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| - Howdy folks.. Over the past few months, I've been thinking a lot about how to keep up with the needs of the WoWWiki community. I'm really proud of how WoWWiki has grown into a valuable resource for all World of Warcraft players, and want to make sure that it can continue to grow. As you've seen, I've had trouble keeping up with server issues, problems, and getting the upgrades and extensions that are needed to make WoWWiki better. I've looked at a few options on how to solve this over the last month. When Jimmy Wales and Gil Penchina offered to let us move the wiki to Wikia, this seemed like a natural fit and I accepted. These guys have a record of treating communities well and running a great service, and I'm going to stay involved to help make sure that they deliver what our community needs. Some of the benefits that WoWWiki will receive by moving to Wikia:
* More servers and more uptime (and no 10 min template edits!)
* Solid backups and multiple colos
* Increased number of extensions so we can do more interesting stuff
* Other gamer communities that we can share with
* Last, but not least, Gil has said that Wikia wants to experiment with removing the pesky gold ads, and (hopefully!) remove them permanently if it works out. Practically, what this means is that the site will continue to operate as is for the next few weeks. I'll complete the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.9 (was going to be tonight, will be tomorrow!), then in another few weeks, we'll migrate everything to MediaWiki 1.10 and move the content to new servers. From there, we'll be able to start feeling the benefits listed above. I'm pretty happy with this match, and I hope that you're all as excited as I am about working with Wikia on WoWWiki! --Rustak 03:00, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Just so long as the domain name doesn't change. Image:Smiley.gif --Sky (t · c · w) 03:09, 2 May 2007 (EDT) As per IRC chat, I've got an idea to toss out there. If Wikia is willing, I think splitting the wiki up into 2 or 3 seperate wikis might be a good idea. Put lore and in-game stuff (item pages, NPCs, zones) in one, servers and guilds in another, and API/hosted addon pages in another. Wowace might be willing to move over their API to the new wiki, I'm gonna toss the idea at them. These could be combined in namespaces, but if Wikia is willing it would probably be cleaner to seperate them out a bit. 04:36, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Personally I don't see the point of so much separation at all. I know I used to tout a new "API" (or something) namespace but I've thought twice about that. I mean... wikipedia manages to put the whole world in one namespace. Mikk (T) 06:26, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Yes, everything... except the mediawiki documentation, wiktionary, news, species, commons, quotes, library, learning materials, and textbooxs and manuals. I know it can all be done under one wiki, but why not split up for the general cleanliness of it all? the main wiki is akin to wikipedia in that it's a factual source of info on the game world, API/addons wiki would be akin to meta or the commons, and server/guild wiki would be it's own little community site. Get some proper intra-wiki links in each and it would feel like a single seamless wiki. 17:00, 2 May 2007 (EDT) I agree with Mikk. I don't see the reason for splitting up the wiki. Having everything in one place concerning WoW has its advantages, too. No matter what u want to know, simply go to www.wowwiki.com and there it is. Beside, what would you gain from splitting the wiki into separate ones? I can't think of any, I'd like to have.--Luke1410 09:31, 4 May 2007 (EDT) This is just a knee-jerk reaction, but... Wow, what a bad idea. I mean, obviously, I see the upsides. But there still has something to be said about running your own ship. None of the wikia sites I've seen look sexy. And we'd be under the rulership of some... Company. What if they go weird on us? And will we keep the domain name? It's invaluable. // This kinda announcement kinda makes me want to look into fork-wiki-ing again... No, sir, I don't like it.--Hobinheim (talk · contr) 07:36, 2 May 2007 (EDT) My slow computer is stuck processing something so I can't sign on to IRC right now. But... I'm still very, very suspicious of this. I don't trust it, at all. And yet I'm having a very difficult time finding any negative press about Wikia. File:Emot-argh.gif--Hobinheim (talk · contr) 07:48, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Please dont go white... 08:09, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Hmmm :/ -- 09:53, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Shouldn't be any white-going; there are various Wikia wikis that aren't white (and some that are incredibly purple, even). The domain name will stay the same for the foreseeable future, though it will probably be accessible from both a wikia domain and wowwiki.com at some point. I'm not worried about them going "weird" on the community; they know how to work with wiki communities (after all, that's their business!), so I'm sure that they'll be a benefit. See how it goes for the next few months :) -- Rustak 13:39, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Will WoWWiki remain primarily under the GNU Free Documentation License? If so, and you retain ownership of the WoWWiki name (trademark) and the wowwiki.com DNS domain (where the domain points to does not depend on ownership, it can point to any server the domain owner wants), then I don't think we have anything to fear from Wikia. Make sure that you keep a regularly updated complete copy of the underlying data, then you can easily move the wiki to another host, should things change for the worse with Wikia (eg, if Wikia, Inc was to fall into the hands of someone who wants to exploit or change it to its detriment - hopefully unlikely, but better safe than sorry). I've had a quick look at the Wikia site, and it certainly does appear to me that they support the GFDL, are good guys, etc, just be careful what you sign or transfer to them... So, assuming this is a good thing, grats!!! :-) --Murph 16:05, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Yep, the content will remain under the GFDL, and the site should remain wowwiki.com. The GFDL is pretty core to what they do, so I don't think there's anythung to worry about on that front. --Rustak Well, firstly, awesome. Secondly, more shades of awesome. Jimbo Wales and Gil are incredibly well-respected people in the wiki community (Jimbo founded wikipedia, for example). Regarding separation, I reckon it would be very sensible to have all UI stuff in a ui. subdomain, and everything else in the normal domain. There's little need to split up lots of little things, it'll be too complicated. Hobinheim, there's no need to worry :) 09:19, 2 May 2007 (EDT) Sounds good to me. I don't see any downside to moving to Wikia, but I'm not so sure about separating everything. Putting the UI stuff by itself makes sense, but the rest should stay together. --Amro 09:39, 2 May 2007 (EDT) It appears that the average users won't even feel the change, right? Just a cleaner and faster wiki? Looks will barely change? If that's true, then hey, I'm up for it, AS LONG as you have enough precautions. don't want them to go wild on us... // Patrigan | Talk/ Contr \\ 09:19, 3 May 2007 (EDT) Yep, there should be very little change to the wiki users. Btw, Patrigan, do put your sig into a template :) --Rustak It is in a template, he uses solution two. -- 12:32, 9 May 2007 (EDT)
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