A Breakdown of Every Skyrim Wiki

For gamers diving into The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, finding the right Skyrim Wiki can be extremely frustrating because some are filled with wonderful information while others offer no help at all. Sure, a simple Google search might eventually get you there, but our goal is to put together a list of every Skyrim Wiki being published and break them down in terms of what they have to offer, along with a letter grade for overall quality.

For more great Skyrim reading, check out Ben Sheene’s Legendary Update Breathes New Life Into Old Skyrim as well as his reflective “Looking Back on Skyrim” article from January, 2013. Let’s take a look at some of the best Skyrim Wiki resources available today and see which one is best.

Skyrim – The Elder Scrolls Wiki

This wiki can be found at elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Skyrim and typically comes up right at the top of most search engine query results. This wiki is extremely similar to the popular WoWwiki for World of Warcraft. The number of pages for “The Elder Scrolls Wiki” ranks in at a whopping 18,749, so there’s a glutton of information available. In addition there are over 17,000 photos available to go along with many of the entries. The navigation is broken up into Quests, Character, Gameplay, World, Items and Misc (which covers things like console commands and Easter Eggs).
Overall, this is definitely one of the top, if not the best, wiki for Skyrim available. The information is up-to-date and extremely helpful and makes for good reading even if you are not actively stuck somewhere in the game.

Grade: A

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages

Located at www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Skyrim, this wiki looks a lot like traditional wiki pages with a hint of the old-school IMDB design for those of you that remember what that site used to look like. The homepage for this wiki is well thought out, with quick links for character creation, dragon shouts and leveling easily found within the body of the main page. Once you dive in, there’s links to get into everything a Skyrim player would want to know, from quests to creatures. The search feature on this wiki conflates *all* Elder Scrolls games, so finding something specific to Skyrim can be tricky. That said, the information within the pages is well detailed and typically helpful.

Grade: A-

Skyrim Wiki

Kudos to these guys for buying the best domain name of the bunch at www.skyrimwiki.com, which features a nicely laid out homepage featuring items, monsters, NPCs, news, races, classes, locations and more. Of all the Skyrim Wiki homepages, this one might have the absolute best homepage. Everything is laid out wonderfully and finding exactly what you want to find should take seconds. Once you go into one of the links, all the pages are then listed in alphabetical order. The articles themselves, however, are a little spotty. There are decent walk-throughs for quests but often times there are no images to go along with those descriptions. Some of the side-widget information on these pages can be lacking compared to others as well. That said, this isn’t a bad wiki at all and as stated before, probably has the best laid out homepage of the bunch.

Grade: B+

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Wiki Guide on IGN

The monolithic gaming-themed website IGN might just have the best looking Wiki of them all, thanks to a robust and gorgeous iOS application. Available both on a browser and in the application, the IGN Skyrim wiki has a ton of information available. One negative is that IGN supports takeover advertisements that get in the way of browsing, something that the smaller sites don’t do (ads go away after 10-15 seconds or you click the X). Getting inside the inner pages is a little disappointing as not all weapons, for example, have their own breakout page. An example of this is the popular “Daedric Sword” which many equip in the game. Sometimes when you do click on one of these links, case in point – glass sword, you’ll get a rather lame “Bummer. This page has no content.” The pages that do have content are typically well written and helpful.

Grade: B