Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-209674-20140225224507/@comment-4142476-20140301081300

I'm not saying copying doesn't happen, but it's still not allowed. When someone makes a website without a single copyright notification, then it's always best to assume that general copyright applies. Wikia goes under CC-BY-SA, and I agree that putting a notification in the article comments or on the talk page is a bit ridiculous, but an edit summary I think is the least people should add.

But I agree, Special:Export + Special:Import are great tools and would probably be regarded as sufficient attribution because they show the history. However I personally wouldn't use them to make a duplicate wiki better (to get back on-topic), but instead for things such as wiki merges and wiki moves to another client (Wikia → other hosts, other hosts → Wikia).

I think duplicate wikis do more harm than they do good though. To think two wikis on the same subject is twice the viewers is a bit naive, you'd always be losing a big chunk of viewers and editors to the other wiki. I really think combined effort of the contributors in one wiki will get this wiki to grow more, and it will get higher WAM and google scores than one wiki possibly could when there's a second out there. And if you look at it from the point of the reader, that makes sense too: one well-written article is much more valuable than two okay-written articles.

To get back on the Anti-Duplication Policy though -- I don't think that's a good idea. Duplicate wikis may not be a nice thing and should definitely be discouraged, but to go as far as to forbid it, I think that's a bit too much to ask. I think it would be a better idea to add a "Explore if there isn't already a wiki about your subject yet" or something similar to the wiki creation tool, and otherwise make the search wiki tool more present. After all, there's also a "Start/create a wiki" button on every single page.