Wednesday 29 October 2008

Wikia vs Uncyclopedia

Word on the grapevine is that Uncyclopedia wants to go independent, breaking their long-running ties with Wikia. Over thirty users have voted for a move, but whether they'll actually do anything about it is another matter.

However, if they do move, this could be useful for the citizens of Illogicopedia.
  1. We could hang onto their coat tails and move to the new server with them.
  2. Or, watch what happens and base our transition to independent wiki on their model.
  3. Alternatively, sit back and eat fudge cake.
I vote for number three.

Meanwhile, Wikia continues on a downward spiral and before long they'll be bust. I can see it now: "Jimbo Wales buys out ailing Wikia because they just plain suck too much to go alone any more". It's an example of commercialism ruining the community: wikis should NEVER be based on capitalist ethics. Otherwise, well, you can see what's happening with Wikia...

More Wikis that want to go independent include Liberapedia, the Furry Wikia and others that I can't think of right now. Further note to Wikia: Meh, I don't care any more. Stick your Web 2.0 bandwagon jumping up yer rather large goat's bumhole.

10 comments:

  1. Well that's wikias days over. ?pedia and the creatures wiki were one of the first to discuss a move, and the idea seems to have caught on. As a retired user who has created thier own wikia wiki recently (the coca cola football league championship wiki) I also have a view:

    FECK WIKIA

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  2. What'll you do when Sheff Utd. get promoted/relegated from the Championship?

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  3. When you say "Uncyclopedia wants to go independent", certainly you oversimplify. There already are plenty of Uncyclopedias which are non-Wikia (uncyclopedia.tw/hk, uncyclopedia.info) or fully independent (uncyclopedia.kr). One could fill two co-located servers with this babble er, Babel and still have demand for more capacity. This has been ongoing since 2006, the only thing that's changed now is the number of users on en: who have had enough.

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  4. Velly intellesting. Let's slee vat hlappenz

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  5. WikiFur can go one better, we're already (somewhat) independent of Wikia. Our English, French, German, Portuguese and Czech Slovakian versions are on Wikia, pending movement to our server soon.

    Our Polish, Spanish and Russian editions are already moved onto the new server; along with the pool wiki that hosts our shared resources.

    Our Finnish and Swedish editions are separately run; franchised for lack of a better word. They're TurriWiki and WikiLurv respectively.

    It should be noted that they don't exactly make it easy for breaking away from Wikia. They have a database of all the content of your wiki, and they are quite entitled to keep it stored and keep hosting it. WikiFur has had to broker a deal where we continue to display Wikia advertising (in a much less obtrusive manner) in return for them shutting down the WikiFur wikis on their webspace.

    They wanted bloody flash banners for a redirect.

    Love, Robomilk.
    Sometime Illogicopedia contributor, sometime WikiFur administrator.

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  6. Also, in a little note to the Badester, Creatures Wiki was co-founded by the founder of WikiFur. They might be moving together, got no idea~

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  7. Cheers for the comment, Carlb! Usually when I say 'Uncyclopedia' I refer to the English one cos that's the only one I can understand. Though I was never really involved in them, I am well aware that a large number of the other Uncycs have nothing to do with Wikia. How are they faring? Much better for not being with Wikia I'd guess.

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  8. @ Robomilk: Yes, we've experienced these problems with Wikia but we're hopeful that something can be sorted. Silent Penguin owns the copyrights to the 'Illogicopedia' name and he can prove it.

    :)

    :)

    :)

    Cheers for the status update with the WikiFur independence movement!

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  9. Creatures Wiki is not currently moving with WikiFur, as our new host has provided the hosting specifically for WikiFur. If it moves, it would be to a separate location run by members of the Creatures Community.

    WikiFur decided to move in June. We want to do things as smoothly as possible for the community, so we've been setting up new non-English language projects before moving the whole thing over, building automated statistics and dumps, tuning our server, adjusting inbound links, a central portal, etc.

    There's some LiveJournal posts on these topics that other site leaders might find useful, particularly in the area of site optimization, automated interwiki linking and sitemaps.

    As for Illogicopedia, probably the best is a service mark registration, which Silent Penguin might consider obtaining.

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  10. Wikia will end! Hooray for private independence!

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