It saddens me to see how much Wikia has changed in just two years. When I joined Wikia's Star Wars Fanon wiki (http://swfanon.wikia.com) in 2006, things were very different. Wikia could have been said to be a kinder, politer, and more friendlier version of Wikipedia, with the focus being on a certain subject (e.g. Star Wars) instead of everything, as Wikipedia's focus is. The ads were not obtrusive, and I even happened to click on them every now and then. While I certainly cannot say that I like the "New Style" ads, I can somehow tolerate them; that, though, is not the main point of this email.
As I commented, in the beginning Wikia offered what Wikipedia could not, or would not. However, something slowly began to change as Wikia got older, and took on a more aggressive approach. To be honest, I do not know what exactly it was that changed, or can not put my finger on specifically what, just that something took a wrong turn at a fork in the road; I can feel comfortable saying that there are most likely some former and current Wikia Staff who could say in greater detail what changed. Back when I joined, Wikia was running on MediaWiki 1.7alpha and didn't have as many features as it does now. However, there is always the other side of the coin, as with everything in life. The MediaWiki extensions Wikia were using at the time were mostly from the official MediaWiki SVN archive ( http://svn.wikimedia.org) and thus, they were open source. Now Wikia is running on MediaWiki 1.12 and has an incredible amount of extensions - some from official MediaWiki SVN (http://svn.wikimedia.org) and some written specifically for Wikia by its technical team. The page "Open company test" on Central Wikia ( http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Open_company_test) reflects the change quite nicely. Back when Wikia first launched as Wikicities, it looked like this: http://www.wikia.com/index.php?title=Open_company_test&oldid=10439. Now it's mostly full of "no"s. And the thing is, the current version is more than correct. One particular concern is Wikia and its version of MediaWiki, including extensions. Wikia and its technical team members have developed some great extensions, such as MiniUpload, MultiDelete, MultiWikiEdit, ProblemReports and <poll> tag, just to name a few. However, do you see their source code anywhere? No. Wikia has released only a few of its extensions, and those are mostly broken/beta-ish and released back to the community after they're no longer used by Wikia, such as ImageTagging ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ImageTagging). The category "Extensions by Wikia, Inc." at MediaWiki.org ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions_by_Wikia%2C_Inc.) isn't too large either. Of these, Wikiwyg is essentially broken, ImageTagging is partially broken, FCKeditor is beta, SocialProfile might still have a bug or two (the very least it is incomplete), WhosOnline is quite server-heavy and the others are ok/stable. The English Wikipedia community already requested SpamRegex extension to be installed on enwiki and I'm sure that ProblemReports and MiniUpload could be profitable for users using the Wikimedia wikis. I've personally been inquired a couple times about Wikia extensions such as MultiWikiEdit, believe it or not. Releasing the extensions to the community has one unbelievable profit over anything else: translations. Assuming the extensions use wfMsg() and thus, MediaWiki messages (even if they do not, that can be fixed easily), they can be easily and quickly translated to many, many languages. Currently, translations are done through messaging.wikia.com by staff and a very few volunteers, such as myself. By default, Wikia's extensions support only English, and in some cases, maybe Polish too. There is no support e.g. for Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, French, Finnish, or several other main languages of the world. Wikia's version of MediaWiki undoubtedly uses quite a few hacks and custom hooks. If these hooks were applied into the trunk version of MediaWiki ( http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/), they would surely make life for Wikia and its technicians easier, having to apply a few hacks less into MW in the next software upgrade. Another issue is skins. Wikia's tech team has developed a bunch of great skins and themes that are superior when compared to the default skins included with MediaWiki (compare e.g. QuartzSlate to Classic or Nostalgia). As of now, June 2008, Quartz skin is being phased out in favor of Monaco. This makes me wonder: what prevents Wikia from releasing it to the community? Some of the Quartz themes, such as Slate, are great and no doubt that many wikis would like to use a skin different from the boring defaults. With the above being said, I do not get why Wikia's developers cannot commit some of Wikia's extensions and skins into the official MediaWiki SVN. After all, a SVN commit doesn't take too long on my Windows Vista and I bet it is not that slow under Linux either. Also, not to forget that four