2020 Weird Gloop Year in Review

Riblet's big words here. 2020 has been a humanitarian disaster on a global scale and a fantastic year of growth for the RuneScapes Wiki. We are Weird Gloop, the organisation behind the sites, and we'd like to share this year's successes with you.

Traffic statistics

When it comes to daily traffic, the wikis spike in activity whenever RuneScape grows, with notable upticks around the global lockdowns early in the year and RuneScape's launch on the Steam platform in October. Traffic peaked around the start of Old School RuneScape's Trailblazer League in November, with new editors and readers arriving in droves to research the league and its unique restrictions.

With over 1.5 billion pageviews in 2020, the RuneScape Wiki is the second-most visited wiki in the world (although we probably won't be catching Wikipedia any time soon). About half those pageviews came from the United States, but the wikis had visitors from 236 different countries and territories this year, including Antarctica, Micronesia, and Chad. You can check out a breakdown of each wiki's traffic and statistics here:

Community statistics

The wiki's greatest strength continues to be our amazing community, from the admins and regular contributors to the anonymous editors who just help out when they can. Whether it's fixing a typo, uploading an image, or helping write a new guide, we owe our success to every one of the thousands of players who make the wiki possible.

Technical changes

This past November, we made some big changes to how we handle Grand Exchange prices. We moved historical price data off the wikis to api.weirdgloop.org, stopped updating individual item modules in favor of accessing prices from a single bulk module, and deleted old revisions of those item modules.

By doing so, we removed roughly 73% of all revisions on the site, including 66% of the RuneScape Wiki, 84% of the Old School RuneScape Wiki, and 95% of the Portuguese-Brazilian RuneScape Wiki. This has a huge impact on the portability of the database, both for migrations and possible future ephemeral versions of the wikis. Our Grand Exchange bot now makes around a dozen edits per day, down from 18,000 per day (one for each tradeable item), which means better performance for caching, the job queue, and our web servers.

Third-party scrapers can use the new API, which is heavily cached, instead of hitting our wiki web servers. We hope this makes it easier for people to make cool things that rely on Grand Exchange prices, especially since the official APIs are difficult to use programmatically. (REPLACE THIS LAST SENTENCE)

Trivia quiz

The wikis have no shortage of interesting trivia, with a dedicated trivia section on over 15,000 pages. Think you know your stuff? Give our quizzes a go and see how you well you know the game! If you want to try more than one, you'll get the chance to choose again after you've finished a quiz.

This year we were honoured to be recognised as Community Champion at the 10th Annual Golden Gnome Awards. We again want to thank each and every one of you who read and edited the wiki this year for your support. We truly could not be where we are today without all your help, and we hope to serve the RuneScape community for years to come.

If you want to get involved with the wiki, there's always work to do, and new projects get started all the time. If you haven't edited before and aren't sure where to start, check out the One Small Wiki Favour program, which regularly highlights different community projects and rewards in-game bonds for helping out.

2020 was a year full of unique trials to overcome, and we're aiming to make 2021 the best year we've had on the wikis yet. We hope you join us in making the wikis as good as they possibly can be, so don't be afraid to hop into our Discord server or chat with us on Twitter, @RSWiki and @OSRS_Wiki.

— From all of us at the RuneScape Wikis
(which could include you, too)