This is Fandyllic from WoWWiki (and a big chunk of Wowpedia by extension).
I stayed with WoWWiki, but I don’t hate Wowpedia. I won’t say I’m not going to gloat, because I am human. However, I hope the Wowpedia admins can be civil if we have to do a merger.
I will be the first to admit Wowpedia is superior to WoWWiki in most ways that count. Blizzard even links to them from official WoW sites. However, Wowpedia is still a branch from the WoWWiki tree and most of the admins have worked together well in the past. Let’s try to do it again.
One of the reasons I stayed with WoWWiki is because I saw this coming. Business is business and nice as Curse is for gaming, it was still a niche company started by an old WoW guild. Also, when the fork happened, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be able to self-host and despite all the hate, FANDOM/Wikia is the biggest MediaWiki-based host out there, so any alternative would be a smaller entity.
I’m as shocked as anyone, but if the Wowpedia folks want to try to fork again and go their own way, they should do it. They have the experience, so it isn’t impossible.
Lastly, if you ask around the FANDOM/Wikia community, I’m no fanboy of theirs… I try to be more of constructive thorn in their side. One thing I have learned though, is there are some great people there and WoWWiki was a huge part of their early success (Kirkburn, originally one of the first WoWWiki admins is now a long time employee there). I hope the Curse folks don’t roll over, but instead try to make FANDOM/Wikia better.
Not sure it makes a difference, but I could get an MVP I know verify my identity… You can see the short post on WoWWiki where I do a little gloating here, if you want to discuss this on WoWWiki: wowwiki DOT com SLASH Thread:385777
I’m old enough to remember the Great Schism that led to Wowpedia’s creation. I went over to Wowpedia at the get go and never regretted my decision. I checked WoWwiki not too long ago, and that site is complete garbage. Bare bones pages, horrible layout, etc. The fact that the much superior Wowpedia is going to be subsumed by that place is pretty depressing. My only hope is that somehow, someway, the Wowpedia people can prevent that from happening.
I found an article on WoWWiki that was copy and pasted from WoWpedia. Not copied and adapted, just a lazy copy and paste. They had all the same “citations” but nothing was linked. It was a [3] behind a sentence that you couldn’t click on. And I overall hate all wikia sites. Just a hot mess. They have the web design principles of a teenager from 2007. I’m hoping for another fork.
I’m willing to put up with it if the wiki’s are converted to wowpedia’s format. I understand why wiki has ads, but can they be less obnoxious? Also remove the malware.
For those believing that the wreck that is WoWWiki is extending an olive branch, I point you to this post, which he will likely delete in due course: https://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:385777
Nice to see you haven’t changed your colors, Fandyllic.
This is disappointing. I use WoWpedia a lot and I really hope the website doesn’t get screwed over. I desperately do not want viruses on there. If that happens I might actually play WoW less because of it. I’m hoping there’s a positive outcome to this.
Call me naive, but it might lead to a different grassroots, organic system that grows and has various contributors. Or it might lead to people coming here for story questions and getting 100s of contradictory posts and arguments.
While money rules the world, it is not the be all and end all. It seems as if the owners of Gamepedia either were done or wanted cash - but perhaps it was a hostile take over.
Either way, good is possible. All is not lost.
Maybe WoW will make an ingame database - though partnering with a company like Fandom might be more profitable.
If Wowpedia is forced to merge with WoWWiki I will not contribute to it. The Fandom / Wikia platform is worse than its ever been, and it was bad enough eight years ago to force the fork into Wowpedia.
Now seeing that Fandyllic is still behaving the way he did eight years ago pretty much cements my feelings about WoWWiki and Fandom in general.
I sincerely hope that an alternative host can be found, because I really don’t want to see Wowpedia go down the drain after nearly a decade of collaborative editing.
Yeah. His behaviour in that one linked post definitely didn’t give me much faith that this merge would benefit us in any fashion either. Sigh. I’ll miss WoWpedia, if this goes through.
Probably because they are the staff that’s considered redundant and will be let go. When you are merging two sites that cover the same material, you don’t need two sets of editors.