Template:Wikia.com / Fandom.com

For the Wikia wikis which deal with the administration and management of the whole Wikia project by specific language, see: Wikia, Wikia-De, Wikia-Es, Wikia-Fr,.

For the Wikia community portal wikis in various languages, see: Wikia Community Central.

For those Wikia wikis who left Wikia to re-establish as an independent wiki or on another wiki farm, see: category:Ex-Wikia.

For sub-categories of Wikia wikis by official language portals, see: category:De.Wikia, category:Es.Wikia, category:Fr.Wikia, category:It.Wikia, category:Ja.Wikia, category:Nl.Wikia, category:Pl.Wikia, category:Pt-Br.Wikia, category:Ru.Wikia, category:Sv.Wikia,.

See also the {{Wikia boilerplate}} template. Template:WikiEngineFeatures

original Wikicities logo

Wikia, currently branded as Fandom and originally known as Wikicities, is a collection of over 400,000 wikis. Known as a 'wiki farm', it is owned by its parent company Wikia, Inc. It was founded by Jimmy 'Jimbo' Wales (who had previously founded Wikipedia) and his then business partner Angela Starling in October 2004. Its original tagline was "Create. Collaborate. Be Original." In 2006, Gil Penchina became the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and hoped to take Wikia to a new level as he did with eBay. In late 2011, a new CEO Craig Palmer was appointed. In late 2016, the entire Wikia site was rebranded from 'Wikia' to 'Fandom', and also launched the non-profit sister site Wikia.org.

Wikia, Inc. is a company registered in the State of Delaware, U.S.A. (corporate number C2935209), whose registered office is at 360 3rd Street, Suite 750, San Francisco, CA 94107, U.S.A.

Wikia.com uses a unique and heavily modified creation of the MediaWiki wiki engine; it is visually different from conventional MediaWiki sites (such as Wikipedia) in that it has its own exclusive custom skin, and most notably, is embedded with a range and variety of graphic and dynamic advertisements. The fundamental business model of Wikia / Fandom is the offering of free hosting for an individual or community to build a free content wiki-based website, on virtually any subject. New wikis can be created instantly at http://www.Wikia.com/Special:CreateNewWiki. Hosting of wiki, and 24 hour customer support is free, in return for advertising placed on the pages; but editors and users have little say over the advertisements (both content and placement) their wiki site displays. Support, on both the technical and community aspects of running a wiki community, is provided at Wikia Community Central (or one of its related other language Community wikis).

Wikia staff and helpers have sysop powers throughout all Wikia wikis, as well as several types of automated detection and blocking tools to help deal with vandals and spam on individual wikis. This can be helpful for controversial wikis like Liberapedia which tends to attract vandals. Template:TOCright

Editing

From its creation in 2004, all wiki sites hosted on Wikia had unrestricted editing privileges, known as 'open edit'. This meant, that whilst Wikia welcomed users to register for an account and create their own username, anonymous folks were equally welcome and able to edit without the need to create an account and / or log-in. As was the norm throughout the developing wikisphere, individuals from this latter group became known as an IP editor, due to them being identified by their IP address from the edit history of any wiki page they had edited. This 'open edit' ethos continued as a fundamental basis until July 2013; when it was deemed that 'open edit' was not compliant with the "Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998", commonly known as COPPA, which became effective 21 April 2000, and is overseen by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). As a result, in order to comply with COPPA, all new Wikia wikis were required to implement all users to register for an account before being able to edit, known as 'log-in to edit'. Those existing Wikia sites created before July 2013 are also required to convert to 'log-in to edit', thus effectively ending one of the founding wiki fundamentals of being 'open to all'.

Registered Wikia users with new 'talk' messages on any Wikia wiki will get a talk page notification about that message on any other Wikia wiki where they have a tab or window open. If a user has different usernames for different Wikia wiki sites, then logging into a different account for one can change the account for all.

Licensing

The vast majority of Wikia wikis are currently released under one primary wiki license: the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 unported license (CC-BY-SA 3.0), as explained here. However, other licenses are available on Wikia; these include the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC-BY-NC), as used by Memory Alpha, and the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 unported (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0) licenses.

Historically, when Wikia was founded, it used the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or GFDL), just like Wikipedia did.

Wikia portals

Wikia wikis are grouped under differing portals, or 'hubs', as shown in the bottom centre of their page. These include:

• Games
• Movies
• TV

Facebook

This section requires expansion with info on the Facebook Connect plugin which Wikia is now using.

Wikia backup

The entire Wikia project is available as a backup file here . Individual Wikia wikis may also backed up, and their backup files are available near the bottom of their relevant /Special:Statistics page, as explained here. However, whilst all Wikia wikis have a Statistics page, complete with the 'Database dumps' section containing appropriate placement for their backup file links, those Wikia wikis which show 'unknown' for the actual URLs are expected definitely have not been backed up! Local administrators do have the option to request (a new, or) updated dump. The reality is that a vast proportion of Wikia sites do not have individual dumps available, and for those sites that do have live URLs to their backup files, they are invariably outdated, typically by many months, though some are outdated by many years. Originally managed internally by Wikia and found at WikiStats.Wikia.com or Dumps.Wikia.net, as of 2018, Wikia backups are provided by Amazon S3 from Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS).

Statistics

Because all Wikia wikis are powered by MediaWiki (albeit an outdated but extensively modified and customised version), they all have a /Special:Statistics page, which provides a standardised set of statistics specific to individual Wikia wikis. These include page statistics (content pages, all pages, and uploaded files), edit statistics (total number of edits since creation of specific wiki, and average edits per page), and user statistics; though it should be noted that the sources used in the third section are inconsistent. Specifically, active users, administrators, bureaucrats, and bots correctly report data for their actual wiki; whereas the registered users output reports ALL registered users of ALL wikis throughout the entire Wikia project!

