“Older than Google,” this Elder Scrolls wiki has been helping gamers for 30 years

Broadly, UESPWiki is an impressive information repository of The Elder Scrolls franchise. It also documents the dense, often convoluted lore of the franchise, as well as books and merchandise sold alongside the games, and the multiple tabletop games.

For all its uniqueness—the sort of early “Web 2.0” design style, limited advertisement space, and its namespace-centered way of organization—the UESP is an independent wiki at its core. It has all the bone structure that makes a wiki accessible and easy to use and is driven by a dedicated community of editors.

The wiki currently maintains over 110,000 articles. The phrase “We have been building a collaborative source for all knowledge on the Elder Scrolls series since 1995” is written at the top of the home page. This year, UESP is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

“The phrase I always say is ‘we’re older than Google,’” said 51-year-old Dave Humphrey, founder of the UESP. “Obviously, we’re not as big or as popular as Google, but we’re older than Google, and we’re older than a lot of websites. In fact, I don’t think there’s any other Elder Scrolls-related website that’s older than us.”

The earliest version of the UESP wasn’t a wiki at all and is just a little older than 30 years. It was a message distributed through USENET called Daggerfall FAQ, originally published in the fall of 1994, and it featured prerelease content about The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.

A year later, the Daggerfall FAQ would become a webpage, and a few months after that, it would become the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, which was just a webpage at the time, to include information about The Elder Scrolls games.

When The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind released, it was the franchise’s biggest game at that point, and Humphrey quickly became remarkably busy. He wrote hundreds of entries for the game and its two DLCs while maintaining his regular job. But the more he did, the more reader emails suggesting new entries and edits to the site came in. In 2005, UESP officially became a wiki.