Why is the D&D wiki so bad?

[StevenC21]

This post is not to ask WHAT is terrible. I've seen, and I can point out stealing piles of feces when I see them.

My question is why?! In my experience, most community organized products are actually of high quality - it's a product of love and passion, rather than greed.

The D&D wiki is an excellent exception. But does anyone know why?

[ngilop]

If you actually looks through everything it is not any more or less worse than any other site with homebrew posted on it.

The biggest difference is, the lack of feedback one gets on D&D wiki.

If you look on GiTP you will find just as crazy bonkers stuff on it, as well as decent stuff. it is just people on this site are 1) biased and 2) have had at least some saying this or that about their homebrew

[tyckspoon]

community organized products are actually of high quality - it's a product of love and passion, rather than greed.


Bolded the important part. DanDWiki is not one of these. An organized project, that is. A well organized community product will have.. let's call them project managers? Editors, maybe? People who are checking submissions for quality, helping workshop them and refine them if they're good ideas but the implementation is not up to par, rejecting ideas if they don't fit the overall theme or have unsolvable mechanical issues. The structure of a wiki goes against this idea; all you need is enough time to write up an article, and you can throw any random junk on there. The idea is that another interested editor will fix any mistakes you make, which works reasonably well for factual stuff and most fandom things where you're just recording character storylines and traits and whatnot. But when you're just posting your homebrew, who cares to do that? Maybe you get some people on the discussion page who will give their opinion, but they're not going to just randomly change the stats on your class. It'd be rude and it's not their work.

[Rater202]

It's less of an organized product and more of a fanfic repository.

Or rather, two such repositories. There's two wikis for the game that both have homebrew material and a lot of overlap betweent he two

There is limited collaboration and no dedicated feedback or quality control, so it has the same problems as FFN: Lots of crap drowning out the quality stuff and/or the stuff that has effort put into it and less than talented people not getting the constructive feedback that leads to the cultivation of talent.

There's some good stuff on it--I've been wanting to play a Hivemaster(3.5 class involving insect control and turning into a bug monster) at some point for years--but again, there's no quality control so you've kinda gotta weight through sewage to find the gold.

--even my beloved Hivemaster is an example. The selling point of the class is several exclusive feats that give you progressive bonuses based on your hive-master leve, all themed after specific insects. A second author with permission of the original later added more feats that serve as upgrades to the original(Take Bond of the Spider to be even more Spider-Like than just Aspect, or if you have both Aphids and Ants then you can take a feat that lets you have one start farming the other resulting in bot getting stronger and you by extension getting more direct benefit.)

They're all generally balanced towards the purpose of the Hive-master--a non or partial caster comperable to the Sorcerer.

Years later, a third author without permission made his own feats that just don't compare. They're halfed assed, fail to interact with the game mechanics properly, break the scheme of other feats, and some of them just kind of... suck.

Like, I don't know what an assassin bug is, but at level 11 I don't think a DC of 5+Con or take 3d12 acid from a melee attack is comperable to what a sorcerercan do.

[ezekielraiden]

1. It's incredibly accessible. People who want to put out content get funneled to it almost immediately, and people who want to find content similarly find it almost instantly through searches.
2. It has no real community. People post TONS of stuff without any form of critical review. They've made token efforts, and I've seen a few things that actually got some vetting...but most of it is posted without the slightest form of analysis.
3. It is, in part because of 1, often the first place people get directed to for lots of things, so much of the crap simply settles there first--it's effort to seek out a forum, but anyone can post to a wiki.
4. In the rare cases that real, deep thought went into things, often campaign limitations or gentleman's/ladies' agreements have addressed the flaws for the specific table that produced it. Stuff I've made for the game I run would not be appropriate for every table everywhere, but DandDwiki doesn't acccount for that.

It's like getting to see every random person's submissions to Dragon magazine, without any filter whatsoever. You're getting a metric crapton of crap, table-specific rules, unvetted speculation, and over-enthusiastic appreciation.

