Former Guardian reporter Seth Finkelstein breaks a story about an "Anti-Wikia Alliance".

I think it's interesting that Wikia has prohibited the mere mention of the word "Wikipedia Review" on its sites.

Seems even Wowwiki might leave Wikia now, considering they are a more than 10% of Wikia's page views, this might not end well for them.

If they can't get 8 to 15 nerds to donate $10 a month (and keep all advertising to themselves) in order to get out from under Jimbo's treacherous thumb, then they just may deserve to remain under that sinister grip.

I don't know why anybody would want or need to use Wikia and subject themselves to all their rules and ads.

Ignorance.

Most people do not have the basic technical skills to set up or maintain a wiki. These people often do not even have the technical skills to write decent HTML. They are therefore happy to get free hosting and technical service, even if it means a number of annoying advertisements and arbitrary rules.

My hosting account with Dreamhost includes the ability to set up MediaWiki sites (among other platforms). This should work for all but the most wildly popular wikis (which might trigger bandwidth or server usage amounts that necessitate moving to a private server at extra expense), so I don't know why anybody would want or need to use Wikia and subject themselves to all their rules and ads.

These people often do not even have the technical skills to write decent HTML.

Edit: P.S. Mediawiki uses a ton of server resources. One time I received an automated warning from Dreamhost for using up a lot of CPU and I was only using the site myself.

If they can't get 8 to 15 nerds to donate $10 a month (and keep all advertising to themselves) in order to get out from under Jimbo's treacherous thumb, then they just may deserve to remain under that sinister grip.

If you pay for 3 years hosting then it cost £25 a year on godaddy. Which gives 10GB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth. They'll also install mediawiki, pmwiki etc, or you can do it yourself. I eventually stuck with using drupal and wordpress mu. I suspect their issue may be disk space, but for £40 you'll get 150GB of space and unlimited space costs about £55.

If you need a place to put your fancruft, there really aren't too many great alternatives

1) Band together with a bunch of other anonymous or not so anonymous freaks and start something which will probably fail and have lots of infighting
2) Go it alone
3) Find a free wiki farm with a proven record of years of responsible hosting of similar material
4 Try to integrate with a large general-purpose wiki like Encyc
5) Suck it up and leave your stuff on Wikia, where at least it's relatively safe
6) Give up on the wiki idea and get a free blog or MySpace account.

Well the 'unlimited' was something they've changed in the last few months, prior to that it was 300GB a month. Does the Wowwiki get anywhere near that limit?

7) Give up the internet entirely and enjoy your free time with no ulcers.

7) Give up the internet entirely and enjoy your free time with no ulcers.

It could be argued that most people who edit Wikipedia, do not even have the skills to write a good article let alone HTML.

That probably depends on degree of annoyance and the degree to which the arbitrary rules get in their way. I'll leave it to Aubrey to express that in an equation.

1) Band together with a bunch of other anonymous or not so anonymous freaks and start something which will probably fail and have lots of infighting
2) Go it alone
3) Find a free wiki farm with a proven record of years of responsible hosting of similar material
4 Try to integrate with a large general-purpose wiki like Encyc
5) Suck it up and leave your stuff on Wikia, where at least it's relatively safe
6) Give up on the wiki idea and get a free blog or MySpace account.

We could take bets on how long it will be before someone puts up an anti-Wikimedia wiki.
(No, ED and Wikipedia Review don't count. I mean a wiki that does nothing but criticize Wikimedia.)

Why not use PmWiki or the Everything engine? TvTropes is doing just fine with PmWiki and the same goes for Everything2 with their open source engine.

Why the hell does it have to be a wiki at all? Why fight with all that crap software?
If you're creating a specialized knowledgebase with a small group of users contributing,
why not just use have them post to a public (free) blog? Create a Blogger blog, pass out
the password to your users, and let them use it as a data dump. You can export the
results as an XML file and diddle with it later.

We could take bets on how long it will be before someone puts up an anti-Wikimedia wiki.

I believe that wiki was called "WikiTruth" (RIP).

The chickens are coming to roost on Jimbo's talk.

