Main Page

This site is an archive. It does not exist as a point to originate content, only to preserve it.

For the Anti-Wikia Alliance's lists of moved, forked or closed wikis, see awa:Forked wikis and awa:Closed wikis.

There have been many complaints regarding the hosting of wikis which either are on Wikia.com (now Fandom.com aka "FANDOOM") or have left that site. Unfortunately, as the issues affect multiple unrelated wikis, much of the information is scattered in multiple locations.

It was proposed in 2008 (when many communities were leaving due to forced ad-heavy reskins) that this wiki be used as an archive of these discussions; in the case of text covered by any of the free licenses, it is advised that a copy of the original wiki pages be both linked and archived here (indicating source, license and authorship) as the original site or the original threads may vanish at any time given the current situation.

The myth

Wikia/FANDOM makes various carefully-worded marketing claims in which "reasons for using Wikia" purportedly include the content of wikis hosted there belonging to the community and being downloadable open-source. The wording is deliberately vague.

The reality

Wikia as a for-profit business ultimately is accountable not to its end-users but to outside investors such as Amazon Inc. and Bessemer, a venture capital firm. These companies sank an estimated total of $14 million into Wikia in 2006.

Sadly, the interests of outsiders such as advertisers and investors does not always match those of individual wiki authors.

The increasing quantity and prominence of advertising, most notably in mid-2008, has caused many communities to look elsewhere for wiki hosting, but these communities are encountering problems in their attempts to rid themselves of Wikia:

• The domain names under which the individual projects are hosted are not projectname.org but (almost always) projectname.wikia.com; this makes finding a wiki that has relocated elsewhere difficult.
• The individual projects do not have their own userlist; Wikia controls the one main userlist used for everything, requiring all users to re-register once a wiki gets its own independent server elsewhere.
• The free license used by Wikia is, like Wikipedia, a GNU GFDL - a deliberately-weak copyleft which allows anyone to take the content, mangle it beyond recognition and post it on any site surrounded with their own ads
• Wikia staff have been making blatantly misleading claims about GFDL, such as by attempting to use it to force newly-independent wikis to license new pages under GFDL instead of a non-commercial license or even to link back to Wikia on every page. GFDL is clear that copyrights and attribution belong to the original author; that is its purpose. Wikia is not the author.
• The database download may be in a deliberately-unusable form in which at one point "From {SITENAME}, a Wikia wiki" links were being spammed onto every page, every template, every message in the database even though Wikia is *not* the author of any of the content. As of 2008, the downloadable archives were updated only once every few weeks and do not include images. ^[1]
• It is basically impossible to close a Wikia project once opened. If you are part of a wiki community that has chosen to leave Wikia, the end result is that Wikia is using your content and your project name to operate a wiki in direct competition with you. All of your inbound links likely point to the abandoned version, seriously hurting your new site in search engine ranking and visibility.
• Google and other search engines are increasingly penalising "duplicate content". If your project moved elsewhere, and Wikia is still hosting an outdated version of your site on an old domain name, the search engines will ignore your new project as "duplicate". This is killing communities.

Talk about projects belonging to "the community" is cheap but, if Wikia owns the domain and continues to operate the wiki under your name and the former domain, the intent behind the "project belongs to the community" claim is not that the project belong in any way to its authors. It in fact takes possession of the wiki away from its founders and gives it to Wikia. See Wikia:Ownership and contrast its claims that "The wikis are owned by the communities. No one user owns any wiki on Wikia. Founders are those who requested a wiki be created, but ownership of that wiki resides with the community as a whole, not only with the founder." to the current situation here, for instance. The same problems exist for other communities which are abandoning Wikia.

The current definition of a wiki belonging to "the community" now appears to have become: "this is something for the editing community to decide. That is, the community of this wiki." A cleverly devious but ultimately dishonest way of redefining "community" to exclude all of the original authors once they take their content and their original community to their new wiki elsewhere. Conveniently, there is no "community" once everyone Wikia has alienated has left.

Issues

• Advertising and cross-promotions
• Content licenses
• Forced reskins
• Forks and abandoned wikia
• Names and domain registrations
• An (unverified) Bug in Wikia software may harm computers.

Timeline

This is a brief summary; see details on individual affected wiki communities below.

2004

• Wikicities, a wiki hosting service created in 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, is introduced by Wikia Inc. as a for-profit venture to be funded entirely by advertisements. The new for-profit site, based on Google AdSense as a source of revenue, profits from extensive publicity obtained due to its founders' ties to the well-known and non-profit Wikipedia encyclopædia wiki.

