Community Central:Merging


 * This is not an official Wikia policy - just a proposal - comment on Talk:Merging

What to do with inactive Wikias?
The most propable reason why a Wikia becomes inactive is a very specialised topic that attracts too few people. Usually there exists a more general active wikia that shares the topic.

Example: a wiki about 500 people town with ~3 articles and no editors for 6 months could simply be merged into http://cities.wikia.com

Why do we need this at all?

 * inactive wikis attract spammers as no one takes a look at the recent changes
 * fewer people will join a dead project and start editing

Research
First find out wether there are still active editors. Try to contact the founder. If there is really nobody there, proceed. If not, ask the remaining Wikians, first! A hostile takeover is not very polite and should be avoided at all costs!

Transfer
As there are usually just few articles and all Wikias share the same account data, this can be done manually and does not take too much time:
 * Special:Export articles to create XML pages with author and page history
 * Special:Import them again (needs sysops rights)

Inform
You need to inform Wikia staff that a wiki can be shut down and even more important to redirect interested editors to the new source:
 * mark wikis Main Page and the Wikia description page with Template:Merged
 * using