Have you seen the Wikia article?!?

Take a look at the template added here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=188335402



I know they badly need to distinguish between the two groups, especially after the Spanking Wiki / Child abuse images scandal but is this really the norm on articles?

That seems like a waste of a template. If it's notable (and I guess it is), it should be in the text of the article.

It's only worth having a template if they intend to put the same text in lots of articles. Maybe they have, or propose, an article on each of the larger Wikia wikis.

I like the Wikia Search paragraph...

Now let's see how long that lives, starting from... NOW!

And, of course, the Wikia is not Wikimedia template was created by the highly conflicted UK Wikimedia chair Alison Wheeler. So, an agent of the Foundation itself writes and installs the template. And this is accepted without WP:COI scrutiny, why? Note, the template is not to be removed "without permission"!

I could just as easily create a template stating that Wikia is Wikimedia, complete with pictures of Jimbo lecturing Wikimania in his Wikia t-shirt, copies of the Form 990 stating that there is ownership/Trustee overlap, and the story of how Jimbo hired Essjay to Wikia and appointed him to ArbCom in less than 35 days' timeframe.

How would they like them apples? The entire Wikipedia/Wikia system is a corrupt joke.

Greg

In true Wikia/Wikipedia form, the template does not even read unambiguously*:



So we can remove from any article where it has been placed with permission? Or are we to understand that someone has been placing this template all over the place without permission and that as evidence we are to leave it alone?

Interesting also, that either the WMF or Wikia are taking ownership and responsibility for Wikipedia content when they always deny they are responsible for content. It is supposedly the community that owns the content, not WiMkFia.

*[Edit]Bah! Don't you just hate it when you nitpick over someone's English and don't check your own?

Also note the seemingly innocuous edit where she removes info that shows one of the ways in which Wikia and Wikipedia are connected. I guess you can say they're seperate if you hide all the evidence, eh?

Everyone, keep your eye on what's happening on the Wikia page and the Template discussion page.

Now is the time for all sane Wikipedians to stand up for Truth and not Whitewashing. Do any such Wikipedians still exist?

Greg

Rich Farmbrough writes during the template deletion debate



That is pretty much what I thought when I first saw it.

But preferential treatment of Wikia is bountiful and easy to find on Wikipedia.

Greg, how many outbound links are there to non-notable Wikia sites on Wikipedia again?

Rich Farmbrough has added a Conflict of Interest tag to the article now. Damn right.

Why don't they just give up the charade and call the whole site ConflictOfInterestapedia? It's just one massive accountability and conflict of interest disaster zone. You've got the chair of Wikimedia UK placing proclamations at the top of Wikia's article, who herself has two admin accounts and went onto Wikipedia using a sockpuppet to argue for her own vanity article to be kept on the site, without declaring her interest in that venture.

Meanwhile, this dude got slapped by Wikiminions for uploading a few of his own pictures of himself to his own biography, which he didn't want in the first place.

From the template deletion page:

Ouch!

Nothing on the Communications committee page that suggests that their remit includes censoring Wikipedia - and quite rightly too because we all know that censoring Wikipedia is the biggest evil that there is - far worse than supporting paedophilia or undermining those who seek to defend us against the Muslim hoards.*

...unless it is content about WiMkFians. Has anyone got a petard handy? I feel some hoisting coming on.

(*Just in case, as people are getting confused, that is satirical)

Alison Wheeler has gone on record as saying that the absurd template is a neccessity, as "This is a matter of *law* not of opinion."

Now Alison Wheeler may be steeped in Wiki-culture, but it is becoming apparent that she is very naive as to the reality of the broken format.

First Rule of public Wikis : There is no Law
Second Rule of public Wikis: If you try to enforce a Law then You... Will... Fail!!!!!

WP:NLT!

Worst Arguments Ever made on a deletion debate... She's going to really regret this...

I believe if the proper authorities would actually get off their asses and look into the self-dealing presented by Wikia's involvement with Wikipedia, we would soon learn that "the law" determines that the two organizations are most certainly not "completely separate".

Tell me, if Jimbo, Angela, and Mikey getting together and saying, "Hey, let's spin off a for-profit wiki farm like Wikipedia," is not a "spin-off", then pray tell, WTF would constitute a spin-off?

To answer an earlier question, there are 11,300 external links from Wikipedia to Wikia. I would guess that 65% of them are not from article Main space, but I would also venture a guess that 45% of them would violate the WP:EL (External Links) policy. All but three or four of them violate the code of business ethics. There should be external links to Wikia from the Wikipedia articles about Wikia, Jimmy Wales, and Angela Beesley, and not much else.

Greg

The thing is, it's a self-justifying circle. Links to Wikia are justified because people are told to go dump their fancruft there. And why should we encourage them to dump fancruft on Wikia? Well, we have these links to Wikia sites, why not use them?

No matter how legally different they are, the public will probably see Wikipedia and Wikia as the same. And WP editors are part of the public.

