User:Dr ishmael/GuildWiki

GuildWiki is a wiki for ArenaNet's flagship MMO, Guild Wars. It officially forked from GuildWars@Wikia in November 2010. It is not affiliated in any way with Wikia, the company which hosts GuildWars@Wikia.

History
GuildWiki was started in May, 2005, as a resource for the newly-launched video game Guild Wars. Started by the Corpse Corps guild as a repository for information they themselves might need in the future, it grew exponentially thanks to the contributions of some very cool people.

Originally hosted by User:Gravewit as part of the GameWikis network, in October 2007 the gamewikis.org domain name was sold to Wikia, and all hosted wikis were migrated to Wikia's servers. This transaction was carried out directly between Gravewit and Wikia without consulting the community, and as a result, many users felt that Gravewit had exploited the community's efforts for personal profit. A significant portion of these users subsequently abandoned GuildWiki in favor of the official Guild Wars Wiki.

While the remaining GuildWiki community eventually acclimated to the new accommodations, the relationship between the community and Wikia was never able to recover from this initial setback. When Wikia announced in the summer of 2010 that they would soon introduce a new skin that would be mandatory for all wikis, the community decided that Wikia was no longer a healthy location for the wiki and began to consider leaving Wikia. Lengthy discussions were held to evaluate the various options for alternative hosting.

A letter documenting the community's grievances, signed by most of the admins and many regular users, was sent to Wikia in hopes of reaching a compromise where Wikia could once again be a healthy environment for GuildWiki, but no response was ever received.

In the end, it was decided that the majority of the community would fork the wiki, taking the GuildWiki name with them, and set up a new site hosted by Curse.com, while the wiki here would be rebranded as GuildWars@Wikia. The fork was completed on November 30, 2010, with a full database backup as of that date.

Differences
There are a number of differences between GuildWars@Wikia and GuildWiki, some imperceptible to the casual user. The most obvious are that, on GuildWiki, the sidebar is in its original place and there is no fixed width. Additionally, GuildWiki has a single, non-obtrusive banner ad at the top of every page, regardless of whether a user is logged in or not.

Many of the new 'social' features introduced by Wikia, such as Facebook Connect, user blogs/avatars, and image attribution, do not exist on the new site, in recognition of the wiki's primary purpose of documentation, as opposed to Wikia's increased focus on socializing.

Reception
The decision to fork was unanimous among GuildWiki's administrators, and was supported by a significant complement of the site's active users. A small portion of admins and users decided to remain active here, in order to help GuildWars@Wikia reinvent itself as a distinct resource for Guild Wars players.