[MisterKaws]

When you post a homebrew here or on the other tabletop gaming forums, the interested parties will often rapidly dissect your creation, and point out every single one of their flaws (most times in a friendly manner). By looking at the replies, the author can then improve their idea to a decent level. The same replies can also be used by a possible user of said homebrew to decide whether it is appropriate to their campaign.

On D&DWiki you get none of that. The page discussion section is hidden in a dark corner no one looks at. Posters don't even need to make an account: they can just drop their steaming piece of dung and fly away without even landing, like an angry pigeon. There's not even a rating system, which would at least let you differentiate the crap from the gold. Instead, you have to dig through all that poop yourself to find a single gold nugget, and most of the times, it's all scratched, mixed with other stones, and lacking polish.

I like metaphors.

[Malphegor]

All that said, it is a good resource for character ideas. I see it like going to the pub to listen to old drunks' stories as inspiration for fiction writing- it might be nonsense based on piles of 'if X was true, then we could do Y', but occasionally there's a nugget of an idea in a broken build using homebrew that can be repurposed for non-homebrew stuff.

If they actually finish their entries. Nothing more frustrating than an incomplete wiki page with the templates visible.

[Mato]

The D&D wiki is an excellent exception. But does anyone know why?Easy answer? Personal bias.

Complicated answer? D&D is a complicated system and many people on this forum haven't even read a rulebook but they have played D&D. This can lead to a lot of misconstrued ideas about every element of D&D. Now, I'm not trying to strawman here (aka wrong thread to tell me how you think I'm wrong) but take the whole kobold as a true dragon thing. The misinformation is drawn from not being able to properly quantify the meaning of "more powerful" in the terms that D&D, an unfamiliarity with page 142 of the Draconomicon, a massive dose of narcissistic self-importance, and it ultimately only works with people at the first level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence) of competence in the rule structure. But how often does this sixteen year old debate appear on a 3.5 dedicated sub forum and how many people are still unconvinced otherwise?

Now I'm not saying everyone in dndwiki is intentionally incorrect. Unlike other wikis that seek to remain unbiaist with many people contributing to a single piece of work. The submissions are personal creations managed by a single person often built using personal tabletop anecdotes (a source wikis ban) which is just a recipe for disaster. To plug another debate in as an example, just last week someone was claiming they have never seen a second level spell that rolled more than ten dice and so they offered their opinion based around that. And when scorching ray was brought up their immediate emotional and tribal response was to strike the counter example from the record rather than incorporating and adjusting to it. Now imagine an entire website that reacts like that to every single comment because every topic is based around personal submissions. dndwiki has problems because by design it's supposed to be a terrible site and it isn't properly moderated to force people to conform to wiki-like idealisms.

[Psyren]

Combination of Sturgeon's Law and no particularly good way to crowdsource feedback. Sure anyone can edit a wiki, but short of an edit war there isn't much opportunity or incentive for discussion or debate on a particular idea, and without that you can't really refine anything.

This is compounded by the site's longstanding reputation as being not just a repository for random homebrew, but a poorly conceived/balanced one at that - so the people you would most need criticism from are actively avoiding anything you put up there.

What DnDwiki would need to turn this around is similar to what Steam is experimenting with - Curators, i.e. authoritative voices who have a reputation for highlighting the good or interesting stuff. Of course, then you run into the same problem Steam has, i.e. no good way for the Curators to find anything either save digging through all of it, and there's very little incentive to do that. At least it takes less time to read a class entry than to play through a video game.

[MisterKaws]

What DnDwiki would need to turn this around is similar to what Steam is experimenting with - Curators, i.e. authoritative voices who have a reputation for highlighting the good or interesting stuff. Of course, then you run into the same problem Steam has, i.e. no good way for the Curators to find anything either save digging through all of it, and there's very little incentive to do that. At least it takes less time to read a class entry than to play through a video game.

If they gave it that - plus a ratings system - I could see myself scrolling through it to look up interesting stuff, and maybe submit some reviews. But right now, on that poor wiki format, it just doesn't work.