This template is so ridiculous that I would expect its creation to come from one of our regular whipping posts, like Durova or JzG. It is humorous in the way it looks, what it is trying to express, and where it is placed. This thread should probably be linked from the tagline. This could end up being very, very humorous--and who knows, Jimbo himself (being very careful about commenting about Wikia on WP lately) may pop his head into the discussion with an ounce or two of wisdom.

Hence the need for the big templates. We can all see Alison Wheeler's train of thought, and it seems perfectly logical and legitimate in many respects.

However, she appears to be oblivious to the fact that WIKIPEDIA IS A CRAZED MASS OF SEETHING IDIOCY™. And to start applying logical and legitimate measures to Wikia articles means you'd have to start doing the same to the complaints of people like Greg, or Judd Bagley, or anyone else who found themselves on the wrong side of the looking glass.

At Wikipedia, to be "logical and legitimate" would be to set a precedent.

User Jossi -- who has been described as the most Conflicted-Of-Interested editor on Wikipedia due to his 1000s of edits on articles concerning the Prem Rawat Foundation (which he works for), and whom I once opined was a supporter of BADSITES because of a Conflict of Interest over what critical websites would have to say about his Conflict of Interest on the Conflict of Interest page, where he showed a Conflict of Interest by amending the text to allow for his Conflict of Interest on the Rawat articles -- has stepped in!

He has removed the Conflict of Interest template.

He says it is only there to make a point.

I guess he should know.

____________________

Oh, and by the way, Alison Wheeler has been threatening to block people who have been removing the absurd template and comparing their actions to vandalism.

By definition, the Protagonist and Antagonist in a WikiDrama have conflicting interests.

Conflict of interest is one of the defining features of all drama.

Doesn't that witch see how her beloved Template is going down in flames?

Greg

I think we also need to mark this date in our diaries. We are at one with SlimVirgin!

This one is crashing and burning, hard (as indeed it should). Do we start laying odds on when the god-king will be "asked to comment" (even though as we're repeatedly told, "he is not a final authority"), or will it just be speedy closed (seems to be a fear of numerous commentators)?

Seraphimblade made a sensible comment!

I'm surprised it hasn't been WP:SNOWballed by now.

Perhaps only a matter of time, or maybe someone is trying to talk AlisonW off the precipice...

I have a theory. Did Alison Wheeler create this bat-feet insane template so that we would all not notice this whitewashing edit that she made to the article a day after plastering the template?

Seriously, that may be worse than the template.

We went from Wikia "having ties" every day since early September 2007, to having "no ties" in February 2008. How can Alison get away with changing the five-month old switch from "ties" to "no ties", and not expect anyone to notice or protest?

Wikipedia is a joke. Wikia is a joke. Alison Wheeler is a joke.

Heh, good theory as any. She seems to have given up on this without much of a fight, despite an ominous statement that "this will be dealt with internally" and this edit trying to prove how super-dooper important she is.

She appears to be a bit of an amateur at forcing her will on Wikipedia. She is far away from the league of Slim, JzG, or even someone like Mantanmoreland. Perhaps she is mentally healthy. The mentally unstable on Wikipedia seem to have a way of getting things done, no matter what.

I noticed that. No responses on the TfD page from here in over three days. Perhaps she realized how little "consensus" she had.

Those of us who are pissed off about the template have specifically asked that it not be SNOWed; we want the full opportunity to vent our rage. Not that that will necessarily prevent SNOWage, mind you, but I suspect that that request has something to do with the fact that it hasn't been.

Despite the hideous template being rejected wholesale by the community, Alison Wheeler is still trying to push WMF/Wikia PR on the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=191027854

WHAT PART OF "CONFLICT OF INTEREST" DO THESE PEOPLE NOT UNDERSTAND?

Interesting that the current version does not mention the Essjay controversy.

Even to this day, Angela Beesley (co-founder of Wikia, Inc.) is busy as a bee, finding articles for deletion on Wikipedia, and migrating them over to her for-profit enterprise. She even gets to use a convenient wiki mark-up syntax, to make links to Wikia even easier.

When I used an account to notify on their User_Talk pages creators of deleted pages, that their content would be welcome at my wiki site, the comments were removed, and the account was blocked.

Content borrowing for financial self-benefit is alive and well on Wikipedia, it just depends who you are and who you know. Note, too, that in the Wikia model, Angela and her investors keep all of the ad revenue on the borrowed content. On Wikipedia Review, the author keeps all the ad revenue (except for the one small Amazon banner at the very bottom of their page). Guess which site is pumped and promoted within Wikipedia, and guess which one is restricted and rejected?

So Angela is basically saying "I have deemed your contributions to the non-profit collaborative project to be not worthy nor welcomed. I can however squeeze a buck out of your unappreciated effort over at my money making site. I know this might be upsetting but you really should have read the fine print in that "GFDL" thingy. Information wants to be free and I want you to work for me for free, too. Thanks again sucker."