Template:Wikia.com / Fandom.com

Description

Wikia is a collection of over 12,000 wikis (a WikiFarm) run by Wikia, Inc, founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, and Angela Beesley in October 2004. In 2006, Gil Penchina became the CEO and hopes to take Wikia to a new level as he did with eBay.

Wikia offers free MediaWiki hosting for a community to build a free content wiki-based website. New wikis can be created instantly at http://create.wikia.com. Hosting and 24-hour customer support is free, in return for advertising placed on the pages, but users have little say over the advertisements their website displays. Support on both the technical and community aspects of running a wiki community is provided.

Wikia staff and helpers have sysop powers throughout Wikia, 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 that attract vandals.

Users with new messages on any Wikia wiki they will get a note about the message on any other Wikia wiki where they have a window open. If a user has different usernames for different Wikia Wikis then logging into a different account for one can change the account for all.

Wiki size:	14,345 article pages see stats
wikiFactor:	15 info / verify

Problems between Wikia and its users

Advertising

Wikia offers free MediaWiki hosting for a community to build a wiki-based website, in return for the display of ads. Some users complain that they have little say over the placement or content of advertisements their website 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 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 is worth an estimated $8.11 Million USD to the advertisers with a daily page view of 3703703, since all three have exactly the same figures it must be for the whole of Wikia. [1][2][3]

Skins

The default skin for Wikia wikis is called "Monaco", more colorful and customizable than the standard Monobook skin that Wikipedia uses. While individual users can view Wikia sites using the Monobook skin (by choosing it in their preferences), Wikia does not allow it to be chosen as a default skin for all wiki visitors, which is frustrating for some communities. Wikia says statistics show that Monaco encourages new users by making editing easier.

Criticism

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

List of wikis

Here is their list, for the fan of WikiIndex to add from!

Ten largest wikis

• LyricWiki - Lyrics
• Wikianswers - Questions and answers
• WoWWiki - World of Warcraft
• Wookieepedia - Star Wars
• Familypedia - Genealogy
• Marvel Database Project Wiki - Marvel
• EQ2i - Everquest
• The Third Turn - Nascar wiki
• Recipes Wiki
• DC Database Project Wiki