WoWpedia and WoWWiki

[Israia]

Soooo, holy hell drama bombs Batman. BouBouille_MMO posted tonight on MMO-Champion about this new site, Wowpedia.org. I said to myself, "Woah, neat! Maybe this won't be as crappy as WoWWiki has gotten. I just hope they didn't copy everythi-"

Deathwing the Destroyer[2], originally Neltharion, the Earth-Warder, is one of five Dragon Aspects and leader of the black dragonflight. Thousands of years ago, Neltharion was empowered by the Titans with dominion over the earth and the deep places of Azeroth. However, driven mad by the Old Gods, he turned against the other Aspects during the War of the Ancients. Among both mortals and dragons his name has become one whispered with a feeling of fear and contempt.

Deathwing the Destroyer[2], originally Neltharion, the Earth-Warder, is one of five Dragon Aspects and leader of the black dragonflight. Thousands of years ago, Neltharion was empowered by the Titans with dominion over the earth and the deep places of Azeroth. However, driven mad by the Old Gods, he turned against the other Aspects during the War of the Ancients. Among both mortals and dragons his name has become one whispered with a feeling of fear and contempt.

Oh crap.

So, I inquired to BouBouille_MMO over twitter as to the legality of this. And thanks to FeistTheRogue on Twitter, I found out WoWWiki falls under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which makes the whole thing totally legal. Then, he links me to an SA thread one of the WoWWiki admins made a few days ago in SA's WoW section, which said:

Wowpedia is the new WoWWiki

Hey friends. TT here dropping by to let you know that Wowpedia is the new WoWWiki.

A little background... WoWWiki was an independent wiki. Then along came Wikia promising us gold and riches. So we allied with them. But this alliance has since turned sour. Wikia is planning to ramp up the number of advertisements on all of their wikis. In response, many wikis are planning a mass exodus from the service. The leadership behind WoWWiki has done just that.

To clarify, WoWWiki will still be up and operational. The content is Creative Comments, so Wowpedia has forked the content that is already there. We won't be deleting or carpet bombing WoWWiki or anything like that. We're just encouraging editors and users to start using Wowpedia instead of WoWWiki. By visiting both sites, you can already tell Wowpedia has less ads.

I'll probably ninja this in when the actual announcement crops up on blogs, but we're allying with a popular company in the WoW universe. Ironic, I know, since we were burned by our last set of overlords. But hey, that's how the die were cast.

I'd like to take this opportunity as an admin for both sites to ask you what your thoughts, concerns, questions, and suggestions are regarding the move and state of both sites.

We recognize that other sites are more popular for consuming certain types of WoW-related information. We have plans of shoring up some of our weaknesses. But keep in mind, this is a volunteer labor of love. No one is getting paid for this. At least I'm not. :geno:

I'm sure everyone's noticed the huge amount of ads all over WoWWiki these days, and the fact that the ads they run are some of the most dangerous ones you can display, making them one of the most likely places to get robbed of your account information of anything out there(Be sure to run NoScript/Adblock/Chrome or something!). I've contributed to WoWWiki in the past, and even had my own character page up there all through Burning Crusade. However, this is a pretty big thing- literally all of the admins on WoWWiki have moved over.

We all use WoWWiki as likely one of our most frequently referenced spots for information on WoW lore, so I thought this would interest all of you. I think it's pretty important, seeing it now. Hopefully they don't make the same mistake twice, or worse ones.

[Gryphonheart]

Yeah, you can find more information over at WoWpedia's Welcome page. Basically, Wikia was forcing its various wiki partners to change to a different style/skin/theme/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, as well as adding more and more ads to the page. So the entire leadership of WoWWiki broke off and created WoWpedia, which is being hosted ad-free (though just for a few months) by Curse, and copied all of the content over to the new site, so it's all the same as of Oct. 18th or 21st or something relatively recent.

What that means now is basically that WoWWiki and WoWpedia are competing for survival as the wiki for the WarCraft universe, and WoWpedia is launching a campaign to ask participants to update every out-of-date article in hopes of winning the fight. That said, if WoWpedia is using the same Creative Commons license that WoWWiki was, I don't see what'll stop WoWWiki from just copying all the WoWpedia changes and tying them to their own larger brand name.

[Israia]

Yeah, you can find more information over at WoWpedia's Welcome page. Basically, Wikia was forcing its various wiki partners to change to a different style/skin/theme/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, as well as adding more and more ads to the page. So the entire leadership of WoWWiki broke off and created WoWpedia, which is being hosted ad-free (though just for a few months) by Curse, and copied all of the content over to the new site, so it's all the same as of Oct. 18th or 21st or something relatively recent.

What that means now is basically that WoWWiki and WoWpedia are competing for survival as the wiki for the WarCraft universe, and WoWpedia is launching a campaign to ask participants to update every out-of-date article in hopes of winning the fight. That said, if WoWpedia is using the same Creative Commons license that WoWWiki was, I don't see what'll stop WoWWiki from just copying all the WoWpedia changes and tying them to their own larger brand name.

Well, they can, but they'd have to put the work into that themselves. The admins have all jumped over- and with that being the case, that's the vast majority of those who worked on WoWWiki. They can copy back all they like but it will require new folks.