Welcome to UESP's 2023 Retrospective, where we will look back on our journey over the past year, and maybe take a glimpse at what awaits us in 2024.
Registered Users
group123,000
234 active in past 30 days
Content Articles
article100,000+
370,354 pages total
Page Views
visibility207 million
Last year saw the UESP continue to grow impressively, with the most notable milestone being breaking past 100,000 content articles.
Checking WikiStats, that puts us as the 213th largest wiki overall at time of writing. However, keeping in mind that about 129 of the ones ahead of us are all different branches of Wikipedia, so we are arguably in the top 100 largest wikis in the world!
From the official side of things, we saw the long-anticipated release of Starfield, the ESO Necrom expansion, updates to Skyrim, and the surprise pre-release of The Elder Scrolls: Castles.
Community
In total, 32,438 pages were added to the UESP in the last year from community editors. That means almost ten percent of the UESP was created in just the last year alone! (~8.68% if you want to be more precise!)
For comparison's sake, the UESP has 373,448 pages in total, with that count also including support and technical pages.
Edits Made In 2023
edit175,000
8 edits per page on average
User with Most Edits
social_leaderboardMolagBallet
With 17,787 edits in 2023
Most Edits in One Day
today6,604
On 13th Jan 2023
We also had some major happenings from the wider TES community this year as well.
We saw the release of the latest Tamriel Rebuilt map, Andaram. The Elder Kings 2, a fan project bringing The Elder Scrolls to Crusader Kings 3, saw three major updates in the last year. Beyond Skyrim, Skywind, and Skyblivion jointly hosted Creation Mod Con. We also saw the release of the Harthstone Isles from the Arcane University. And while they have asked us not to say what it is yet, keep an eye out on The Imperial Library in the near future for some big changes.
This is just a small slice of what the rest of the larger Elder Scrolls community has been up to, it's truly amazing to see the love, creativity, and dedication from all of you out there.
Major Events
7th February 2023
CSlist expanded to support multiple languages
UESP started off the year by expanding our CSList game database to cover multiple languages. Some translated in-game texts can have drastic differences, as translators often end up working with outdated versions of texts.
One example comes from non-English versions of The Real Barenziah, which worked off of the Daggerfall version due to time constraints, and as such was never censored like the English equivalent.
We also hope this will help UESP translation projects, wherever they may arise. As one of the few clear options we have available to aid them without learning additional languages to build these wikis ourselves, we hope this will prove useful to them.
22nd March 2023
Dave invited to private ESO: Necrom Preview
The ESO team invites Dave Humphrey, founder of UESP, to a private playtest of the ESO:Necrom chapter.
Whilst there, he had the opportunity to ask community questions had about the expansion, and to see the technical side of things we don't see as much of.
Dave would later post his impressions on 12 Apr 2023 in a private Patreon post.
17th April 2023
Upgraded wiki extension backend
RobinHood70, wiki administrator and template wizard rewrote MetaTemplate - a major extension used in many of UESP's wiki templates. This work added some minor features, and brought it up to modern MediaWiki standards, allowing it to be more easily maintained in future.
29th June 2023
Lore:Vivec overhaul
Several community editors finished a months-long comprehensive overhaul of the Lore:Vivec page, which attempted to account for all the nuances and conflicting accounts of the Dark Elf Tribunal god Vivec’s origins and history. The revamp began April 28th, and the last major section was added June 29th.
5th July 2023
Updated MediaWiki infrastructure
Dave migrated UESP.net to MediaWiki 1.30, the software that powers UESP.net under the hood. The update was part of the never stopping march of progress for mediawiki software. Whilst not a super exciting update, it allowed UESP.net to host and play midi files, which wasn't possible before. It also resolved an information coverage issue.
It took 20 minutes in total, and no downtime was recorded.
7th August 2023
Gamemap overhaul launched
In early August 2023, UESP released a complete overhaul of our online interactive maps system, which was over a year in the making. This was a close-to-ground-up rework of our map system, focusing on performance and mobile friendliness, as the old one was proving hard to navigate on mobile and had several bugs.
The new release was roughly 50-60% faster than the older version, in addition to several improvements to accessibility and web standards.
Map Views
visibility4.1 million
10,000 - 15,000 a day
Total Map Markers
location_on53,600
Total Map Worlds
globe3,800
Average Visit Duration
hourglass4:30 minutes
Total Map Tiles
image3.2 million
Totalling over 12gb
Tiles Served
dns60 / sec
12th August 2023
UESP reaches 100k articles!
After spending most of its wiki life in the ten thousands, UESP finally achieves a six-digit article count, with Lore:Cheese as the 100,000th article. This achievement was celebrated in an ESO Community Spotlight.
For those curious, the 99,999th article was Lore:Rat, and Lore:Balhar was the 100,001st.
28th August 2023
Starfield Wiki launched
Perhaps the biggest challenge of the year for UESP was the launch of Starfield Wiki. Prior to the launch of Starfield, we were hard at work getting Starfield Wiki up and running.
Starfield Wiki represents a big opportunity for us, as this is UESP's first wiki covering a Bethesda game other than The Elder Scrolls. We hope that documenting the game on its own wiki will give us some insights into the development of the Creation Engine ahead of the release of The Elder Scrolls VI.
We're really excited about providing a solid wiki for the community on this one, and seeing where Starfield goes in future!
Page Views
visibility2.5 million
Since launch
Unique Visitors
groups440k
Content Articles
article8,500
17k pages total
10th October 2023
UESP Affiliates with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure wiki
UESP affiliates with JoJo's Bizarre Encyclopedia, a website dedicated to the works of the manga artist Hirohiko Araki and related media.
4th November 2023
UESP invited to ESO Endless Archive event
Coinciding with the release of ESO's Endless Archive, ZOS invited UESP to a large streaming event dedicated to the DLC. The Imperial Library's Benefactor ran our Twitch channel for the stream from 4th November - 5th November, delved deep into the lore of the Archive during the event, and also gave away a few goodies.
8th November 2023
UESP Affiliates with Mystery Dungeon wiki
UESP affiliates with The Mystery Dungeon Franchise Wiki, a community encyclopaedia built with the sole purpose of documenting the entirety of the Mystery Dungeon Franchise.
4 December 2023
UESP Participates in Extra Life 2023
In early December, UESP participated in Extra Life 2023, a fundraising event, the proceeds of which go directly to children's hospitals. With the help of the community, we were able to raise $5,000 in total to help children's hospitals.
That put us close to the top five percent of all teams! This really does make a big difference in the world, and we can't express enough how much we appreciate you all for helping us do this. Thank you.
Traffic & Outages
Overall, a very good year with effectively no outages. The only measurable outage was 5 minutes on the Content3
server. However, with 100% total uptime, that outage was a rounding error in comparison.
Total Site Visitors
groups12 million
In 2023
Daily Average Views
visibility567k / day
Top Countries of Origin
public- United States 52%
- United Kingdom 8%
- China 6%
- Canada 5%
- Australia 3%
Site Sessions
recent_actors60 million
Average Session Duration
hourglass5 minutes
Pages Per Session
description4 pages
On average
Thank You!
In 2023, UESP continued to be a leading source of information for Elder Scrolls fans. With over 100,000 content articles and a dedicated user base, we think that UESP.net is poised for even greater success in the years to come.
We're looking forward to continuing to cover ESO content in 2024, ESO's 10th anniversary, the 30th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls, and some exciting new unannounced projects.
We have a lot of things planned to make UESP even better than before! Thanks for your continued support!
— Everyone at UESP.net9th February, 2024
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