him back, please?

Given ESO's many updates over the last 10 years, has it been challenging to keep up with everything added to the game and universe?

Dave: The continual updates every four months is quite different from the prior Elder Scrolls games, but we adjust and do our best. Some of the more mundane things (like skills, items, etc.) are extracted from the game data and the wiki updated by bots which eliminates a lot but not all the work.

AKB: Absolutely, but you (the person reading this right now) can make that easier. The UESP is open to everyone who would like to help make it. If you would like to help us document all things Elder Scrolls, you can check out our help files for how to get started, get in contact with our editors to learn from them more directly, or just start editing any page that you wish if you want to dive right in!

Do you personally have a favorite Elder Scrolls lore tidbit/page?

Dave: The establishment of Jyggalag in Daggerfall. It’s a single tidbit, but it was extremely forward thinking. It established immediately that there was more to the setting than we would necessarily experience in Daggerfall and was a good writing precedent for the series as a whole to set up things that would pay off much later.

TJ: This one’s a bit of a deep cut, but it gave me such an “aha!” moment whilst playing I can’t help but mention it:

In ESO: Summerset, we have to use two magical Resolute Diamonds from Lilandril to enter the Crystal Tower. Some main quest shenanigans go by, and the two get merged into one. This has special significance to those that played Arena, as that merged diamond actually plays an important part of the Main Quest for that game.

A massive thank you to Dave and the team for taking the time to answer our questions about their work on UESP. If you’d like to dive deep into Elder Scrolls lore or simply find out more about the website and how you can help, you can visit them on uesp.net, Discord, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and other platforms. Check the community section on the site!

As always, if you know an ESO content creator that you think the rest of the #ESOFam should know about, share them with us via X (the artist formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook.