I would tell a slightly longer history of bgwiki that might show why it eventually rose to prominence.
BGwiki was founded in the aftermath of the Wikia Dale email dump by a disaffected community, but there was a ton of FFXI content and wikia already had the pages and years of content. BGwiki managed to make novel pages for Salvage findings, but beyond that it never really found a niche.
Fast forwards a few years to the WotG doldrums and wikia's editing has slowed, while BG is literally down to a single editor, Septimus. Septimus developed tools that let him automatically generated wiki page following game updates, so he was keeping page skeletons up even for new content but wasn't playing and had no other editors.
Around this time, I was doing a bunch of testing and got ticked about how my wiki edits would be reverted / the shitty ads and layout on Wikia, while BG was a tabula rasa. Thus, I started updating BGwiki's mechanics pages. TheBlackrose made some templates at the time, and I used them to remake all the ability/spell/WS pages with accurate information, testing links, etc. Septimus kept developing tools like a set detector, but we were still a small time operation.
Eventually Slycer joined us and he and I started adding content, like Salvage 2, Dynamis revamp, and Meebles. Both of us made pretty accurate pages, but his were always both pretty and accurate. Anyway, Dynamis revamp or Voidwatch were probably the first big times that people had to use bgeiki because Wikia didn't copy our pages quickly enough for them.
Some time around then, we picked up a lot more contributors including Funk and Spicy and Septimus stopped editing/posting on BG.
It is hard to overstate how critical Septimus' work was for BGwiki. It takes an entire community to make a wiki successful, but it took Septimus to keep it alive and make it maintainable lowman. His tools gave bgwiki the edge it needed during the WotG doldrums and let us maintain fairly current content with a tiny staff.