User blog:Craiglpalmer/The Future of Lost Media Wiki on Wikia

Hi Lost Media Wiki Fans!

I'm Craig, the President & CEO of Wikia.

Recently, a handful of admins here made the decision to take a copy of the content in this community and host it outside of Wikia. After doing this, they requested that Wikia close this community -- as a matter of fact, went so far as to create a petition on change.org to lobby me to do so.

I’d like to take this opportunity to respond to the request, and explain how and why Wikia operates in this type of situation.

First of all, one of the great aspects of Wikia is that it isn’t a walled, proprietary garden. If you build a community and create content in Wikia, you do it under a license (technically, it’s Creative Commons CC-by-SA) that if for any reason you are not happy with Wikia, you can take a copy of the content elsewhere as long as you maintain the same CC-by-SA license and provide proper attribution. (I'll note the the users who have taken a copy of the content off Wikia have claimed the content is no longer governed by a CC-by-SA License, which is not legal, and they have not provided proper attribution, but that is not the main point of this blog.)

Back to the main point, we, of course, hope you wouldn’t choose to take this action because:


 * The platform we’ve created to build a community and content is much richer and more expansive than standard wiki technology and has many features that you cannot find elsewhere.   To give a couple examples of this, w e have Wikia's  Video Library  -- a collection of thousands  of legally licensed video assets that can be integrated in community content with no concern of copyright issues.  W e have world class discussion technology that is in process of being rolled out to our larger communities and we can generate world-class mobile apps on IOS and Android the presents all community content in great mobile experiences.  All of these capabilities do not exist in standard wiki technology.  By the way -- If you want to see our discussion and mobile technology in use, take a look at the Star Wars Fan app in the Google or IOS Store.    The Lost Media Wiki community has grown large enough that Wikia would love to work with the community here to bring discussions and a mobile app to Lost Media Wiki fans -- just let us know and we'll work with you to do this,


 * The mass of users and content in Wikia optimally brings traffic to you from search and social that you just will not get on your own. Wikia has 140 million monthly users and over 40M pages of content (across all of our communities) which helps us optimize search engine results far beyond what a small site can do on their own. To reinforce this point, if you search for “Lost Media ” on Google, the first 8 search results take you to this community.  A small community outside of Wikia will likely never attain this kind of search success and Wikia will be the place most users will find if searching for the type of content in this community,


 * Creating a competing site just divides the fans instead of uniting them into the (hopefully) largest fan community in the world around the topic you love,


 * We partner with many of the creators of the games, movies, TV shows, comics, boosk, etc that your community is built around and facilitates an amazing collaboration between them and your community in a program called the Fan Studio . The ability to interact directly in this fashion is only offered by Wikia.
 * We have an extensive community organization that is focused on helping you grow your skills and the breadth/depth of your community and content,
 * As one of the largest websites in the world (#15), we have advanced operations staff and capability that keeps the site running without you having to worry about it.

But, at the end of the day, the decision is yours. If you decide to take the action that some here have chosen, we respect your decision, but we will not close the Wikia community.  Here’s why:


 * First and most importantly, community content was created through the contribution hundreds --  in the case of Lost Media Wiki, as of today, 864 users have made contributions to the community.  Some communities in Wikia have thousands or even millions of fans who contribute to the content.   When you consider this, I'm sure it's obvious that no one person or even a handful of community members can speak for all the users who have contributed to the success of the community. So to close a community created by this many users because of the request of a few is not reasonable or fair.
 * Wikia’s  Terms of Use  and the CC-by-SA license are clear. You have the right to take a copy of content, but we are under no obligation to close a site.

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 * Even though some members of the Lost Media Wiki community have chosen to leave, there are active members and daily contributions in this community who want to stay and we will maintain a place for you to continue your endeavours in Lost Media Wiki and Wikia in general.

I hope this helps Lost Media Wiki fans understand our approach to handling this situation and I wish the community here at Wikia great success!

Craig Palmer,

President & CEO, Wikia