Help:Duplicate communities

Duplicate wikis
Wikis are about working together. We allow multiple wikis on the same topic, but we strongly encourage you to find and join an existing wiki instead of trying to create a new project about an existing topic -- for many interests, we may already have an active community that needs your help, or a dormant project that you can adopt and bring to life.

In the wider web, wikis about the same topic tend to merge sooner or later, or the less popular project(s) are abandoned as editors move to the more complete wiki. It is much easier to incorporate good ideas into an existing wiki than to try to merge content or create "sister project" structures later.

Advantages of working together:
 * There is a better chance of reaching the number of active contributors needed to sustain a wiki over time
 * New ideas can use already-developed infrastructure of established Wikia, such as templates, infoboxes, and help pages
 * New ideas can enliven or provide new direction to a faltering wiki, if presented with kindness and tact

Disadvantages of creating a duplicate wiki:
 * Covering the same ground in the same way as other wikis makes it more difficult to attract readers and contributors
 * Re-creating work that has already been improved by many collaborators can be tiring and unnecessary
 * If you don't rewrite topics in your own words, you may be tempted to copy from other freely licensed wikis. If you do, you must remember:
 * Copying the hard work of a dedicated community may cause hard feelings, damaging the reputation of your wiki and making it more difficult to attract contributors
 * You may not copy content from other Wikia, or from Wikipedia, without providing proper credit and a link back to the source
 * Duplicating the exact text of another website severely penalizes the search engine results for the more recent wiki

If you really want a separate wiki on an existing topic, please use your creativity to present the information in a different way -- you could be serious where others are silly (or vice versa), be opinionated where others are neutral, focus on fan activity or trivia rather than encyclopedic information, or anything else that will set you apart from existing projects.

A wiki which only copies content from other wikis may be closed, if it fails to provide credit or begin editing the text to make the project different and distinct.

Wikia also does not duplicate Wikimedia projects, so if you are interested in general reference works we encourage you to join Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects in your language instead.

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