Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-209674-20140225224507/@comment-4142476-20140228083449

Hey, this is one of things I take a quite strict stance on. I honestly agree with the fact that people should not make duplicate wikis, because the founders regularly make them for reasons such as: Personally I've seen it a couple of times where people asked the original wiki for admin rights when they had made less than 100 edits (100 edits is a nice contribution, I'm not denying that, but I don't think adminship's necessary), only to start a new wiki when the admin did not want to give them the rights.
 * "The original one is too small / poorly written / badly designed."
 * "It had no active contributors."
 * "I couldn't do with it what I wanted." (also known as "I'm not admin there")

I also find it an invalid argument when people tell me they would rather start from scratch than working on a wiki with badly-written pages and a poor design. One wiki I work on is 1000+ articles, and I still regularly find HTML and  tags in pages. I however greatly appreciate their writers' work of looking up the information and writing everything out. The only case where I find it useful to start a new wiki about the same subject is when the community on the original one is really ill-mannered and when there's a lot of bad interaction going on. In that case however, I would still suggest putting up a community discussion with a RfA when you have a decent amount of contributions and such. Then it's you who can do something about how the wiki is run.

Also, one specific case I'd like to mention: fr.yu-gi-oh was originally created under another URL to be about one specific anime or game series, but later they shifted to the entire Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise and changed their URL (instead of merging back with fr.yugioh). They did grow bigger than the other wiki and have better articles about the games and such. They requested that the English wiki interlanguage link to them for FR instead of to the other wiki, but when suggested a merge they do not want to give up the duplicate pages that are more well-written on the original wiki.

Besides that I would however also like to say that making duplicates is actually not really a bad thing (I just think it's really stupid...). As Jr Mime said, it's perfectly OK to do so unless you start copying pages. Copying pages may only be done with the appropriate attribution, as mentioned on Wikia's Licensing page under the section Importing text: "Where such credit is commonly given through page histories (such as copying within Wikia), it is sufficient to give attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page history, when importing the text."