User blog:Drew1200/Why I Think We Should Move Off Wikia

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should look at the forum about us moving off of Wikia. Here’s basically what is going on: Brickipedia has been working on moving off Wikia. It’s possible for us to go with them. In this blog, I’m just going to explain why I think we should move.

Ads
One of Wikia’s biggest problems are all their ads. When you’re not logged in, the pages look like they’re just totally spammed with ads. I’ve talked to several people who do not have accounts on the wiki. Most of them have told me that they won’t even read it because all of the ads are so annoying. Another problem with that is that everyone who does not have an account thinks that the wiki looks the same when you do have an account. This is keeping them from creating accounts, too. Because of all the ads, we are not only losing pageviews, we are also losing editors.

If we were to move, there will be one small ad. It will not be so distracting, and more importantly, it will not be inappropriate. I’ll bet that we will eventually gain many more viewers and editors because of this.

Skins
On Wikia, you’re limited to the Oasis and Monobook skins. Both are okay, but both could be much better. On the new wiki, we would have many more options, including Vector and Monaco. We would even have the option of creating our own if we wanted to.

Extensions
Like I said in the previous section, we will be able to enable ‘’any’’ extension we want. We can even write our own. An extension is basically another feature you can add to a wiki. Chat, polls, badges, message walls, and the new forums are all basically just extensions. There are TONS of extensions that would be really helpful to us. This includes new badges that are much better than we have here, Semantic MediaWiki (which would make our templates ‘’much’’ more functional), and possibly even a new chat! There’s tons of extensions that we could explore and possibly enable if we want. This is one of the biggest benefits of moving.

User Right Groups
If we were to move, we would have more control over user rights. We would have all of the ones we have here, but we could slightly modify them so that they better fit our wiki. We would also be capable of creating new user groups. Just some examples; We could create a user group who could edit MediaWiki, or we could could create a user group that's capable of protecting pages. (These are just examples, though. We will ONLY create a user group if it would significantly benefit the entire wiki.)

Achievements
As many of you know, Wikia's badges are very inaccurate. If a user just makes thousands of tiny edits, they'll be miles ahead of a good contributor who makes a couple hundred amazing edits. The Wikia badges sometimes encourage spamming as well. The new badges we will have will promote good edits, and help prevent spamming instead of encouraging it. I personally am looking forward to them. One thing you will have to note about this is that we will not take your current badges over to the new wiki. It really shouldn't be much of a problem, though. A fresh start will be VERY helpful.

Brickipedia Going First
Brickipedia will move their wiki before we move ours. If it doesn’t work out, then we don’t have to move. If it does work out, we’ll know it’s good, and we can move easier!

Downsides
These are some things that we will lose once we move. I’m going to explain why I really don’t think they’re that big of a deal.

Oasis
This is probably the biggest change. If we were to move, we would no longer have the Oasis skin on our wiki. The Oasis skin is what makes Wikia look how it will look. Initially, we will probably only have the Vector and Monobook skins. Eventually, we should be able to create our own skin, however. We would allow our community to give their opinions about it and how we can make it better. Also, many of the features on Wikia such as chat, blogs, and badges will be able to be duplicated. There are some extensions that allow us to do similar things. Overall, I think it will be very easy to get past this issue. I believe we’ll eventually be able to create a skin much cooler and more useful than the Oasis skin.

Chat
The chat which we use on this wiki so much would have to be left behind. This really is only a minor problem, though. Anyone could still come back here to visit and use our chat. Also, as I said above, we may be able to enable a chat extension! This extension has the potential to be ‘’much’’ better than the current Wikia chat we have right now. Again, this chat would still exist, so you could come and use it anytime you want.

VSTF
One of the benefits of being on Wikia is the VSTF. If there’s no admins on, they’re able to come and revert vandalism. I am of the opinion that we do not need them. We have enough admins and rollbacks now, and we can pretty much catch all the trolls and vandals as soon as they come on. We also would have all the same tools as the VSTF, and could easily respond to any vandalism as needed.

Wikia Tech Team
A very minor problem is that we wouldn't have Wikia's tech people any longer. Again, a very minor issue. We'd have the support of the Brickimedia admins who are very capable tech people. Since they only will have a couple wikis to take care of, they may be better, too, because they'll have more time to focus on our wiki specifically if we have any needs.

Also, as you may know, there are plenty of people here good with computers. Several of the admins can write useful scripts and stylesheets, and there's also some very skilled users who do not have sysop rights. I know we could easily survive on our own.

Short Term Reader Loss
Another major problem we will have is a loss of readers (and possibly even editors) for a short amount of time. When we switch wikis, it will take some time for all of our readers to find the new site. It will also take awhile for it to move up in Google search results. However, this will only be short term. Eventually, we will most likely pass our average page view number, and become even more popular than we were on Wikia.

Brickipedia
I’m only putting this under the downsides because many users here seem to think that this will be a problem. This is actually a good thing. If you think we’ll be part of Brickipedia, or that the two wikis will merge, then you’re wrong. We will simply both be hosted on Brickimedia. We’re already both hosted on Wikia, we will just be switching our hosts together.