Wikia has gone to the shit...

Ugh well it was bound to happen... i'm not sure if any of you guys out there are frequent wiki contributors but the best free wiki creator site has just gone belly up and has turned into a facebook wannabe peice of crap worst wiki creator site... and i use the term "creator" very loosely now..

As some of you may know, i am a featured editor on Stargate Wiki with approx 3000 edits i did in the space of about 6-9 months, anyway regardless of numbers i was a very active member of that site for quite some time, everything was fine and dandy, i hadn't gone back recently because Stargate was on a break for the season and there wasn't much else to add.

Anyways yesterday i spent most of the day learning and teaching myself how to mod the game GRID, which also uses the same enigne as DiRT, DiRT2, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, F1 2010 and the upcoming sequal to GRID, GRID2 and DiRT3... The engine is called "EGO" and after spending about 10 or so hours learning the scripting system i gotta say its very robust... anyways i thought i would start a Wiki of things to do with modding the EGO engine, because it's not officially supported by Codemasters however they don't mind people modding it, infact there are a few stickied topics on the Codemasters forum explaining how to skin cars and stuff...

Anyway after i had created the wiki using Wikia, i noticed that everything was very different, but never the less i continued to add blank pages just to have a head start, however, when i tried to change the theme something was very wrong... Since the beginning of Novemeber, Wikia have now introduced a mandatory fixed-width for ALL its sub wiki's, including the extremely popular WoWwiki, Memory Alpha (Star Trek wiki) and PvXWiki (Guild Wars wiki)... Most of the admins, bureaucrats & featured editors are outraged at these changes, with a huge outcry in the community for them to revert back. However Wikia aren't listening, they are doing something even worse than just not listening, they are actually banning admins and such who are now boycotting them, even for simply putting a Site Notice on the wiki that they are moving.. yes thats right, apparently freedom of speech and creative control mean nothing to Wikia, instead they would rather run their company like a dictatorship than a community based project.

You can read some interesting things here;
http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Anti-Wikia_Alliance/comments
and here;
http://memory-alpha.org/index.php?title=Forum:Yet_another_skin_change
and here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia#Domain_and_skin_assimilation

Quote :

Wikia also changed the Terms of Use, prohibiting any modification that changes the default layout of the skin. As a result of the skin change, some users have proposed to move their wikis to another wiki farm and have created an "Anti-Wikia Alliance" (in reference to the name of the skin) with comments against the new skin, links to wiki farms and a database to keep all the moving wikis. Some important wikis like WoWWiki, Halopedia, WikiSimpsons and Grand Theft Wiki have already moved, while others such as the Club Penguin Wiki and MicroWiki are in the process of moving. The new look has been described by Wikia as "sleek" and is supposed to be helpful to new users. However, many of the older contributors feel that it is hard to use and a lot of the features are unneeded and unwanted, especially the fixed width, the image attribution in articles, the bar along the top leading to other wikis and the massive right-aligned sidebar. Recently, it has been revealed that Wikia will be giving WoWWiki a special, larger skin for greater content viewing, and this action has, in result, risen a controversy over the action not being done to other wikis who would need it.

Personally i am disgusted at this change, and will never be using Wikia again. That is at least until they give the option to have complete creative control again, something they have provided for years and suddenly feel as if they would get more users by taking those rights away -- what a load of shit.

fail at its finest