Buy outs

"Our intention is to reduce the commercialism of the site, not increase it."

- Jimbo Wales, founder/President of Wikia, Inc., Guildwars Wikia, 2007

"If these images (showing an editor is being 'compensat(ed) ... somewhere around a quarter of a million') are valid, then our number 1 priority is to get as much of the guildwiki data off the servers as possible for a fork. Wikia may buy off one person, but they cannot buy a community."

- Editor about the Guildwars buyout

If you are a member of a large Wikia, and the veteran editors are unwilling to leave, the reason maybe that they have been paid, or are being paid ongoing advertising revenue.

Wikia regularly buys out wikis, giving core editors thousands of dollars to join Wikia.

Which poses the question: Do the leaders of your wikia site have the communities best interest in mind?

ArmchairGM
From:, this site was founded Dec 2005 and sold to Wikia a year later.

$2 million bucks, according to TuftsDaily. Wow.

Guildwiki
From:

$62,000 and $3,000 in stock for gamewikis, (see the leaked contract below)

GraveWit answering questions:


 * First Things First: Are You Getting Paid For This


 * Short answer: Yes.


 * Long answer: Wikia gave me some cash and company stock in exchange for all of the related GameWikis URLs, a data dump of all of our content, and the discontinuation of my hosting of the sites. As you're probably aware, GameWikis has had suitors before. This is truly not about the money.

World of Warcraft
The original owners of WoWWiki were given money to come to Wikia initially, they are long since gone and no one remaining in the admin staff (of Wowpedia) was part of that pay-off. Pcj 18:33, November 30, 2010 (UTC)

Since WoWWiki forked to Wowpedia, Wikia Staff has hired a paid volunteer to try to keep pages up to date, since all active admins left to Wowpedia.
 * This is exactly why we hired Raylan13, an active WoW player, to focus only on WoWWiki, primarily on the addition, organization and maintenance of Cataclysm articles.

Also:

Part of: Help:Helper_Group

List of helpers: Special:ListUsers/helper

Memory Alpha (The Star Trek canon wiki)

 * http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Community_Central:Press:_Memory_Alpha_joins_Wikia
 * http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Memory_Alpha:Announcements/February_2005_server_move
 * http://memory-alpha.org/en/index.php?title=Forum:Wikia_now_owns_memory-alpha.org&t=20090228123541
 * http://memory-alpha.org/en/index.php?title=Forum:Wikia_now_owns_memory-alpha.org
 * http://www.subspace-comms.net/index.php?topic=3082.0

English Uncyclopedia
Uncyclopedia co-founder Jonathan Huang (Chronarion) sold the "uncyclopedia.org" domain name to Wikia in 2006 in secret, much to the displeasure of the community. Wikia has since turned "uncyclopedia.org" into a simple redirect to "uncyclopedia.wikia.com", again against the wishes of the users and despite strong objections.

Wikia and Huang both refuse to disclose the amount paid for the "uncyclopedia.org" domain name

Quote from Carlb:

Pity that Chronarion sold the uncyclopedia.org domain to Wikia in 2006 without consulting with the community first; that move did untold harm to the project and its editorial autonomy. By then, I was already seeing issues which were making the implementation of "Babel projects" - Uncyclopedias in other languages - more difficult. The first of these was the French-language Désencyclopédie, which Wikia originally turned down because its creator wanted the non-commercial CC-BY-NC-SA licence (which is needed to reuse content from en.uncyclopedia, as-is or translated). Others such as Spanish and Italian soon followed. Among the original issues was an inability to create arbitrary language 'xx' under 'xx.uncyclopedia.org' (Wikia was forcing everything onto their *.wikia.com domain with their incompatible licence) and inability to edit the interwiki link table. By the time the next batch (Portuguese, Japanese, Taiwan - traditional script and a few others) was created in 2006, it looked easier just to pay for an server on a domain name which wasn't controlled by people outside the project and install Linux, MediaWiki - all of it is being given away free. Sadly, by then, the damage had been done for many of the projects. Sure, Wikia claims "we host you for free" and "the project belongs to the community", but nothing could be further from the truth. Wikia has made a lot of changes which have alienated a lot of communities - a series of ad-heavy forced reskins in 2006-08 were bad enough to actually get a bit of unfavourable mainstream media coverage (UK Guardian and The Register, IIRC) and, when disgruntled communities took their content and went elsewhere, Wikia's attitude was that those who had left were "no longer part of the community" and therefore their opinions did not matter - even through they created the original content.