Wikia developers (Bartek, Emil, Eloy, Inez) already have commit access. Wikia has gotten MediaWiki software - and support for it - for free. Entirely free. According to Ohloh.net's project calculator ( http://www.ohloh.net/projects/mediawiki), it would've cost $18,533,433.00 to write MediaWiki from scratch. Now to think of that, and the fact that the support, while sometimes not the best available, is free, that is quite a saving for Wikia for not having to pay anything for the software. An open SVN for developers wanting to develop Wikia code further was planned (http://fp001.development.wikia-inc.com) but it unfortunately never happened. I have been pushing and pushing for the open SVN, like many other users before me, but alas, there are still no visible results. After you mention the words "open" and "SVN" to several Staff and other persons, it is like talking to a wall, except more frustrating. No replies, no comments, no questions, no acknowledgments, no nothing. And I don't feel that the odd "we're working on it, please be patient" is sufficient given the amount of time that the debates around SVN have been going on. Also, remember SocialProfile ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile)? It was great; It still is great. However, it is missing quite a few things. Check out a vanilla copy of MediaWiki from trunk, then a vanilla copy of SocialProfile and compare the features to Halopedia's (http://halo.wikia.com) ones. A lot of things were 'dropped', such as points system (which I'd have liked to see very much myself) and related features, like Special:TopUsers, <welcomeUser> & <loggedin> & <loggedout> parser hook extensions (how else would the user know if s/he has friend requests? That is far more handy than having to go into Special:ViewRelationshipRequests), Special:InviteContacts (one UserRelationship extension message even refers to Special:InviteContacts...irony, maybe?), Special:RemoveAvatar (now how are wiki administrators going to remove users who upload goatse, or similar inappropriate things, as their avatar(s)?), comment system and gift system. Now, let me just say this: I do not believe that we are perfect. As a matter of fact, I do not believe that anyone or anything is perfect, including myself or the dozens of friends, both official and unofficial, that I've made on Wikia. That is why it would be important for external developers to be able to improve Wikia's code and make users' Wikia experience a tad bit better again. SocialProfile extension is a fine example of how much a SVN commit can help to improve the code. The first release was quite buggy, as you can see for yourself by looking at the archived discussion page for SocialProfile extension ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:SocialProfile/Archive_1). However, these bugs were fixed by many external developers, and as a result, SocialProfile works very nicely now on vanilla MediaWiki installs. I do not believe that it is too much to ask that you contribute something back, and go back to your roots, back to what attracted people, and investors, to Wikicities in the first place; back to a time when you were not afraid to ask your communities for help; back to a time when asking external developers to take a look at things was not perceived as a thing of weakness, or a giant corporate-risk; back to a time when your average user enjoyed doing more, and enjoyed helping out the wider "Wikia-community" as opposed to just their own, individual wiki-communities. What I have seen is an unfortunate trend of these volunteer users and developers, who always enjoyed doing more and helping in a wider context, retreating back to their origins and, in some instances, cementing themselves firmly in their home wikis, too disgusted or disenchanted to even think about volunteering again. In other, more unfortunate instances, some users/external-developers have just decided that volunteering their time is not worth the headaches, constantly being ignored, and other similar things, and have therefore just picked up and left, making the decision that their talents and expertise might be better used elsewhere. I guess, this letter boils down to this: what are you, Wikia Inc., afraid of? MediaWiki developers have seen all kinds of ugly/awful/broken code and they're not afraid to fix it - in fact, they love to tackle those types of problems. With that being said, code cleanup or anything is not necessarily needed, per se. As for license concerns, just throw * @copyright (c) Wikia, Inc. and * @license http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GNU General Public License 2.0 at the beginning of the file. While I do appreciate your time in reading this, I hope that you all understand the amount effort, time, and dedication that your volunteers, both user and developer levels, put into Wikia, and hope that more of a response than "Please be patient" will be given. Thank you, -- Jack Phoenix http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User:Jack_Phoenix
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