2005

• Uncyclopedia moves to Wikia as uncyclopedia.org in early June 2005
• The first non-English Uncyclopedia creation request tentatively rejected June 8 (dÉ, as CC-BY-SA-NC)

2006

• Uncyclopedias for Taiwan, Asia-Pacific, Brazil and various others created as non-Wikia (uncyclopedia.info) in May 2006
• First dedicated non-Wikia server for Uncyclopedia Babel project deployed in July 2006
• Wikia secretly purchases Uncyclopedia.org's domain from one of the project's co-founders, this appears in whois July 12 2006
• Wikia attempts to buy RCMurphy's Uncyclopedia puzzle potato logo; nothing is done and most likely nothing will be done as this logo is in use on dozens of other-language Uncyclopedias on multiple diverse hosts.
• Jimbo Wales asks if uncyclopedia.info's domain is for sale, is simply told "no".

2007

Now with more new and improved ads

• Multiple/abusive registrations of Desciclopédia-related domain names (.net, .info) by Wikia on speculation of the wiki moving; Desciclopédia and various Uncyclopedia.info projects move to new co-located server, still non-Wikia, in May
• Czech Uncyclopedia (Necyclopedie) moves to Wikia, its Slovak-language content is soon split from this combined Czechoslovakian project to a new Wikia wiki. Effectively, any text moved from the Czechoslovakian Neciklopedie (CC-NC-BY-SA, non-commercial) to the Slovakian Neciklopedia (GFDL, commercial) is in violation of copyright due to license incompatibility. Only the original writers of a page can lawfully authorise its re-licensure for commercial for-profit use.
• GuildWiki and others in same series sold to Wikia for $US62000; content is CC-NC-BY-SA which does not allow commercial use. Wikis are promptly filled with inappropriate advertisements as soon as Wikia takes control.
• Wikipedia starts placing "rel='nofollow'" tags on outbound links, preventing external sites from gaining pagerank from the links. As wikia: is an interwiki prefix, Wikipedia's software fails to treat it in this same manner. An attempt to flag this as a bug in 2008 is bluntly ignored.

2008

• Wikia drops Spanking Art wiki, forcing it independent with no or almost no advance notice in response to external pressure
• Forced reskin to New Monaco in June adds large quantities of additional advertising, users begin to leave
• Wikia traffic drops, no longer in top-300 range per Alexa stats due to widespread community backlash, never fully recovers, although on Quantcast traffic appears to still be growing http://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com
• Individual communities begin to seek independent hosting elsewhere
• Uncyclopedia.org moved to uncyclopedia.wikia.com in October despite objections of entire community, in an attempt to camouflage this drop in traffic.
• Wikia lays off a tenth of its paid staff on October 20 (questions about the layoffs are deleted unanswered here)
• Wikia discovered to be cybersquatting domain needed for new non-Wikia Creatures wiki
• Transformers wiki goes independent in September (new URL: tfwiki.net)
• Illogicopedia goes independent in November (new URL: illogicopedia.org)
• Wikia attempt to force WoWWiki (wowwiki.com) to move to a .wikia.com subdomain, despite significant objections and little support for the change from the community.

2009

• In January, using money obtained from a major donor, the Wikimedia Foundation agrees to lease pricey office space from Wikia. Wikimedia lists its existing San Francisco office space for lease several months later. Due to the overlap in key personnel and founders, the move is noted by various on-line sources as a serious perceived conflict-of-interest.

