Wikia (ConceptTopic, 13)
From Compile Worlds
Wikia is a profiteering wiki farm company.
Please avoid putting any links to wikia [dot] com on this page.
Any such links would up their pagerank by just a bit, and we don't want that, now do we?
Don't you already see the problem with that?
Yup. Wikia employees will do anything they possibly can to keep its custom in much the same way any company's complaints department will fob you off about everything.
Recently, they switched to a new skin, codenamed "Oasis" and, confusingly enough, officially titled "Wikia". This skin forces a 1000px fixed-width layout on all visitors, hides useful tools like "page history" and "view source" meaning you have to manually edit the URL to actually see anything, introduces social networking features that have no place in a wiki, and does plenty of other facepalm-inducing things.
As a direct reaction to this, many communities have decided to up and leave Wikia. However, being as possessive as they are over their wikis, they refuse to close wikis for the reason of wanting to move elsewhere, and outright ban people for directing visitors to any new host. In addition, they attempt to bribe the minority remainder of users that haven't left with features that shouldn't even be necessary (such as a slightly wider, but still not variable-width, layout).
Noticeably, whenever there's a "debate" on whether a Wikia wiki should be moved to alternative hosting, it's extremely one-sided: the only votes against the move are those by Wikia employees.
Ironically, Wikia has started offering ad-free wiki hosting for $19.95 per month - even the entire VPS that Kumizone is hosted on is significantly cheaper than that!!
The gallery picture shows nmn taking it upon himself to add the message that Touhou Wiki had moved (to http://touhouwiki.net/ ) to 300 pages of the version that Wikia insisted on keeping.
January 8, 2011
On this date nmn finished his bot which would be used to automatically add the "wiki moved" message to every page. It ran for several hours before sysops arrived to revert the messages, which they did rather clumsily (for example, by adding themselves to the "bots" category to hide the reverts, and then mass reverting all edits of one IP, but not others). Once the entire wiki was protected, the situation was taken to a few user talk pages, only to be consistently reverted by one of the sysops...
Hey!! Reverting legitimate talk page comments is against policy! Well, it's certainly against Wikipedia policy, and if it isn't against Wikia policy then that's yet another nail in the coffin for how corrupt Wikia truly is.
