Wowpedia was created when Wikia screwed up royally by re-designing a globally imposed wiki skin without really accommodating the wishes of many wiki admins including WoWWiki. Instead of trying to work with the admins they basically said, "if you don't like it, leave." So many did. I mostly boycotted Wikia for awhile (6 or 9 months, I forget how long exactly) and WoWWiki was in bad shape soon after most of the WoWWiki admins made a copy of WoWWiki's database according to CC-by-SA and started Wowpedia based on that data. It largely happened also because Curse offered to host the wiki for free. I worked on Wowpedia and not WoWWiki early on after coming back from my boycott of Wikia, but I also worked on other Wikia wikis at the same time (like Templates and Logo Creation).