No affiliation with wiki.answers.com

• Wikia relaunches the long-dormant Answers wiki under the "Wikia Answers" brand in January, provoking immediate objections that the name is knowingly and confusingly similar to "WikiAnswers", an established answers.com product.
• Existing Wikia-hosted projects display an ad box in the left-column as wikianswers - Recently Asked Questions - Wikianswers is a Q&A wiki where answers are improved, wiki-style.
• The uncyclopedia: interwiki prefix is removed from all Wikimedia projects, and therefore from the default list of interwiki links installed in new MediaWiki installations, at the end of July. While the removal appears in part to be motivated by a political agenda on the part of one or two Wikipedians, issues with Uncyclopedia no longer being on its own separate domain are used in an attempt at justification.
• An abandoned version of illogicopedia:, renamed to Wackypedia and locked read-only in 2008, is inexplicably re-opened for editing.
• Elder Scrolls Fanon moves from tesfanon.wikia.com to tesfanon.yourwiki.net.
• Uncyclopedians request (and briefly get) the subdomain "fuck.wikia.com" under a new, misguided "create anything, no questions asked" system.[2]
• In late August, Wikia deploys a 'bot which posts to new users' pages with "Hi, welcome to (PROJECTNAME)! Thanks for your edit to the (PAGENAME) page. Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! --~~~~". While the username in the page history and logs is [[User:Wikia]], the username in the page text signature is forged to be that of various randomly-selected individual admins on the project. In the case of Wackypedia (Wikia's fork of Illogicopedia), users impersonated include many who have already left Wikia nearly a year ago when the Illogicopedia project moved to illogicopedia.org. See also the Illogicopedia blog's discussion of User:Hindleyite being impersonated by this 'bot.
• At the end of August, the English WikiFur's content is removed from furry.wikia.com, completing a move which started with the founding of new language projects on a independent server in 2008.
• All outbound external links from Wikia-hosted projects are redirected through Special:Outbound, an interstitial ad page. "You are now leaving Wikia. Please click here to continue, or wait 10 seconds to be redirected."
• In September, Wikia claims to the business press to be profitable less than a year after a series of major layoffs.

2010

• In May, Wikia introduced "following pages". This shortly ensues fire.
• In June Uncyclomedia started a petition. They asked for deletions of some copied sites, but they weren't heard. This caused a great impact on several wiki communities in the negative way.
• In August, Wikia introduced a new skin, but again receives fire. See "" and their new home.
• In September, Wikia took down the Squirtage Wiki in a move eerily similar to the 2008 takedown of Spanking Art Wiki.
• Any discussion pertaining to AWA begins to magically disappear from Wikia, deleted by staff. We will allow community discussion. Or not.
• In October, Wikia attempts to avert a move of WoWwiki by offering wider content space but only manages to annoy other wikis on-Wikia plagued with the same issues of advertising crowding out content. WoWWiki was nonetheless forked to wowpedia.org by a dissatisfied community, unable to use wowwiki.com as Wikia had already taken that name.
• A forum request to remove the non-commercial licence Uncyclopedia content from Wikia is pointedly ignored: Archive:Wikia forum - Uncyclomedia's complaint on Wikia

2012

• Wikia makes some sneaky changes to the terms of service of their site to attempt to contract themselves out of the "non-commercial" term of the various CC-NC licences, setting the stage for blatant violation of the non-commercial licence once intrusive display advertising comes to Guildwars/Gamewikis, Memory Alpha and other CC-NC-* licenced projects.
• In February, ZombiePodcast.com successfully gets its collection of images removed from zombiepodcast.wikia.com, an abandoned wiki, through a DMCA complaint by one of the original creators of the work. The prior position of Wikia staff was this:

2013

• After ongoing unresolved issues with Wikia content warnings and censorship of photos on-wiki in late 2012, the English-language Uncyclopedia moves to en.uncyclopedia.co on January 5, 2013 - the eighth anniversary of its 2005 establishment as a originally-independent wiki. True to form, Wikia staff continue to operate the semi-abandoned wiki in direct competition to the new project.
• Wikia began blacklisting requests for downloadable data dumps if a user had made too many requests: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wikia#History reports that Wikia is making it more difficult for users to request a copy of the XML data, which is useful when importing articles into another wiki server. In 2013, the directory list of all dumps which used to be on dumps.wikia.net was removed; the number of data dumps created declined abruptly and the few new dumps were placed on Amazon S3 with no master index. Dumps for inactive/abandoned wikis have not been available since 2015.

2017

• The ability for Wikia users to request an XML data dump of their own CC-BY-SA work was taken away from all but the individual projects' admins.

2018

• Wikia, now branding itself as FANDOM, revokes all access to the Monobook and Vector skins - a problem for Uncyclopedias which need these skins because, as encyclopaedia parodies, they need to reproduce the look and feel of Wikipedia. Nonsensopedia (Polish) and Nonciclopedia (Italian) fork and move to non-profit wiki farm https://miraheze.org - the Hebrew Uncyclopedia is created off-Wikia at http://eincyclopedia.org

2019

• Wikia pulls the plug on all Uncyclopedia-related projects except the Danish-language Spademann's Leksikon - which it removes in 2022. Instead of disclosing that the project has permanently moved off-Wikia, they merely claim the project to be "closed" in the hope of appropriating Uncyclopedia's users and pushing them to other projects which Wikia/FANDOM does still host.
• Wikia legally changes its corporate name, registered in Delaware as a flag of convenience, to FANDOM. That creates odd project titles like cancer.fandom.com (in place of cancer.wikia.com) and, predictably, some backlash.

