Template:Wikia.com / Fandom.com

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Revision as of 13:04, 12 October 2012 by Hoof Hearted (talk | contribs) (move Facebook section up the page to a more logical sub-section)
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For the Wikia wikis which deal with the administration and management of the whole Wikia project, see: Wikia.

Template:Wiki FarmTemplate:TOCright See also the Template:Tl template.

Description

Wikia, formerly Wikicities, is now a collection of over 200,000[1] wikis (a WikiFarm) run by Wikia, Inc, and founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, along with Angela Beesley in October 2004. Its' tagline is "Create. Collaborate. Be Original." In 2006, Gil Penchina became the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and hopes to take Wikia to a new level as he did with eBay. As of late 2011, the current CEO is Craig Palmer .

Wikia uses a heavily modified creation of the MediaWiki wiki engine; and is visually different from regular MediaWiki sites in that it has its own custom skin, and most notably, complete with a range and variety of embeded advertisements. Wikia offers free hosting for an individual or 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, at Wikia Community Central (or one of the 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 that attract vandals.

Users with new 'talk' messages on any Wikia wiki will get a note about the message on any other Wikia wiki where they have a tab or 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.

Licensing

The vast majority of Wikia wikis are released under one primary wiki license – the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) license. [2] However, other licenses are available on Wikia; these include the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC-BY-NC) and the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works (CC-BY-NC-ND) licenses.

Wikia portals

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

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 are also backed up, and their file is available on their relevant Statistics page.

Stats

List of wikis

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

Ten largest wikis

This section needs updating

Problems between Wikia and its users

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

Advertising

Wikia offers free MediaWiki hosting for a community to build a wiki-based website, in return for the display of advertisements. 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 currently uses the following types of ads on pages:

  • A banner at at the top of the page.
  • A large square ad in the sidebar which may often be a video advertisement.
  • On large pages a tall skyscraper ad is placed inside the end of the sidebar.
  • On large pages two large (or three slightly smaller) square ads 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 ad may pop out of the left of this bar.
  • Occasionally Wikia may make use of take-over ads 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 is 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. [3][4][5]

Skins

Until recently, people 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 uses. While individual 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 users by making editing easier. As Monaco is being phased out, it becomes clear that some users really did like it.

Oasis

Wikia has introduced a new 'Oasis' skin, which is widely unpopular with 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.

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.

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