Friday 23 October 2009

A year of independence: The Wikia debacle revisited

It's been one whole year since Illogicopedia moved from Wikia's servers, and it's verily shot by. Seems like only yesterday I was ranting my ass off at Wikia and their uncanny ability to cheese people off royally.

But for all that bad blood, I really don't think Wikia are that evil. The extreme views expressed within the pages of this weblog are all in good humour, you understand (or perhaps not: looks like we managed to fool one or two people with our Wikia-bashing along the way).

That's not to say I actually like Wikia: in fact, it's doubtful whether I ever did, even when Illogicopedia was with them. There's something about it that makes it all incompatible with everything Illogico, and by proxy I, stand for. Perhaps its the whole corporate image, or the fact it promotes profiting from volunteer spirit.

Yes, we were grateful when they took us on, but it was a means to an end. As has been mooted numerous times, it was always an idea for Illogicopedia to go it alone, so to speak, and moving to Wikia was simply a stepping stone.

It's still the ultimate goal for Illogicopedia to be self-funding, and maybe one day when I get a job that actually pays more than peanuts we may actually get to the point where we become the commercialised ones, with Illogico mugs and T-Shirts and the like. Oh, how the boot will be on the other foot then!

That's all in the future though. To mark Illogicopedia's first whole year of independence, I've posted a bit of an analysis over at one of those free-to-host places on the interwebs. It's a bit dry, but will hopefully bring to the attention of the general public the plight of small wikis such as ourselves. It's one of the bigger user-generated content sites, so who knows, maybe somebody from the mainstream media may read it.

8 comments:

  1. Illogicopedia is not supposed to be a soapbox which "stands for" anything. There are some things it definitely doesn't or shouldn't "stand for" but nothing it does or ought to "stand for" besides harmless nonsense.

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  2. "Illogicopedia is not supposed to be a soapbox which "stands for" anything."

    To me, Illogicopedia stands for an awful lot, and anyone who disagrees isn't reading between the lines ;)

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  3. If what you say is true, the project is a failure and somebody ought to try again.

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  4. Wholly disagree, but I'm not going to get into this argument.

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  5. Dude, i just found your site. I wish I met you guys earlier.

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  6. Nerd, the reason Illogicopedia is like a soapbox site is because it's against the concept of newbie bias, judgment by length, and sticks up admins asses *cough* Uncyc *cough*.

    I know the site's not supposed to be against Uncyc but quite frankly I hate Uncyc and I wish we were outspoken against them.

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  7. Well, it's not "against the concept"s - there is no principle of, "The way we do things here is the way they ought to be done everywhere, on every project." The way we run things does reflect an internal philosophy, it's true, but not one we project outwards. You are welcome to use your user pages to advocate whatever you'd like (within reason and common decency) but the site's not supposed to be an advocate of anything but itself, and itself is just light-hearted nonsense. The only real philosophy we have (or ought to have) is what I outlined under "Positions and Values" in Illogicopedia:About: http://illogicopedia.org/wiki/Illogicopedia:About#Positions_and_Values

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  8. Come on Nerd, now this stuff is bordering on the, well, um, Nerdy. :-D

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