Individual communities

See also: Forked wikis and Closed Wikis, a full list maintained on the Anti-Wikia Alliance wiki.

There are a number of threads and discussions of the situation as it affects various individual wikis; for those which have moved or are considering moving to new hosts, often this information is on the individual project's forum. There is a need to have some form of access to the information, now scattered, in one place. This section is not intended to replicate these discussions, only provide a list of links (by incident) to either the discussion on the target site or to an archived copy of the information on this wiki.

Atheism Wiki

• No plans to leave. There is some concern from the administrator, Proxima Centauri that there are regular advertisements from religous groups. This appeared unfair as no one would consider putting advertisements onto Christian Wikis encouraging Christians to become freethinkers.

Bionicle

• No clear plans, although initial reaction to the ad-heavy reskin had been negative.

See Talk:Main_Page#Columns

Creatures wiki

• Appears to be planning to move off-Wikia in 2008, German version has already moved to creaturesforum.de
• Wikia secretly registers the name (creatureswiki.com) that the community made useful and popular (essentially hijacking a trademark).
• As of September 2009, an ongoing discussion with a wikia staff member is taking place here.

See creatures:forum:Wikia's "New Look" and the Future of the Creatures Wiki for the original post and discussion on the wiki.

Elder Scrolls Fanon

• Elder Scrolls Fanon switches its host from Wikia to YourWiki.

See Staff Noticeboard/Archive/Archive 2, Forum:Moving to YourWiki, Forum:Preparing to move, Forum:We're gone, and Forum:Welcome to YourWiki.

Guild wars

Come cheat at GuildWars™! Buy gold here!

• Originally an independent project under a non-commercial license before one of the founders sold them down the river to Wikia for $US62000 in 2007; establishment of original wiki was through donations, leading to many awkward monetary questions
• Inappropriate advertising has long been an issue on gaming wikis, where advertisers will often run « buy gold » or other promotions aimed at helping players cheat. The problems became evident as soon as Wikia had any role in this project.
• Problems with GuildWiki appear to be a factor in a decision to host a wiki.guildwars.com with ArenaNet
• The ad-heavy "New Look" seems not to have helped matters.

See GuildWiki:Wikia Move (2007) and Community Outlook- Wikia's "New Look" (2008) along with related subpages. The issue of User:Gravewit, for commercial gain, selling a wiki to which he holds content (written by others) solely under a non-commercial Creative Commons license is raised by Slashdot here.

For a company that claims that "The wikis are owned by the communities. No one user owns any wiki on Wikia. Founders are those who requested a wiki be created, but ownership of that wiki resides with the community as a whole, not only with the founder," Wikia seems to send an entirely different message about the concept of project ownership privately, with the multi-page contractual document by which one founder signs away control of a wiki on behalf of an uninformed and unsuspecting community packed with clauses such as:

• A requirement that all databases, wiki text, images and user lists be turned over to Wikia and any other copies of the information deleted.
• A requirement that the individual selling the wiki not speak out publically about the specifics of what has taken place, except to express restrictively vague and laudatory comments about Wikia in general.
• A requirement that all related domain name(s) be sold to Wikia.
• A requirement that a new wiki or site on the same or related topics not be started by the same people.
• A demand that Wikia be given a claim to trademark in the project's name.

Much of this runs directly counter to the principles on which the wiki operates (GuildWiki text and images are open-source, the non-commercial license gives no rights to this one user to sell the content for profit) and even the trademark claim stands upon very legally questionable domain (the GuildWars™ name is trademarked to the game's manufacturer, not to any individual associated with the wiki; the wiki's name is derivative of that externally-held trademark as the wiki is based on commenting on GuildWars™ copyrighted and proprietary entertainment products under the pretexts of fair use and fair dealing). Effectively, neither the trade name nor the content is that which this one individual appears to have any legal standing to sell; nonetheless, the terms of this contract require the contract itself remain secret unless Wikia itself were to divulge the information.

