Thursday 30 October 2008

Wikia... again

I personally was never really happy with Wikia to start with, they were too meddlesome in their wikis, Sannse promised that this would not be the case. Seems they turned on that rather sharpish. As for other options, despite what people say, we have more than one might think - some of them might be a little ropey, others cost money.

Now then, options:

We stay with Wikia, simple and cheap, and make a lot of noise about how they are pissing everyone off. Start an amnesty for the whole situation, suggest that community members are held in important discussions, not just hired and turned into Wikia drones.

Now for the harder ones, involving moving away:
  1. Find a new Wikifarm. Now these ones are a bit ropey on the ground, no other major wikifarm exists apart from maybe Bluwiki and Editthis, but at least they leave their wikis alone.
  2. Find a good serverfarm which allows us to run Mediawiki properly. this is another dodgy one, farms are slow and i set up a test wiki for ?pedia ages ago on one but the place went in the pooper.
  3. Start our own wikifarm. Rent a server and share the costs between all the wikis, each wiki gets a managed share of the server, good uptime assuming they don't break it. essentially we make a second Wikia, aimed at not for profit.
  4. Go entirely solo. rent a server with only us in mind. this will cost uber amounts of money compared to the above. and offers very little in advantages, accept maybe website speed.
So, those are the options, but hey, we don't have much money, so the bottom one is pretty much out of the window.

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Now playing: Mike Oldfield - Far Above the Clouds
via FoxyTunes

3 comments:

  1. Make another wikifarm with other wiki's would be the best option, since there are many other wikis with the same views. Uncle pete need to sort something out 'cause there pretty muck fuked the way there going.

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  2. I formatted the post and added a dumb pic, hope you don't mind, Sepp. :)

    Anyway, lengthy thoughts:

    I think for all the gyp we give Wikia they aren't that bad, I mean the server is more reliable than other wikifarms and it was definitely the right move to go to Wikia at the time, IMO. But we're not some little tinpot wiki anymore, we've got around 30 regular users (guess) and about 70 edits per day (another guess) and it is very tempting to go independent.

    However, I love the third option (wikifarm). Get in touch with Uncyclopedia, Creatures Wiki, Liberapedia etc. and see if they'd be in on the deal to create a totally independent wikifarm with no Wikia bureaucracy entirely funded by the community.

    I'm going to be stuck in the house for the next two weeks (pretty much) so I would have time to help out if something could be brokered.

    Also, we need a good name for the wikifarm idea :D

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  3. United Coalition of Wikia Refugees (UCWR), or, to use the typical OSS route, 'Castellum' (latin for refuge).

    In case you didn't infer this, my vote is for the third option. That would fucking rock.

    ReplyDelete