About ads on bg3.wiki

Dear Baldur's Gate 3 community and wiki enthusiasts,

The wiki started out with the promise that it would never show ads, but sadly decided to break this promise in summer 2024. See here for historic details:

• July 16, 2024: About plans to put ads on bg3.wiki
• July 29, 2024: Ads are rolling out soon

The wiki is still owned and controlled by community members, and we continue to be dedicated to its quality in every way.

Following is a summary, but please read the original announcement & updates for more details especially if you have questions or concerns, since many questions were already answered. Also see the discussion page of the original announcement.

Why

I've decided to do this because projections show that there will be so much income that all significant past contributors can be paid quite well, with enough money left over for me to make a living off of it and make wiki work my full-time job.

I've asked for feedback on various venues, and the response was mostly positive. Still, anyone with concerns is always welcome to contact me directly, or speak up publicly, such as on a discussion page of the wiki, or on our Discord, or some other place you can find me. Just make sure to ping me so I can respond!

Payment of past contributors

If you are a past contributor, you will be notified about payment in the coming months, once enough income has pooled up and some kind of payment processing system is set up.

Note that there are no plans to pay people for new contributions going forth, since this would create an incentive to put quantity over quality. Please only contribute to the wiki out of your own genuine desire, with the only goal being to improve the wiki.

Copyrights and Licensing

See bg3wiki:Copyrights (legalese) and bg3wiki:Licensing (casual) for a detailed explanation. In summary, content is being re-licensed to a dual-license of BY-NC-SA + BY-SA as much as possible, but some content on the wiki is likely to remain exclusively under BY-NC-SA due to the difficulty of reaching all past contributors, especially anonymous ones. There does not seem to be a legal problem with continuing to serve BY-NC-SA content.

Ensuring a good wiki experience despite ads

Since we continue to put content quality and the comfort of wiki visitors above all else, we explicitly support ad-block users, hide ads for logged-in users (creating an account is free of course), and ensure that the ads we serve are as non-intrusive as possible while providing sufficient revenue.

Basically, if you don't want ads, we make it very easy to avoid them. Whether you want to see ads or not should be your choice.

The nature of ads served on bg3.wiki

The site serves relatively standard but high-quality ads. They're usually served by one or another reputable ad company (may change over time; see bg3wiki:Privacy policy for up to date details) and they implement "personalized ads" aka "tracking" of users, meaning that the ad companies create an anonymous profile of your web browsing habits so they can serve ads that you're most likely to be interested in.

The future

If ad money ever dries up due to a drastic loss of traffic, I'll find another source of income and go back to hosting the wiki ad-free. The actual server costs are low, and would be even lower if we had much less traffic, so the wiki is never going to be under danger of going down, nor being forced to put up more and more ads.

As always, feedback welcome!

You can always contact me on Discord or any of the contact methods listed on my user page, so feel free to contact me any time with questions or other feedback.