Illogicopedia (various languages)

New Monaco forced reskin

• Originally created off-Wikia as Wikia staff considered it too close to Uncyclopedia in subject matter, moved to Wikia later once they saw traffic to be had.
• Strong objections to New Monaco forced ad-heavy reskin in mid-2008, which Illogicopedians immediately begin to compare to the infamous New Coke marketing blunder of the 1980's. Requests to use MediaWiki's standard default skin repeatedly refused by Wikia.
• Illogicopedia leaves Wikia in early November 2008, Wikia refuses to close now-abandoned version on their servers
• Wikia demands that default license on new Illogicopedia.org articles be changed from non-commercial to GFDL, is refused
• Wikia staff repeatedly removes information about the move from the old wiki and revokes sysop access for at least one user [3]; the same information is removed by staff on Illogicopedia's listing on the central Wikia [4]

See Forum:Regarding the direction of the wiki,‎ New Monaco, How to get rid of New Monaco and Illogicopedia... now Wikia-free!

See also Illogicopedia's IllogiBlog for explanation of the decision to leave Wikia. Wikia renames its version of Illogopedia as Wakypedia.

29th January 2009, Wakipedia is locked against editing. Users trying to edit get the message below.

Database locked

From Wackypedia

Jump to: navigation, search

The database is currently locked.

Because much of the community has left this wiki, editing has been disabled. If you are interested in caring for and actively maintaining this wiki, please email c[email protected]. For more information, please read this page.

You can view and copy the source of this page:

Wikia advertises that it wants to restart with new users. Wikia wants Wackypedia to become a competitor to Illogicopedia and, as of mid-2009, the wiki is once again open for editing despite its sole "content" being an outdated copy of the Illogicopedia pages, from before the wiki moved to a new server and to a non-commercial license for all new content in 2008.

Wikia removes sysop rights on one user and bans them for a week for "vandalism", apparently deleting pages counts as vandalism.

Search engines (such as Google) continue (as of Sept 2010, nearly two years after the project moved to its own domain) to return links to Wikia's fork of the project instead of to illogicopedia.org, with the confusing footnote "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." returned by the search engine.

Liberapedia

No plans to leave. Liberapedia is controversial and needs Wikia janitors to deal with vandals and deter vandals. All the active sysops opposed the new Monaco skin which was forced onto Liberapedia. See Liberapedia Forum - New skin (source).

Liberapedia was promised that there would be no advertisements on small articles. Wikia's definition of small seems to be two or three lines. Proxima Centauri has been forced to move many pictures to the left as a picture and an advertisement both on the right side mess up the formatting. The effect of the Monaco skin on new users isn't clear as there have been outside changes. For seven months a Wiki Liberapedians called Old Liberpedia with different hosting was on-line. Google insisted on displaying Old Liberpedia above new Liberapedia, ie the wikia wiki although Old Liberpedia was archived. Naturally this deterred contributors. Old Liberpedia finally vanished on January 1st 2009. New Liberapedia is now doing better.

Scientology advertisements appeared on the userpage and talk page of Proxima Centauri for several months as well as elsewhere. See example Liberapedia user Proxima Centauri There were repeated complaints which achieved nothing. Proxima Centauri responed by researching and writing about criticisms of Scientology. See Operation Clambake for one source Proxima Centauri used. Scientology advertisements have now disappeared but have returned and Proxima Centauri considers Scientology an evil cult. Liberapedia is primarily political and creative but Liberapedia includes articles putting the freethought point of view forward as does Atheism Wiki. There is a similar problem with Christian and other religious advertisement on Liberapedia as on Atheism Wiki.

Simpsons Wiki

The simpsons.wikia.com community moved to simpsonswiki.net in October 2010. Information about the move has been deleted from Wikia's fork of the project.[5]

Spanking Art

Dumped unceremoniously with little or no notice by Wikia in 2008 after a group of Wikipedia's most vociferous critics use the wiki as a pretext to threaten to approach Wikia advertisers to complain about the wiki's content.

See Forum:Spanking art wiki, Wikia:Our stories, the Wikipedia:user talk:Jimbo Wales discussion on this issue and their new (non-Wikia) wiki at spankingartwiki.animeotk.com. The history of the boy scout controversy incident is documented on their new site [NSFW] as part of the historical record of the project. See also talk:boy scout.

Boy Scouts at a campfire ring at summer camp (Wikimedia Commons, see disclaimers)

Spanking Art Wiki, despite more careful restriction on content on a new website, is not aimed at, intended for or suitable for 13 year olds. Wikia officially allows kids 13 and older (this is the minimum age to avoid US federal restrictions on the gathering of personal information from users under COPPA) but much Wikia-hosted content is aimed at fans of entertainment (such as Muppets) viewed primarily by a mainstream under-13 audience.

