2019 has been a great year for RuneScape, and a momentous year for the wikis. We've forged new collaborations and built new tools to make us the best possible resource for RuneScape and Old School RuneScape. We are Weird Gloop, the organisation behind the site, and we take pride in the quality of the wikis. We'd like to share this year's successes with you.
In early 2019, we welcomed the Portuguese-Brazilian RuneScape Wiki and the RuneScape Classic Wiki to our network. The Portuguese wiki is maintained by a group of dedicated editors, and we thought it would be a great idea to bring them on board. While RuneScape Classic is no longer available, it's still part of the legacy of the game. Our goal is to preserve the history of RuneScape under one roof, and Classic is part of our family.
As the most complete RuneScape encyclopedia, we've got a lot of players coming to us for information, guides, and calculators. Take a look at some of the most popular content on the wikis, accessed by millions of players during 2019.
/wiki searchesThe past year has been a massive success for both the RuneScape Wiki and Old School RuneScape Wiki. Here are some of the major achievements from 2019.
The wikis started off the year strong with coverage of two big updates. RuneScape featured a complete Mining and Smithing rework, and Old School RuneScape developed the new Kebos Lowlands region. Just hours after release, editors had already prepared articles, taken images, and written guides.
The OSRS client RuneLite released a wiki plugin to help users quickly pull up articles on items, NPCs, and quests. This feature has been used over 6 million times since launch.
RuneLite provided the Old School RuneScape Wiki with 50 million kills of drop log data. This resource has enabled the wiki to calculate accurate drop tables for hundreds of monsters that would never otherwise have been possible.
Across both wikis we launched One Small Wiki Favour, a programme to reward new editors with bonds in-game for their contributions to the wiki. This has gotten over a hundred new editors involved and helped complete numerous wiki projects.
We have affiliated with other Discord communities to improve our coverage on specialised topics. The PvM Encyclopedia community have helped us write high-level PvM guides on RSW, and the RuneScape Speedruns community have provided high quality speedrunning guides for OSRS. The wikis are always looking out for dedicated teams to collaborate with on any subject.
The official RuneScape client was updated to add integration with the wiki. Players can now type /wiki in the chatbox to easily search for wiki articles from directly in-game.
The RuneScape Wiki released a complete perks calculator! Perks had long been poorly understood, so figuring out the exact mechanics was a big accomplishment. This would not have been possible without the help of Mod Shauny.
In a RuneFest first, our editors hosted a panel to discuss all things wiki. It was a huge opportunity to talk with Jagex Moderators, who provided invaluable collaboration on a number of wiki projects. Check out a recording of the livestream!
Old School RuneScape launched Twisted League, a seasonal competition in Great Kourend and the Kebos Lowlands. The wiki prepared a collection of guides and annotated the entire wiki with Twisted League icons. On the day of release, thousands of players utilised the wiki to explore Twisted League from the very beginning.
The RuneScape Wiki launched a convenient events interface accessible on every page. The interface shows useful timers for dailies, as well as the current Voice of Seren and featured activities. Check it out by clicking the calendar icon at the top of the page!
With hundreds of thousands of articles and images, the wiki is all about actual data. We've had an impressive year in terms of numbers, and collected a few statistics over the past year.
The wiki has been utilised by millions of visitors for each of the games. Our biggest countries are the United States and the United Kingdom, but we've been visited by almost every country on the planet (including North Korea).
/wiki usageNothing on the wiki would have been possible without the contributions of our amazing community. We owe our success to the hundreds of players who have taken the time to upload an image, write a guide, or just fix a typo on a random article. We recognise the importance of our community with the following numbers.
Behind the scenes, our technical team has been hard at work making the wikis faster and more robust.
The wikis have always used a content delivery network (CDN) to cache image assets geographically close to users, but until early 2019, all page views were being generated by our webservers in France. This was too slow, so in March we designed a way to cache wiki articles using the CDN, with about a 60% hit rate.
In July, we used brand-new database technology from Cloudflare to massively improve the caching, so now 94% of page views are loaded from a datacentre near the user. A few seconds after someone edits a wiki page, those changes propagate worldwide. This has made the average page load 2.5x faster than a year ago.
Over the years, wiki contributors have written nearly 50,000 lines of JS for calculators, price charts, quest checklists, and more. That's great, but it's way too much to ask users to load all at once!
We analyzed all the code and looked for ways to load as few modules as possible for each page. This reduced the average JS bundle by 75%, making page loads faster and smoother, especially on mobile.
Though our editors are from all around the world, the wiki has brought us together as collaborators and friends. Last year, we met up around the time of RuneFest to work on the site and have a bit of vacation as well.
The week before RuneFest, 20 Wikians flew to Gran Canaria, a Spanish island you may recognise as the inspiration for the shape of the granite shield. Between updating the wiki and preparing for RuneFest, we also got to explore the island and experience a little bit of Spanish culture.
RuneFest 2019 was held at Farnborough International Exhibition & Conference Centre, and the wikis were given the opportunity to present a panel about major updates since the fork. We gave out limited edition wiki shirts to attendees and got to meet players who use the wiki every day. RuneFest was an incredible chance to chat with Jagex Moderators, which evolved into a number of collaborative projects like drop rates on the OSRS Wiki.
