Forum:Helping Wikia's Server Space and Ridding of Inactive Wikis

Hello everyone,

This is a nice suggestion that I wish to propose to the Wikia staff mostly, but I'm adding it here to the forums because I also want to get a bit a comments from other members of the Community. I thought about posting this in the Feature requests forum, but decided that this isn't exactly a feature. I'm not even sure how possible this might be for Wikia, but it is something to think about.

When observing the new wikis special page like I do a lot, I have noticed that there are constantly more and more duplicates of the same wiki topic being created. Examples I've seen include numerous The Last Airbender wikis, Star Wars wikis, Club Penguin wikis, etc, just in English alone. I'm sure Wikia knew this would be a problem when they offer free creation of sites like that, and they do support the idea of people creating wikis like that so they can run them their own way, but what's bad is that most of the time, weeks after a wiki is created it still hasn't seen a single edit, not even by the founder. And really it just adds up, I bet.

But what if Wikia added something to the wiki creation form that said something like, "When creating this wiki, you agree that there must at least some editing for the first week of the wiki's creation or it will be deleted without warning. Wikia would like to see your wiki grow to strive, but that can't happen unless someone is active.", and then followed through with it? For the inactive wikis that have already been created, say that if they have been inactive for two months or more, add a sitenotice that clearly says, "This wiki is inactive, and would like some help. You can adopt this wiki and help it grow again, before it has to be deleted!" and if it remains inactive for another week or so, it's free to delete.

I'm not sure how much work it would be to do something like this, or if it's even worth the trouble, but then the URLs are freed up for someone else to use later, and server space would be improved because there won't be a ton of empty sites just sitting around. And the process would continue. But because of my limited knowledge of how Wikia runs from the inside, that's why I posted this here for community comments. I just think that if possible, this might help some.

--† DustKateb  (Talk to Me!)† 03:24, July 26, 2010 (UTC)