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

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/