Why we left

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Why we left, and why you should too
We, the undersigned former Wikians, would like to explain to those who remained why we left, and more importantly why you should too.

Why we left
 "We want to offer you some new features and skins, but that's never mandatory." -- Jimbo Wales 03:24, 17 September 2007, to GuildWiki editors who were angry about Wikia buying a site for a reported $62,000.

On the forums announcing this new skin, the vast majority of editors expressed their opposition to this new skin. Several petitions were created, such as Forum:Keeping the Monaco Skin - Mass Effect Wiki - Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, walkthroughs and more. The staff ignored these concerns, making small token changes but usually ignoring these concerns all together.

 Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia:
 * "Currently, the most popular sites that we have are in entertainment and gaming....World of Warcraft is probably the biggest. That community has built a guide to World of Warcraft that has 80,000 pages on it. Just for that particular wiki alone, I think we see 4 to 5 million people a month."

WoWWiki, the largest site on Wikia, decided to leave. Realizing that their largest income generator was leaving, in desperation the staff attempted to give WoWWiki certain exclusive exemptions from the skin, including a larger edit screen. World of Warcraft left anyway. Other smaller wikias asked for the same exceptions, in formal letters to the staff, and messages on staff's talk pages, and these pleas were all ignored.

The great exodus: vote with your feet
The crown jewel of Wikia, the WoWWiki, left them. Veteran editors who have been on Wikia for years, who have hundreds of thousands of edits, and intimately know the way Wikia treats its editors left. Based on their collective experiences, they could see that Wikia will never respect their rights and their hard work.

Other huge wikis have left also, including Halo and The Simpsons. Dozens of wikis have left. To see a list of them, go to Moved wikis.

Wikia's staff reaction for these communities years of hard work is to ban and take away these editors rights. Showing contempt for its most prolific editors, the staff has begun purging wikias whose members left wikia, taking away dozens of admin and bureaucrat editors rights, and have blocked editors for telling others about the move. Learn more on Retaliation.

Are the leaders of your wikia paid by Wikia?

 * See Buy outs.

Why you should leave too
 Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia:
 * "The free license part of Wikia limits our control. If the community gets mad at us, they can just leave and take the content with them. That alone keeps the relationship honest."

Critics have argued that this is just about a new skin. It isn't: it is about your site collectively spending tens of thousands of hours working hard to build a project, and having no voice in the future of wikia.

Wikia is not the last skin: based on the track record thus far, every two years, Wikia will be coming out with a new disruptive skin. What does that mean for you? You will have just gotten used to this new Wikia skin and spent dozens of hours as a site transferring from Monaco skin to Oasis. Then, Wikia will then create a new skin, forcing your community to adapt it; and you will have no say in those changes. Once again, Wikia Staff will ignore its most valuable asset: its editors.

In the two years following up to the new future skin, Wikia will not leave your community alone. Wikia will continue to make changes against your wikia's best interest as they have in the past. Previous examples include changing the gallery formatting and moving then protecting hundreds of help pages, despite protests.

If you are not a large wikia like WoWWiki or Uncyclopedia (which got an exemption from both skins), you have no voice in the future changes on Wikia, and even the large wikias will only be given token changes in the next skin.

To use Mr. Wales's words, the Wikia Staff have not kept the "relationship honest". The Wikia Staff's actions show again and again: they simply  don't care about you .

Embrace, extend and extinguish
Ciencia Al Poder described Wikia as using a Embrace, extend and extinguish strategy to prevent or make it more difficult to take the content of wikia to another wiki hosting provider, giving the example of the gallery changes on Wikia.

"Embrace, extend and extinguish," also known as "Embrace, extend and exterminate," is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product fields which had widely used and open programming, advancing the programming but applying copyright, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.

On Wikia, programming changes force editors to remain on Wikia if they want to keep all features that their community has grown accustomed too.

Examples:


 * Wikia made changes to image galleries, a core MediaWiki feature, which allows editors to not supply the File: namespace when adding images to the galleries, which is required in any standard MediaWiki installation (and there's no configuration option to enable/disable it). Wikia doesn't require to put the "px" unit in the widths parameter of galleries. Wikia makes an extension to allow editors to easily add and modify the contents of galleries, which changes the gallery content stripping out the File: namespace and the "px" unit in the widths parameter, intentionally breaking compatibility with the galleries outside of Wikia.
 * Unlike most MediaWiki extensions and skins, Wikia skins and extensions are specifically designed for Wikia. A lot of the coding is specific only to Wikia.

The better alternative to Wikia
In ten minutes any editor can start the process of leaving Wikia, the helpful ShoutWiki Staff will do the rest, here is how.

Signed
Anno1404 dead-rising.wikia.com to deadrisingwiki.com (under construction).

Jeff -- (ChitChat)