You'll probably not be able to read past the lede:

Authenticity is the key thing... if you can fake it, you've got it made!

I wonder if he ever took the Landmark forum courses, as I think they make a big buzzword of that.

The fact that he's using the Transformers Wikia site as his primary example is extremely suggestive, isn't it? Not to mention this quote:


...conveniently ignoring all the zillions of other user-participatory content-generation models that are out there, such as group blogs, CMS's, e-Commerce product-review systems ...

It almost sounds like he's been spending way too much time here on WR, doesn't it?

Yes, I wonder if Don Murphy will see that, and what would be his reaction?

Probably some combination of the following:
1. fuck
2. cultist
3. I have no reason to care about what you think.

I suspect Jimbo knows that this is his likely reaction, and he's trying to establish some sort of victimization rationale for himself... It's also possible that he takes Murphy's plan to make a horror-thriller movie based on the WP story seriously, and wants to build the case for his own victimization well in advance.

I gather that the high concept for the film is sort of Children of the Corn meets You've Got Mail?

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, especially since the Transformers wiki just left wikia because of their intrusive advertising.

I knew the transformers community had more class than to compromise their scholarship with crass commercial exploitation. Uhhmm....we are talking about the changeling toys, right? Not Lou Reed types?

They've got a sitenotice up that says "A new server has been set up for tfwiki.net and some of the community have moved to that wiki. You are welcome to edit there, or to continue to edit here. This wiki will remain open, and we are now discussing its future."

The new wiki is definitely more active at the moment, though the old (Wikia) one is still getting about 40-50 edits a day, which isn't bad for a Wikia site... Some of the discussion is going on here, apparently:
http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Transfo...ommunity_Portal

It also occurs to me that Jimbo's claims in the article about the benefits of the wiki to the "Transformers franchise" are largely bogus:

...and later:

The wiki is clearly about the entire Transformers "universe," not just the movie and the toy business. That universe includes all sorts of things, like novels, comic books, games, TV cartoons, and so on, not to mention fan-fiction. (Minor quibble, though.)

The key statement is "they're actually going out and selling the brand," which he's basing on... what, exactly? It seems to me that the people participating in the wiki are committed, hardcore Transformers fans and enthusiasts. There's an equally valid argument that having such a group all in one place makes it more difficult for an entertainment franchise to grow, since the fans feel more entitled to influence the direction it takes. In other words, there's this fear that if you make Transformers II without resurrecting Megatron, the core fan-base is going to boycott the movie, not to mention bad-mouth the producers (which, of course, is what happened with the original movie, all because of... what, exactly? Does anyone even know?)...

In any event, they're not "going out and selling the brand" so much as they're trying to create a centralized information source under the control of a limited number of people. Which in turn (as we've seen so many times with Wikipedia) can draw traffic away from other sites that may be more creative or interesting, either in spite of or because of their not carrying a lot of user-generated content.

And sure enough, at the moment, there's only one page in the "Websites" category at tfwiki.net. The Wikia site doesn't have such a category at all.