The archive of all things Grand Theft Auto has a new home and is busy preparing for GTA 6. We’ll be taking a look at what is going on with, the GTA Wiki, an essential website for the GTA community. I also got chance to ask the site’s team a few questions ahead of what will be a monstrous year for Grand Theft Auto.
For those unaware, the GTA Wiki has been a key resource for GTA fans over the course of twenty years but corporate hosting has made it unpleasant to use and work on for readers and editors alike. Intrusive ads, censorship and more. That’s why the team who look after the Wiki have freed themselves from owner Fandom’s shackles ahead of GTA VI. The site celebrated its 20th anniversary last month with newly found independence.
GTA Wiki can now be found at the simple gta.wiki domain. The hosting is provided by Weird Gloop. This is the same company who have taken onboard other large gaming wikis such as the Minecraft, Runescape and League of Legends encyclopaedias.
Grand Theft Archive
Firstly, given the sheer knowledge base built up over the course of 20 years, fans would naturally be worried about lost data. The good news is that the team confirmed to me that all 22,000+ pages and 226,000+ files (things such as images, sound clips, and more) from the previous wiki were backed up. These were then put onto the new wiki. Nothing has been lost which is great for preservation.
Given the change in platform, I was curious if the GTA Wiki team had any specific plans for GTA VI ahead of its launch later this year. The team say you can expect the site to remain as the most in-depth GTA encyclopedia online with it “documenting every piece of content in the game, from characters, weapons, and missions to even minor worldbuilding details like roads and fictional companies”. The effort is not fading.
GTA VI Preparations Are Underway
The scope of GTA VI is enormous. With that, the wiki team have already been hard at work. Pages on things like an Unnamed GTA VI Pegassi sports car have been made ready for when we do know. Plus, the site has a Discord server with dedicated channels and subthreads to coordinate efforts so no stone is left unturned.
With their excitement for the next installment, the team setup a document titled “Project VI” on the old wiki to cover everything pre-release. This has been replicated on the new site. Once we learn more details on GTA VI in the coming months, they will add to it on the new site. It is also worth noting that the GTA Wiki team are affiliated with the dedicated mapping website State of Leonida.
What’s Happening To The Old Site?
Given this is a major migration for a much visited site, I wanted to find out what will happen to Fandom version of the Wiki. After all, it is still displaying highly in search results. Would it become defunct? Was there a split in editors? Well, whilst the old Wiki is staying put, it won’t be actively getting new content.
The most frequent contributors to the GTA Wiki have moved over to the new site already; 15 staff and a dozen active non-staff. The old site is being maintained by two staffers but it is purely to prevent vandalism and not given new content.
Supporting The New Site
I briefly mentioned earlier about the community and helping clicks over over. When asked how the wider GTA community can help, the team say they are several ways to support them. An important one is to avoid clicking on the Fandom version and only using gta.wiki.
Changing bookmarks, crediting and more to the new domain is a good start. They note that the Indie Wiki Buddy browser extension makes this much easier by automatically redirecting users to the new domain and hiding Fandom results from search pages.
Ultimately spreading the word goes far. The more people know, the more visits the new domain gets. As such, we’ll be linking to gta.wiki instead of the previous version if we do source the site; as should everyone else.
Thanks to the GTA Wiki team for all of their hard work and the interview. Without community, the GTA series would not be as popular as it is. For more GTA VI news updates, stay tuned to RockstarINTEL.
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