The broader issues of the consequences of the free licenses (and their intrinsic content re-use permissions) are soon forgotten. Anyone who uploads an image of a local Boy Scout troop to Wikipedia or Wikia nominally, implicitly agrees (under GFDL 1.3 or any subsequent version and on Wikipedia now additionally CC-BY-SA 3.0) that that image may be freely modified and re-used by anyone for any purpose, including commercial use, provided that the free license and attribution are preserved. In this incident, that permission may be construable to include the re-use of an encyclopædia image of boy scouts to illustrate a wiki article eroticising spanking - likely not the original author's intent. See personality rights.

Star Wars

• A move to a non-Wikia host was considered in mid-2008; see Forum:Finding alternative hosting and Forum:Mirror?. The wiki ultimately did not move off-Wikia.
• In response to numerous intrusive changes made by Wikia to the MediaWiki software, Wookieepedia administration passed a site feature policy requiring that all features Wikia rolls out must be disabled by default on Wookieepedia unless they are standard features from new MediaWiki releases.

Touhou

• Users began to complain about the new skin forced by Wikia.
• The admin moved the wiki to touhouwiki.net and placed a message on the main page announcing the move.
• Wikia employee announced that they would be keeping the Wikia site open and replaced the link to the new wiki with one to the discussion page.
• Wikia took down the notice altogether, and refused to allow the admins to lock the wiki.
• Wikia banned linking to the new wiki altogether, even in paid ads.
• Wikia eventually replaced the admins and continues to operate the wiki alongside the other wiki.
• The new admins decided to move the Wikia site in a different direction to avoid conflict.

Transformers

• Moved to TFwiki.net on Sept. 15, 2008, after ongoing problems with Wikia inserting ads into the space occupied by the article body and making misleading claims on the impact of these changes on the website's traffic statistics. TFwiki.net has both a brief summation of grievances and an archive of the discussion that prompted the move. This press release announced the move when it was completed.
• Data exported from Wikia contained the same problems observed by other migrating wikis (such as outdated backups, broken HTML, no images.tar archive, no userlist, and "from {SITENAME} a Wikia wiki" spammed to every page until it breaks things). A Transformers wiki editor involved in the technical side of the move elaborated upon this in a blog post.
• Wikia version is still online, in direct competition with the new wiki. One week after the migration, Wikia removed notice of the new wiki's existence. The original discussions documenting the community's complaints still exist, but they are difficult to find if you don't know what you're looking for.
• Wikia is still using early-2008 statistics from its Transformers wiki as evidence of Monaco's superiority, despite the TF-wiki community pointing out many concurrent events that put such causative conclusions in doubt. These were, in fact, the aforementioned "misleading claims" that helped drive the community away.

For more information about TFwiki.net's post-move existence, see this post-move discussion page and their new advertising policy.

The Transformers wiki and its controversy have gotten some media coverage. When preparations for the move began to take shape, an editorial in The Guardian used it as an example of the ill will generated by Wikia's new policies. Then just one week after the move was completed, an unintentionally ironic interview with Wikia founder Jimmy Wales was published in which he used the Transformers wiki alone as evidence of Wikia's success. "You have to be sincere about allowing for community control," he advised.

