User talk:Tennessee Ernie Ford/Archive 06

No longer contributing to Wikia after 20 October 2010
Wikia's new direction is taking it away from core support of community-edited, encyclopedic bodies of knowledge (wikis) and moving it a new direction of social networking. They could have chosen to implement this for all new and opting-in existing sites. Instead they have chosen to impose their concept of wiki community on the rest of us. Since I have only limited time to volunteer, I see no reason to spend any of it supporting their top-down approach to hosting consensus-driven sites. The changes might be good for some wikis, but not for this one.

(Added later)

Wikia could have approached us early to say, ''look, we have to re-brand and standardize. It's just unrealistic for a business to continue functioning in this way. We realize these changes will produce a hardship on you, and we can't help that. What we can do, however, is to offer you short-term dedicated help to adapt your wiki to take full advantage''. Instead, our 100% volunteer staff has to figure out the impact on our own, second guess which features to adapt, which to force to fit, what to risk leaving alone. In the end, it's just less work to move to someplace where we have more control and/or our hosts depend on our success to flourish.

More importantly, Wikia has shown no particular enthusiasm for GuildWiki and therefore, I see no reason why we should feel any loyalty at all to remaining here. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 22:12, October 4, 2010 (UTC)
 * I am also of this opinion, I have "loyalty" to the GuildWiki community, but I shall not be supporting Wikia (by editing their wikis, or affiliating myself with them). --  Random Time  22:15, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

Flattery will get you everywhere
Re this. I thought your quote summed up my feelings quite succinctly. It's not awful, it's the principle that we're slaving away voluntarily and they're trying to squeeze profit out of it at our expense. Although if it's a problem I can remove it. Gboyers talk 07:20, October 5, 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm glad it was useful to you, I just had no idea anyone besides us Guild Wikians were looking :-) I wonder if all the groups thinking to move could work together to leverage more support from some potential host. Where are you guys thinking of going? &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 07:30, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

We've arranged to host ourselves, with the assistance of a large GTA fansite. This gives us complete control over everything, something we lack now. We might need some adverts to pay for the hosting, but they would be sensitive, and nowhere near as obtrusive as the Wikia adverts. I toyed with the idea of helping host other wikis, but if Wikia need that much money to run, we probably would too, and then we'd essentially be back where we are now. Gboyers talk 08:50, October 6, 2010 (UTC)


 * Awesome! And I agree: you're in the business of providing a good knowledge base for GTA; figuring out how to host other wikis isn't (at the moment) sensible.


 * However, Wikia's cash needs are different; they aren't trying to just host wikis anymore (and that's partly why they need to make more money). There are lots of hosting farms, a fair number of various sorts of wiki farms and they would like to create something that probably doesn't exist yet. In fact, it might end up being very cool, but it's not wiki hosting. Which is what GWiki needs, as well as GTA wiki etc.


 * Thanks for letting me know how you guys are doing. Good luck! &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 09:37, October 6, 2010 (UTC)