Are the domain names all of the Wikia projects owned by Wikia? Pretty nasty trap there.

Wikia staff bought many domain names to redirect to the subdomains of any respective wiki. The reason was that they "didn't trust the domain name to be left in hands which are not known" (they didn't let StarWars wiki move to the .com domain owned by C. Barbry "Whiteboy", the first ideator of the wiki). They also purchased the domain uncyclopedia.org from Chronarion, its founder.

They're turning the rest of the library into the rest of Zuckerberg's house, but they will not succeed for long.

Regarding the new direction wikia is taking

Hi Jimbo, just curious if you still have any direct control over wikia, because there's a pretty extreme situation over there. I thought your projects were dedicated to the free flow of information. Well the Wikia staff seem to be thinking exactly the opposite. They are forcing a "new look" that removes nearly all customization ability and causes accessibility issues while sacrificing effective screensoace management for ads that practically fill the screen. It also causes severe navigation issues, along with accessibility and usability problems. They have even gone to the extreme of globally banning editors and admins who disagree with them!!! At the Simpsons Wiki, after the community decided to move to ShoutWiki, that wiki's editors created a sitenotice with a link to the new wiki. Then the Wikia staff removed the link, underfed the editor who added it, and immediately desysopped and globally banned anyone who added it back or even tried to explain their reasoning to the staff! And that's just one of many large wikis who are moving away. I'm hoping that you aren't responsible for this, and that you can knock some sense into these people. Sorry for wasting your time! Thanks, Access Denied [FATAL ERROR] 07:02, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Indeed. Buying the domain names was a smart move, as is the fact that you cannot actually *move* a wiki from Wikia, only fork it. That means that the communities must compete against their old presence in Google rankings if they decide to move. Most of the community will go, of course, but it's still a severe handicap. Whether or not people make the switch is up to force of will and resources.

The Halo series wiki has already migrated to "Halopedian.com", which still cannot hold a candle to Wikia search rankings.

Check this out...

Halo.wikia.com gets 161 external links from Wikipedia.

Halopedian.com gets only 56 links.

I wonder how the Linclusionists and the Delinctionists would feel about that imbalance?

Edit: Wow, this just gets more and more interesting. It's like a resistance movement!

Makes you wonder how come the Delinctionists are not doing something about that?

Jon

Yes, it does make you wonder, doesn't it?

Yes, it does make you wonder, doesn't it?

It's no secret that Wales has a clear interest in helping people link away to his for-profit enterprise, but that's a pretty bad graph (not to mention it doesn't really show much beyond an incidental correlation.) Since your ban had little to do with Wikia so much as your own side business, it's not a good comparison to make either.

So why exactly is a Wikia page on a TV show or video game a reliable source for a Wikipedia article that mentions same?

Video games are computer-dependent or console-dependent, and they aren't described very much by conventional media. The need to turn to internet for getting information about those is necessary, because video game magazines come out only once a month.

TV shows are TV-dependent and are covered and described by TV. Much less they are described online.

Look, anyone who thinks about it for a half a second knows that the same person who inserts a statement about a TV show or a video game in a Wikipedia article probably inserted the same statement in the referenced Wikia page. There is simply no semblance of Verifiability in these cases.

I think it's interesting that Wikia has prohibited the mere mention of the word "Wikipedia Review" on its sites.

Somebody on Wikia itself seems to have taken an interest in this phenomenon, too.

That is among the worst mediawiki skins I've seen. Apparently their app-art aesthetics dictate putting a two-inch blue margin on each side, as if my screen isn't tiny enough already.

That is among the worst mediawiki skins I've seen. Apparently their app-art aesthetics dictate putting a two-inch blue margin on each side, as if my screen isn't tiny enough already.

Odd, it doesn't look like that in my browser.

Web 2.0 sucks. Every website wants to be a Facebook.

Web 2.0 as it was in 2005 didn't look bad... this particular upgraded version has too many plug-ins and a strange mentality behind it.
In 5 years, content has become a secondary force, the primary forces are now the widgets. The pages are confused and provide little information, promoting the flashy aspects and the quick responses. It isn't about the hosting and storage facility, but about the interaction.