Uncyclopedias

Uncyclopedia (English)	D00dz, where's my Alexa rank? Major backlash both to the uncyclopedia.org domain name being secretly sold to Jimbo Wales in July 2006 and to it being turned into a mere redirect to uncyclopedia.wikia.com in 2008 A little under half of the community expresses desire to move the wiki in 2008; most of the others are willing to allow one last chance for negotiation but this (so far) leads nowhere. A brief user attempt was made (in late March 2009) to create fuck.wikia.com as a redirect for Uncyclopedia; that redirect now returns "no such Wikia". An off-site archive of Uncyclopedia content existed since 2006 but was rarely used In late 2012, Wikia placed disclaimers on the Uncyclopedia wiki and demanded removal of images to dumb the wiki down for a PG-13 audience, over community objections. Most of the community moved to en.uncyclopedia.co in January 2013 after six years of trying in vain to make their concerns known. For 2006, see Announcement: Wikia & Uncyclopedia, Things don't add up For 2007, see Wikia Spotlight For 2008, see Uncyclopedia domain name, Uncyclopedia: An Essay On Uncyclopedia by RAHB, An open letter to the Cabal and Decisions Time Folks - Let's Be Organized for a Change. For 2012, see Content Warning, Guess what? Wikia is censoring us., Removing problem images, Images to be removed, Are you blowing me? and Wikia has banned nudity. For 2013, see Forks in the road - Uncyclopedia moving from Wikia, a discussion and Official Move Date Announced:January 5th
dÉsencyclopédie (français)	The first non-English Uncyclopedia (excluding wikis which originated outside the project and merely link various Uncyclopedias as "other languages" of their wiki), created in 2005 under a unique (but awkward) dual-license after Wikia refused to allow Uncyclopedia-compatible CC-BY-NC-SA. [6] The desencyclopedie.com domain was donated to Wikia by founder "Philo" but no longer works except as a redirect All subsequent Uncyclopedia languages were created with incompatible, commercial licencing (if they originated as Wikia projects) and therefore cannot use material from en: without infringing author copyright. Original founders and community appear to have left in mid-2006, leaving no one at all maintaining the wiki at some point in 2006-07. Subsequent editors did eventually clean up some of the mess left behind. As of January 2013, external links from dÉ to absurdopedia.net (the Russian uncyclopedia) are blocked by Wikia spam filters. It is currently unclear how many Wikia sites are being censored in this manner.
Hikipedia (Finland - Suomi)	Created as independent in March 2006, significant downtime in May, but re-emerged as non-Wikia A Wikia staffer created a fork of this project at fi.uncyclopedia.wikia.com which was never used except for vandalism Problems with interwiki links from Wikia-hosted Uncyclopedias pointing to their fork instead of the main project through most of 2006, ending in early 2007 See Uncyclopedia forum:German? and forum:Interwiki_link_to_fi:.
Ikkepedia (Norway - Bokmal)	Originally founded as a Wikia-hosted project, moved independent in 2006 Abandoned Wikia version is still open (ikkepedia.wikia.com) Problems with interwiki links from Wikia-hosted Uncyclopedias pointing to outdated fork instead of main project ending in early 2008 (the new version was linkable as nn: - Nynorsk - during much of this time, but not as no:)
Oncyclopedia Netherlands (Dutch)	Originally founded as non-Wikia in 2006, fully independent in 2008. The oncyclopedia.net domain name is owned by one of the project's Dutch administrators. Like other existing non-Wikia projects (including a few Uncyclopedias), Oncyclopedia has been the target of attempts by Wikia staff to convince individual users to support the project being moved Predictably, no mention by Wikia staff that the offer isn't merely to host the wiki, but to have Wikia own the wiki by controlling domain names, user lists and whatever other portions of the site's identity are not already released to all under the Creative Commons license See Oncyclopedia Forum - Mailtje van Angela
偽基百科 Taiwan (Mandarin regular script / traditional Chinese)	Requested as potential Wikia project in early May 2006, no progress after weeks of discussion as Wikia was already hosting Chinese (Simplified) Created as non-Wikia in late May after ROC wiki-in-exile on en:Babel:Zh-tw had amassed over four hundred pages In one incident, Wikia staff remove links from en.Uncyclopedia to the moved pages on uncyclopedia.tw Wikia version of Chinese Uncyclopedia was later to move to uncyclopedia.wikiachina.cn: a key blunder as various languages of Uncyclopedia are ultimately blocked by Great Firewall of China See uncyclopedia:forum:Babel_Babel_Babel#Taiwan_and_the_Red_China_menace, ValleyWag: Jimmy Wales hangs out with China's top censor
偽基百科 Hong Kong	Hong Kong (uncyclopedia.hk) has operated as an integral part of uncyclopedia.tw since inception A Wikia project appears to exist to duplicate this but has never been used
Absurdopedia (Russian)	Moved off-Wikia to absurdopedia.net in October 2010; all non-Wikia Uncyclopedias point the ru: interwiki prefix to the new site. Wikia is (as of 2013) continuing to operate an abandoned absurdopedia.wikia.com as a direct competitor; the interwiki links on all Wikia-hosted Uncyclopedias are left outdated in order to drive the traffic to the abandoned version instead of the current wiki. Wikia staff removed information from the sitenotice about the move. As of November 8, 2012 Wikia is blacklisted by the Russian régime, preventing citizens from accessing any wiki on the site per wikipedia:Russian Internet blacklist#Known sites blocked by the blacklist.

WikiFur

• WikiFur announced its intention to move entirely to independent hosting in 2008; all new WikiFur languages were created on wikifur.com, and the migration of old languages was completed in August 2009.

