Wikia - creating communities

Contents 1 Wiki of the same topic elsewhere

If you have a use for a wiki, and you want that wiki to be easily maintainable, part of a large community, and hosted for free, then you should consider using Wikia.

By creating a wiki on Wikia, you will instantly be part of a large wiki community. Many users edit across more than one wiki, bringing editing expertise to newly created wikis. The Central Wikia provides a place for the communities to come together and deal with problems on individual wikis.

Hosting your wiki on Wikia saves you the hassle of installing and maintaining your own wiki engine. The wiki can be created in minutes, and you don't even need to think about the technical issues involved, such as installation and back ups, or buying servers and domain names. A wiki at Wikia is hosted across a growing network of servers in a professional colocation facility, ensuring your site is always available.

Wikia is using a modified version of MediaWiki, which as we continue to develop the software will get better and better. For example, YouTube can be integrated with the content, users can be notified of changes via email, calendars can be used on pages, dynamic pages lists, parser functions, and much more. We also have excellent spam control and cross-wiki vandal blocking, which leaves users more time to focus on the content instead of dealing with bad edits. Have a look at ArmchairGM or our new entertainment wiki to see some of the other new features we are working on, including automatic listings of good content, and public voting and commenting, Wysiwyg editing, and user challenges.

See also our reasons for using Wikia list created by the community.

[edit] Wiki of the same topic elsewhere

Some reasons to use Wikia even if another wiki exists on the topic:

1. Is the existing wiki free content, that is, explicitly licensed as such? If it is proprietary content, a free new Wikia is desirable. Or, it may not be explicitly licensed as free content. On Wikia, content is explicitly licensed under the GNU FDL or a free Creative Commons license.
2. Does the existing wiki use CamelCase? CamelCase makes pages difficult to read and search, and it is irreversible without manual work (a program cannot know whether a title of "MicroSoft" is meant to be CamelCase or not without a dictionary, which is likely insufficient). Wikia allows you to use free links. Wikia also avoids confusion by allowing the initial letter of an article to be written (and retrieved) in lower or upper case and converts spaces in the URL into readable underscore ("_") marks rather than confusing code.
3. What wiki engine does the existing wiki use? There are countless wikis which will forever languish in mediocrity because of a wiki engine with inferior usability, functionality, or scalability.
4. Is the existing wiki community open to new languages, and does the wiki engine they use support them? Most wikis are strictly monolingual. Wikia will create wikis in new languages if there is a user interest to do so, and MediaWiki has excellent support for even very small languages due to its use on Wikipedia, which is available in over 100 languages.
5. Which policies does the existing wiki follow? Is it possible for regular users to influence the policies of the wiki, or do they just have to follow whatever rules the "GodKing" makes? A truly free wiki should also be free in terms of user participation.
6. Is the existing wiki privately owned? Either an individual hosting the wiki on a machine at his home, or if an individual personally pays some company to provide the hosting service. Even if the content is available under GDFL, if something unfortunate happens to the "owner", and the community doesn't hear about it, the wiki might vaporize without warning. A single unfortunate traffic accident can cut off the bill payment for the privately-owned wiki, vaporizing it without warning. With Wikia, it'll take a highly coordinated international conspiracy to take out the owner (Wikia), and even then it'll probably make headline news so the community will know and quickly make a latest backup of the database before the hosting service stops.