GuildWiki:Community portal/Leaving Wikia/Letter to Wikia

To the Wikia Team:

This letter was put together to help us at GuildWiki communicate our needs and issues regarding the change in skin, Terms of Service and general feelings of malcontent with Wikia.

As you may know, we are ready to take our content to a new host that is more devoted to gaming wikis. However, any such change may be confusing to our users, drive traffic away from our wiki, and lose the few Wikia-specific elements Wikia provides. We want to make sure that an effort to express our concerns and give Wikia the opportunity to take actions that might convince us to stay.

One of the most important things we at GuildWiki must consider is our competitor, Guild Wars Wiki. GWW is the official wiki for the game. Also running on MediaWiki, GWW uses Monobook as a default and is run by ArenaNet who created Guild Wars.

We have to compete with this other wiki. If our readers don't like our wiki, they will stop using it in favor of the official wiki. To us, we can't simply work with the assumption that our readers will keep coming here for the content even if they must deal with a new skin. Regardless of "they will get used to it" and "it will help the community become more active" we must deal with the reality that we are in competition with Guild Wars Wiki. We don't want to lose our members to the official wiki in the time it takes Wikia to work out the kinks.

Many of our users also use both our wiki and the official wiki. We want them to be comfortable moving back and forth between the two and we can't do that if they look so radically different.

We appreciate that this new look, "Oasis" can be beneficial in many ways and will work great on other wikis. And there are aspects that we can accede may eventually enhance our community. However, GuildWiki relies on a massive amount of templates, tables and content that are being distorted by this change. The short time table from the start of your beta to making the skin available to making it mandatory to removing Monaco while changes are made will mean that our content will suffer. If the GuildWiki admins and contributors who do the bulk of the complex editing all leave, these things will take a long time to be corrected.

We have seen your claims that you are continuing to work on these issues. But saying that you may find a solution in the future doesn't alter the fact that people will be viewing distorted content in the interim. We don't feel that giving this skin time to work itself out will be beneficial to our readers and editors.

Our community predates Wikia's acquisition of GuildWiki. The acquisition was done largely behind the scenes and without the general consent of the community. We lost a lot of contributors over this issue and it left a bitter taste in our mouths. Our community predates Guild Wars Wiki, our competitor. We have a different philosophy, established readers, and a focus on providing encyclopedic content for the game. We have already experienced a split in our user base.Our community predates PvX Wiki, our friends who manage the builds. We know that making radical changes can split our community but we are committed to preserving the integrity of our wiki. We knew this when it was decided to move the PvX content to a separate wiki.

To summarize our issues stem from:
 * 1) Any alienation of our user base that would drive them towards the official wiki
 * 2) Reduced content space and fixed width being detrimental to a massive amount of templates and tables across our wiki
 * 3) Inability to customize the new skin sufficiently which we were able to do when Monaco was forced on us.
 * 4) Already having our community split numerous times
 * 5) Frustrations with features and functionality of the skin which are hurting the work flow of our admins and veteran contributors who are the heart of the community. The main consideration of fixed width was that it would help the users all see the same thing. Well, if our experienced users feel they have to revert to monobook to work, it will certainly prevent seeing the same thing!
 * 6) Displeasure with Wikia's response to criticism which has included:
 * 7) Only minor cosmetic change as a result of the short beta period
 * 8) Claims that Wikia is going to work on it but no offer to push back the time table until this is dealt with.  Additionally, many claims are made in promises in talk pages and sometimes blog comments. They has been no official announcements. (http://www.wowwiki.com/Forum:Should_WoWWiki_leave_Wikia)
 * 9) Insistence that all sites remain uniform in appearance (except Uncyclopedia and friends which warrant special treatment) despite different purposes, content, and audience
 * 10) Restricting admin's ability to inform their community of a move of admins and core contributors to a new site
 * 11) Wikia's initial claims that we were not going to get more ads after the move to Wikia in the first place.

Therefore, we feel that unless Wikia can make some serious, hard efforts to quell our concerns (saying that you are “working on it” is not a hard effort) the community and show that being part of Wikia is to our continued benefit, those of at GuildWiki will be relocating our efforts to document Guild Wars to a new location. Sincerely,

The GuildWiki administrators 

GuildWiki admins are invited to sign below

&mdash; 22:34, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

&mdash;♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥ 22:31, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

&mdash; Warw/Wick 22:31, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

&mdash;  Random Time 

&mdash;Dr Ishmael 23:34, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

&mdash;JonTheMon 00:52, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

And members of the community who came out to show support for this move 

GuildWiki non-admins are invited to sign below.

&mdash;Łô√ë îğá†ħŕášħ 23:00, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

– alistic 23:06, 18 October 2010 (UTC) 23:06, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

&mdash;Macros 23:20, October 18, 2010 (UTC)