See News:English WikiFur moved to en.wikifur.com, News:WikiFur moves languages to new server, WikiFur:Moving hosts, WikiFur LiveJournal

WoWWiki

• Mid/late 2008 - Wikia attempt to force a change of domain from wowwiki.com, despite significant objections, and little to no community support for making the change.

See WoWWiki:Domain name, WoWWiki talk:Domain name, WoWWiki talk:Village pump#Domain name.

• Late 2010 - Move being discussed at http://www.wowwiki.com/Forum:Should_WoWWiki_leave_Wikia?. In order to try and get them to stay, Wikia tried to bribe WoWWiki with a bigger screen size for the new skin they were shoving down throats of all their wikis. Other wikia wikis cried foul over the preferential treatment.
  • Now located at wowpedia.org as of Oct. 20th, 2010. 90% of the community abandoned the Wikia wiki for the new one, and Wikia once again tried to bribe the remaining people into staying. A short time later, Sannse uses an extremely flimsy excuse to strip the remaining admins of their rights.

Comments from individuals in the wiki community

• Complaint:D. G. Neree
• Sannse's interests are clearly not helping others...

Coverage of the October 20, 2008 Wikia layoffs

• Tech Crunch
• ValleyWag
• VentureBeat
• Pulse2

Archives

A few key discussions of these issues from various affected wikis is archived here. This list is not comprehensive. All text is the property of the respective individual authors as identified in the revision history; in most cases, Wikia is not the author:

Central Wikia:

• Wikia's New Style
• Forum:Wikia's New Style and Forum:Boycott Wikia's New Style
• Forum: Virus Detected, Shut down

Creatures

• Forum:Wikia's "New Look" and the Future of the Creatures Wiki

Elder Scrolls

• Elder Scrolls Forum - Moving to YourWiki
• Elder Scrolls Forum - Preparing to move
• Elder Scrolls Forum - We're gone
• Elder Scrolls Forum - Welcome to YourWiki
• YourWiki Staff Noticeboard - Archive 2

GuildWiki

• Community Outlook- Wikia's "New Look" and Forum talk:Community Outlook- Wikia's "New Look" (2008)
• GuildWiki:Wikia Move (talk, archive 1, archive 2, community poll) from original 2007 move to Wikia
• Forking - Gravewit's compensation - Technical - BY-NC-SA vs. site advertisements
• User talk: Gravewit, Tanaric (1 2 3 4)
• Donation repayment log (talk)

Illogicopedia

• Forum:Regarding the direction of the wiki
• New Monaco (parody) and Forum:How to get rid of New Monaco
• User talk:KyleH, a Wikia staffer currently trying to fork the project

2008: Wikia gets a spanking.

Spanking Art

• Forum:Spanking art wiki and Wikia:Our stories from the central Wikia.

TFwiki:

• Transformers Wiki:Ads and Transformers Wiki talk:Ads
• Transformers Wiki:Community Portal/Complaints and Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Complaints
• Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Leaving

Uncyclopedia:

• Forum:German? and Forum:Interwiki link to fi:
• Forum:Babel Babel Babel: Taiwan and the menace of Red China
• Forum:Announcement: Wikia & Uncyclopedia and Forum:Things don't add up
• Forum:Wikia Spotlight
• Forum:Uncyclopedia domain name and Forum:Decisions Time Folks - Let's Be Organized for a Change

WikiaNswers:

• WikiAnswers - setting the record straight, the February 2009 commentary from Answers Corp CEO Bob Rosenschein (WikiAnswers, wiki.answers.com) about the confusingly-similar branding employed by answers.wikia.com (aka Wikia Answers and "wikianswers").

WikiFur:

• WikiFur:Moving hosts and WikiFur talk:Moving hosts

Wikipedia:

• Wikia and Talk:Wikia

Wookieepedia

• Forum:Finding alternative hosting

See also

• and (Anti-Wikia Alliance)
• Talk:Wikia on Wikipedia
• Wikia's Alexa rank
• Category:Wikia on wikiindex: (archived description)
• Revision to Wikia's terms of use removing "Wikia will never host pop-up adverts" on 14 June 2008 by Danny Horn, senior community development manager.
• Wikia's New Style, Forum:Wikia's New Style and Forum:Boycott Wikia's New Style

External links

• How will Wikia cope when the workers all quit the plantation?, Seth Finkelstein, guardian.co.uk, July 31 2008
• Wikipedia isn't about human potential, whatever Wales says, Seth Finkelstein, guardian.co.uk, September 25 2008