In respect of data for wikiFactor (wF) figures, originally found at /Special:PopularPages and subsequently at /Special:MostVisitedPages, this is now unknown because Wikia globally disabled the required page to output that metric. In order to preserve the individual wikiFactor figure for separate Wikia wikis, it would be helpful to update the wikiFactor URL= field in the {{Size}} template with the last known 'good' archived URL from either Archive.org or archive.is.

In respect of global statistics for Wikia, the following were available:

• GreenReaper used to produce some very interesting and geeky ##Wikia IRC stats, last updated 2013
• Wikistatistics.net used to produce graphical Wikia Interactive Statistics, last available 2016
• mutante, creator of WikiStats by S23.org, has a tabular list of top 250 Wikias

Wiki age

The exact date of founding of individual Wikia wikis used to be at /Special:WikiStats. Alternative methods to age a Wikia site can be sought at /Special:AncientPages, or by examining the earliest edit version of revision history of its main page at /Main_Page?dir=prev&action=history. The latter example will also be a good place to determine the founder of the individual Wikia site.

List of wikis

Here is their list  ^{[dead link]}, for the fan of WikiIndex to add from!

Ten largest wikis

This section needs updating

• LyricWiki – music lyrics (closed)
• Wikianswers – general questions and answers (closed)
• Familypedia – genealogy
• Wookieepedia – Star Wars
• Marvel Database Project – Marvel comics
• EQ2i – Everquest video game
• The Third Turn – NASCAR
• Recipes Wiki – recipes
• DC Database – DC Comics
• RuneScape Wiki – RuneScape video game

Closure of Wikia wikis

Unlike other wiki farms, Wikia will generally not close a wiki if requested by the wikis' creator/founder, and/or community of editors. Wikia prefer to maintain inactive wikis in a dormant state, and actively seek others to 'adopt' said wikis. This will happen even when former wiki owners copy or 'fork' their entire wiki project and re-host it on another provider or wiki farm. Wikia wikis are only usually closed in exceptional circumstances, typically if the content or intent of the wiki breaches Wikias' terms of service.

Problems between Wikia and its users

For those registered Wikia users having problems logging into Wikia, a solution is to disable scripts from Wikia, then clicking on the 'sign in' link which will send you to sign-in webpage.

Advertising

Wikia offers free hosting for a community to build a wiki-based website based on a unique and heavily modified version of MediaWiki, in return for the display of advertisements. Some registered users complain that they have little say over the placement or content of advertisements their wikisite displays.

Logged-in users don't have to see the advertisements unless they choose to. Users may set their preferences to see advertisements on Wikia in order to see how a page looks to logged-out and/or non-registered Wikia users. A prominent advertisement is placed at the top right hand side of most pages, but when there is also a picture on the top right hand side of a page, the layout for users who see the advertisement can be poor especially on short pages. Logged-in users may not realize this when they add pictures.

Wikia currently uses the following types of adverts on pages:

• A banner at the top of the page;
• A large square advert in the sidebar which may often be a video advertisement;
• On large pages, a tall skyscraper advert is placed inside the end of the sidebar;
• On large pages, two large (or three slightly smaller) square adverts at the end of the page before the footer;
• On various content pages, Wikia also sells 'Sponsored links', which are a section of links that look like an 'External links' page content section, but are placed below the category bar;
• Wikia places a floating social bar at the bottom of the screen for anon users — a square advert may pop out of the left of this bar;
• Occasionally Wikia may make use of take-over adverts which replace the background image;
• They rarely show up, but have been more common recently; Wikia has tried placing in-text advertising in page content occasionally.

As of September 2012, Wikia was worth an estimated $13.93 Million USD to the advertisers, with a daily page view of more than 6,358,000; since all three links have nearly the same figures, it must be for the whole of Wikia.

Skins

Until recently,^[when?] registered users who understood how to use preferences could choose which skin they used, but even this choice will now stop.

Monaco

The default skin for Wikia wikis used to be called 'Monaco', more colorful and customizable than the default MediaWiki 'Monobook' skin that Wikipedia used. While registered users could view Wikia sites using the Monobook skin (by choosing it in their preferences), Wikia did not allow it to be chosen as a default skin for all wiki visitors, which was frustrating for some communities. Wikia says statistics show that Monaco encourages new registered users by making editing easier, but many existing Wikia members left Wikia nonetheless.

Oasis

Wikia introduced a new 'Oasis' skin, which became widely unpopular with registered users, see to the people complaining about the new look. The new skin is now compulsory for all users. Because of this change, many Wikia users have now left, often taking their wiki with them.

Mobile skin

Wikia also supports a mobile-view specific skin, designed to be used on smartphones and / or tablet computers. This version is automatically displayed when any Wikia wiki is opened on such devices, although there is the option to also view the conventional desktop version using the Oasis skin via a link at the bottom of the page.

Venus

In December 2014, Wikia introduced yet another skin, causing even more controversy among users.

Criticism

ComplaintWiki has been set up expressly to look at problems that Wikia registered users have, and includes comments from communities that have left Wikia hosting; as well as other critics of Wikia and Wikipedia.

The Anti-Wikia Alliance (AWA) wiki was set up to provide ongoing support and advice for a number of former Wikia wikis who are now hosted either independently or on another wiki farm.

See also

• Template:Wikipedia / Wikinfo / Wikia / WikiKnowledge — comparison table

External links

• Wikia at English Wikipedia
• Potential Wikia mass exodus at English Wikinews, Friday 1 August 2008

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