Community Central:Why use Wikia?

If you have a use for a wiki, and you want that wiki to be easily maintainable, part of a large community, and hosted for free, then you should consider using Wikicities for it.

By creating a wiki on Wikicities, you will instantly be part of a large wiki community. Many users edit across more than one Wikicity, bringing editing expertise to newly created Wikicities. The Central Wikicity provides a place for the communities to come together and deal with problems on individual wikis.

Hosting your wiki on Wikicities saves you the hassle of installing and maintaining your own wiki engine. The wiki can be created in minutes, and you don't even need to think about the technical issues involved, such as installation and back ups, or buying servers and domain names. Wikicities are hosted across a network of a growing number of servers (currently four) in a professional colocation facility (the same one that hosts Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects), ensuring your site is always available.

Top 20 reasons for using Wikicities

 * 1) Wikicities exclusively uses the highly scalable, highly internationalized, open source, MediaWiki software, which has a multitude of benefits over other wiki engines. Extensions such as hieroglyphics or timelines are available to Wikicities on request.
 * 2) Become part of a large wiki community, with full support for the social and technical aspects of running a wiki.
 * 3) Spam blacklist and protection of pages against severe vandalism.
 * 4) Support for communication within your community via talk pages, mailing lists, an IRC channel, and community pages within the Central Wikicity.
 * 5) Freely licensed content ensures it will remain free.
 * 6) Database download available so your data can never be locked into the site.
 * 7) Completely open site. No annoying hidden pages or log in required.
 * 8) If you choose to log in, only one account is needed to edit any wiki since a single login operates across all Wikicities and Memory Alpha.
 * 9) RSS feeds for recent changes and new pages.
 * 10) File upload feature allows to upload graphics or sound files.
 * 11) Customisable site style and navigation, including accesskeys and tooltips.
 * 12) Personal watchlist to keep track of pages in which you are interested.
 * 13) Editing toolbar to insert common formatting markup.
 * 14) Wikicities is run by Wikia, which passes the open company test.
 * 15) Full text search.
 * 16) Automatic lists of new pages, old pages, more visited pages, pages with spelling errors, images, users, admins and many more special pages.
 * 17) Many user preferences.
 * 18) Categories and tagging.
 * 19) Detailed statistics are available on the number of users, articles, visits, page requests and more, for each Wikicity.
 * 20) Complete version history. Every edit is stored, so can revert bad edits or check old revisions.

If you think Wikicities offers something else that ought to be in this top 20, please add that to the talk page.

Features of MediaWiki
See the MediaWiki feature list for a more extensive list.


 * 1) XML export
 * 2) "Stub" threshold which displays links to articles below a certain size rendered in a different color
 * 3) Printable versions of articles can be generated
 * 4) Message notification when someone edits your talk page.
 * 5) Optional automatic numbering of headings in an article
 * 6) Generate a table of contents for long articles (optional)
 * 7) Automatically turn ISBN numbers into links to an editable list of booksellers
 * 8) XHTML-compatible output
 * 9) Mathematical formulas using LaTeX syntax
 * 10) Automatic resizing of images
 * 11) User contributions lists display all the edits you or another user has made
 * 12) "Related changes": view a filtered version of Recent Changes to the pages linked from the current page
 * 13) Side-by-side diffs with the changed portions highlighted
 * 14) Free links, not UglyCaMeLcAsE
 * 15) Easy-to-learn Wikitext, not HTML
 * 16) Namespace allow content separation
 * 17) Discussion (Talk:) pages are separate from article pages
 * 18) Template: namespace for custom messages
 * 19) Section editing
 * 20) Edit preview
 * 21) Automatic merging of edit conflicts
 * 22) Automatic signatures
 * 23) Support for emailing users through the wiki (email address not shown to the user)
 * 24) UTF-8 support and multilingual interfaces
 * 25) RDF metadata
 * 26) Admin permissions
 * 27) "What links here": View pages that link to the current page.

Future features for Wikicities

 * Integration of the Wikimedia Commons, allowing you to use a large range of images on your wiki without needing to upload them.
 * Optional email notification of changes for any page.
 * Edit pages and images in an external editor of your choice and save it directly to the wiki.
 * Cross wiki template inclusion: Use standard templates and boilerplate messages on any Wikicity. Even include a whole page from another Wikicity without needing to re-upload it.
 * Combined or separate user pages: decide if you want user pages on more than one Wikicity, or if you want a combined user page across all wikis.

Comments
Some reasons to use Wikicities even if another wiki exists on the topic:


 * 1) Is the existing wiki free content, that is, explictly licensed as such? If the only wikis that exist are proprietary content, a free new Wikicity is desirable (all Wikicities are GNU FDL). The FF-Wiki has no copyright assignment on the edit screen and no copyright notice in the footer. The Intro claims that "all original content on this site is copyright-free", but that claim is of dubious validity if contributors have not explicitly assigned their contributions to the PD.
 * 2) Does the existing wiki use CamelCase? CamelCase makes pages difficult to read, difficult to find through search engines, and is irreversible without manual user intervention (a program cannot know whether the real title of "MicroSoft" is meant to be CamelCase or not unless it uses a dictionary, a dictionary is likely to be insufficient for anything but the most basic wikis). To me, it is very much desirable to replace an existing CamelCase-wiki with a non-CamelCase-one.
 * 3) What wiki engine does the existing wiki use? There are countless wikis which will forever languish in mediocrity because of a wiki engine with inferior usability, inferior functionality, or inferior scalability.
 * 4) Is the existing wiki community open to new languages, and does the wiki engine they use support them? Most wikis are strictly monolingual. Wikicities will create wikis in new languages if there is a user interest to do so, and MediaWiki has excellent support for even very small languages due to its use on Wikipedia, which is available in over 100 languages.
 * 5) Which policies does the existing wiki follow? Is it possible for regular users to influence the policies of the wiki, or do they just have to follow whatever rules the "GodKing" makes? A truly free wiki should also be free in terms of user participation.
 * 6) Just because there is already a wiki on a certain subject doesn't mean that Wikicities-based hosting wouldn't provide significant advantages.

--Eloquence 19:19, 16 Mar 2005 (EST)