Fan wikis are encyclopedias of unpaid passion. BloxBase is taking “pro” approach with Roblox.

Over the past few years, major platforms like YouTube have openly recognized the power of fandom. All around the world, millions upon millions of people are fans of everything from huge contemporary properties like Star Trek, Apex Legends, and House of the Dragon to long-cancelled TV shows, indie book series, niche two-volume manga series, and single-author webcomics tucked away on decades-old Tumblr accounts.

Out of these fans’ passion comes wikis: sprawling, community-made and -maintained indexes that catalog all the details about their beloved IPs, most on the Fandom hosting service. There, you can find a wiki for pretty much any TV show, movie, book, and comic out there. (Some content creators have their own, too!) And, again, they’re all made and maintained nonprofit, purely out of fan passion.

But BloxBase is doing something different. It’s putting together a Roblox wiki made by a unified editorial team that “consists exclusively of well-versed content creators,” all of whom are experienced and currently active Roblox players, The Escapist reports.

BloxBase considers itself a professional wiki where, instead of anyone on the net being able to add and modify articles, it’ll send all text content through the editorial team to be “triple-checked” for accuracy.

The site is a bit bare-bones for now, but the articles that are available show BloxBase’s overall content plan: It has individual wiki entries for games (well-known/top-performing ones for now, but maybe that’ll change in the future?) that give an in-depth description of their genres, what players can expect and what sort of game-unique items they’ll get by playing. Each entry also has some interesting stats, like player count.

BloxBase also offers game walkthrough guides and shares news about recent game updates.

The latter two are more standard journalistic fare–and certainly there’s a fair share of games journalism websites out there–but the core wiki itself is a unique approach. As far as we know, this is the first time an organized, journalist-style editorial board has tried managing this kind of wiki.

BloxBase hasn’t said yet who the content creators responsible for it are, so we don’t know if they’re content creators in the sense we’re used to discussing–e.g. YouTubers, TikTokers, Twitch streamers, etc–or trade writers. (It also hasn’t said whether or how much contributing writers will be compensated.)

Either way, this is one of those interesting internet projects worth paying attention to. If it takes off, could it change the way fan wikis are maintained? As The Escapist points out, though fan passion is available in spades, unpaid people with jobs and families don’t always have the free time to maintain wikis thoroughly; as a result, some sites are seasons or books behind on episode descriptions, and have pages filled with the dreaded, This article needs more information. Click here to contribute. And, since there’s no immediate fact-checking when edits are made, if one person is wrong about something, that misinformation could remain on the wiki until someone else more knowledgeable stumbles across it and fixes it.

It also indicates just how much of a force Roblox has become. We’ve written before about how it’s possibly the only platform still successfully riding the metaverse wave, and it’s paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to content creators and developers making virtual items and games on its site.

Now what remains to be seen is whether any of those games can become cultural zeitgeists with the kind of engrossing narrative that’ll put them alongside classics whose wikis have been run on fan energy for decades.