Steam Game Wikis

[Helmic]

Dedicated fans like to contribute to a game's wiki to help out other players. Just about any game playable has a wiki nowadays. Unfortunately, the wiki that becomes the standard everyone uses is often the first one to open, and the first one to open is often on Wikia or similar sites. While the content on those sites is often fine, a game's community is often underserved by the layout, vandalism, and most importantly intrusive advertisements that automatically blare loud videos and crash the Steam browser.

Valve is in a unique position to offer a high quality replacement for these annoying-but-free wiki-hosting sites. An easily-accessible wiki that can be accessed by any player by just hitting Shift-Tab adds a lot of value to a game. Unlike guides, which are written by a single author and have no guarantee of being up-to-date or comprehensive, a wiki can provide an encyclopedic insight into a game's items, mechanics, and characters. Game developers could access the Steamworks API to, say, allow a player to click on a link in an item's description to automatically open up the Steam browser and bring up the item's page in the Steam Wiki.

Unlike Wikia, Valve doesn't need to annoy the everliving snot out of visitors to make money off of wikis. Like guides, a wiki's mere presence adds value to the Steam version of a game. Why bother with the Origin or DRM-free version of a game if the Steam version has the wiki everyone uses?

Wiki vandalism and ownership is often an issue with game wikis. With a Steam Wiki, it can be moderated by anyone that can moderate the game's forums. Developers can moderate it themselves if they so choose, or they can appoint dedicated wiki mods to ban vandals. Particularly interesting is the ability to only allow game owners the ability to edit a wiki - spambots won't be able to post spam everywhere if they have to spend $2-$60 per attempt for the couple hours it takes for someone to notice and delete the spam, while other vandals can be banned without needing to constantly worry about IP-dodging. There's no reason for someone who doesn't own the game to be editing that game's wiki. Users who put a lot of effort into a Wiki can be recognized for their hard work.

In the event a game already has a thriving wiki, a game's community can request that the Steam Wiki instead link to the fan-maintained site. There's no value in splitting a community or treading on players' hard work, or worse yet allowing players to outright plagerize from other wikis to get the Steam version up-to-date. Should Steam Wikis become a thing, there's absoultely no reason to force them down a community's throat.

As for features, the Wiki should be accessible via a game's API to allow developers to link to specific pages on the Wiki, similarly to how they can link to their Workshop, Forums, and Guides. Your standard formatting features should be there, so allow your typical Wikipedia formatting and syntax to work. Wikis need tables, pictures (easily uploaded from your own Steam screenshot collection so the wiki doesn't lose its pictures when you clear your screenshots out), citations, revision history and comparisons, colored links, category pages, et cetera. Copy Wikipedia wholesale.

Things get a little complicated for unreleased games and series. Game wikis often cover an entire series rather than just one game in the series, and they pop up the moment a game's even rumored to be announced. The ability to edit a game's wiki first might make for a nice pre-order bonus for some people, but unless Valve allows wikis to be made for any game whether or not it's available on Steam there will almost always be a Wikia or some such wiki made first.

Hopefully Valve will look into this and consider it.