Community Central:Creation policy

Wikia's goal is to support large communities who want to work together, and small groups who want to share their passions with the world.

Wiki creation policy


Collaborate with people who love what you love Wikia welcomes wikis on almost any topic, large or small, popular or obscure, modern or historical, creative or documentary, funny or serious. However, your wiki must contain no hate, no libel, no pornographic content, and no copyright infringement.

You must agree:
 * to all of our terms of use, including the display of ads,
 * not to allow prohibited content on the wiki, and
 * that the content of the wiki will be freely licensed.

Free content
Text on Wikia sites is available under a free content licence, meaning the information you put on the wiki can be copied and reused by anyone. This is very important to our goal of increasing the amount of free content in the world, but isn't always what creators are looking for when searching for a wiki host. Please be sure you understand Licensing.

Although some fair use material may be included in wikis, Wikia aims to be a repository of free content, so any wiki which would be primarily made up of fair use material rather than freely licensed material is not permitted. Examples include fan translations of copyrighted works, screenshots of television shows or games, or scans of comic book pages.

Public viewing
All Wikia sites are publicly viewable. Wikia does not provide private wikis and there is no option in the software to password-protect or otherwise prevent people from reading any of the pages in a wiki.

Wikia sites are indexed by search engines and contributions may appear prominently in certain search results.

Public editing
Wikis are about working together, and all Wikia projects are open to the public to edit. There is no option to restrict editing to the founder or to a particular group.

Unnecessary page protection is a common mistake that is considered harmful to wiki development. A clear statement of the wiki's goals is a better way to promote your vision than technical restrictions.

Wikia are community projects, not personal websites. They are not owned by their founders, nor does the founder's opinion carry more weight in disagreements than any other user's opinion. Consensus and cooperation should be the primary means for organizing a wiki.

No abuse
Wikis which consist of offensive material or personal attacks will be closed.

A user who is banned on other Wikia projects or who abuses the wiki creation tool may be blocked from creating new wikis.

Users may not create wikis with offensive or abusive titles or urls. We have simple filtering in place to discourage the most obvious undesirable names, but we know it is not possible to block every possible abuse. Users who circumvent the filters in order to create wikis in bad faith will simply have their wiki deleted and their user account banned.

Please contact staff to report any abusive wiki name that we have missed, or if the filter mistakenly prevents you from using an innocent name.

Living people
Please be cautious about creating wikis or pages (even humorous ones) about living people who aren't publicly notable, including classmates and teachers, gaming clans, forum communities, and more. Even positive articles about people can cause unnecessary drama, and may become a tempting target for personal attacks, cyberbullying, unwanted exposure of personal information, and other violations of Wikia's Terms of Use. Remember that any article that uses a person's real name, username or pseudonym can show up prominently in internet searches, and may become a target of pranks or malice long after the original authors have moved on.

Even people who are publicly notable, like actors or politicians, should be treated with respect on Wikia sites. Keep the article's tone neutral or positive where that's appropriate to the wiki's mission. Take care that any negative statements are true, legal, and supported by references. Use humor and parody to make people smile, not as an excuse to insult or degrade real people with real feelings.

What is acceptable will vary depending on the type of wiki, but if problem content is not dealt with in good faith by the project's community, Wikia staff may remove or alter pages (or entire wikis) that are deemed libelous, offensive, or distressing.

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.

Closing, merging, and altering wikis
All wiki projects are subject to closure or alteration if necessary. Wikia staff and helpers may contact the community about making changes to the wiki, including the site name or url, to meet our Terms of Use or to improve search visibility and ad display.

While a wiki founder may request that their project be closed, if the topic is of general public interest Wikia generally prefers to leave dormant wikis available for adoption.

Wikis which have no content, or remain inactive, or have a large overlap with another Wikia may be merged with another project, locked from editing, or closed completely. In the case of complete closure of wikis that previously had content, the database of content will be made available for download. See closed Wikia for further details.