Certainly, there are Uncyclopedias which have already moved - the Americans and the Russians are two examples. Wikia has done their utmost to abuse the search engine duplicate content penalty to destroy these projects, but they are very much still in operation. I am sure that there will be more. I have domain names for most of the individual-language Uncyclopedia projects; some of these redirect to Wikia at the moment, but that could change very easily. For instance, I hold the registration on *.uncyclopedia.info but a visit to ko.uncyclopedia.info redirects to an independent project in Korea - because I have no reason to demand that a project be hosted on my server just to use the domain name or just to have an entry in the interwiki links tables from a few Uncyclopedia-related projects which I have been hosting here since 2006.

As far as getting the old site removed? That's likely the biggest problem... I've only seen it done successfully once. "Spanking Art" used to have their wiki here. A troll discussion group which operates a domain just to attack (or, in their words, "review") Wikipedia decided to take it down as collateral damage by gathering a stack of screen shots containing whatever content they didn't like - surrounded by all of those pesky Wikia ads. They then contacted Wikia and told them to remove the project or else the trolls would contact every advertiser and show them exactly what they've been bankrolling here. Wikia folded like a cheap suit that day. I've never seen anything quite like it - they've been very brave when it comes to defying the Uncyclopedia community on everything from an unwanted forced domain name change to censorship of images to dumb the project down to PG-rated levels to this senseless reskin which completely breaks both usability and the ability to have Uncyclopedia look and feel like that other great encyclopaedia parody, Wikipedia. I'm more than willing to take in any refugees (this is beginning to look like a virtual Roxham Road - that tiny dead-end street where the world is funnelling into Canada as the situation degrades elsewhere), update interwiki links as needed and update any domains I hold to point to the new project (even if it's hosted somewhere else) instead of pointing to Wikia.

Oddly, there was one incident in 2006-07 where one tiny project (Czechloslovakia's version of Uncyclopedia) moved to Wikia and I didn't get one request from Wikia staff saying "please leave the old version up in competition with their new project". Funny double standard, that - but with no paid staff, I'm actually not in a position to censor content to keep users from finding out that a community has gone elsewhere. Wikia does this routinely. Pity.

German Uncyclopedia
A German-language version of Uncyclopedia, originally created independently in 2005 as uncyclopedia.de, was separately handed over to Wikia and the original data then deleted by its founders. The entire image collection was lost in transfer. It is unknown whether anyone at uncyclopedia.de was paid to do this (although "hand everything over and then delete the originals" is among standard Wikia contract terms as noted for GuildWiki above).

Note that this affects only the domains "uncyclopedia.org" and "uncyclopedia.de"; various other languages in the Uncyclopedia series remain as independent or non-Wikia. Each is an independent project, unified by a (mostly) common logo and theme and a (semi-complete) set of interwiki links... but little else.

Battlestar Wiki
Offered "$2,500 up front payment or 30% in advertising revenues." by Angela Beesey.

Bulbapedia
Forum postings about Wikia trying to buy out "Bulbapedia":

An alleged email from Angela Beesey.

wikiHow
This page says: "wikiHow is not hoping to be acquired... We're already profitable, financially stable, and we all love working here, so we aren't in a rush to sell out. Selling might mean the end to a product that we all love working on." This implies that multiple offers to buy out wikiHow have been made; however, there is no info about exactly who made these offers.

Acquired without any info on exchange of money
The following wikis were acquired by Wikia, but there is no information available about exchange of money to the founders.

Lostpedia (lostpedia.wikia.com)
See:


 * 1) http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Lostpedia:WikiaFAQ
 * 2) http://blog.lostpedia.com/2008/12/lostpedia-joins-with-wikia.html
 * 3) http://www.prweb.com/releases/Wikia/Lostpedia/prweb1956864.htm
 * 4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lostpedia

Interesting to note that Wikia had an earlier wiki on the Lost series, which still continues to exist at lost.wikia.com It seems like merging both of the wikis could not happen due to differences in CC licensing.

LyricWiki
See:


 * 1) http://lyrics.wikia.com/LyricWiki:Wikia_Migration_FAQ
 * 2) https://paidcontent.org/article/419-wikia-buys-lyric-wiki-as-part-of-music-expansion/
 * 3) http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090924/0151096298.shtml
 * 4) http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/10/20/wikia-gets-into-the-lyrics-business-acquires-lyricwiki/