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 Wikia.

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

Hosting your wiki on Wikia 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. A wiki at Wikia is hosted across a growing network of servers in a professional colocation facility, ensuring your site is always available.

Wikia is using a modified version of MediaWiki, which as we continue to develop the software will get better and better. For example, YouTube can be integrated with the content, users can be notified of changes via email, calendars can be used on pages, dynamic pages lists, parser functions, and much more. We also have excellent spam control and cross-wiki vandal blocking, which leaves users more time to focus on the content instead of dealing with bad edits. Have a look at ArmchairGM or our new entertainment wiki to see some of the other new features we are working on, including automatic listings of good content, and public voting and commenting, Wysiwyg editing, and user challenges.

Top 21 reasons for using Wikia

 * 1) The best community support available anywhere on the planet. We are the same people that created Wikipedia.
 * 2) *There is no better place for promoting your vision or what you're passionate about than through a wiki. Wikia is all about helping passionate communities grow.
 * 3) *Growing a wiki into a passionate community is an exciting and sometimes challenging affair. If you have questions, we have good answers.
 * 4) *Wikia is always working to make managing wikis, whether large or small, as easy as possible. We listen to our community and are always working on new tools to help you.
 * 5) *Wikia has a lot of diverse communites. This means we can promote your vision to other people in our community as a better way to get kick-started, if that's what you want to do.
 * 6) *Our culture grew out of Wikipedia, we know what's important and we know how not to meddle. We know that our job is to help you.
 * 7) Wikia exclusively uses the highly scalable, highly internationalized, free/open source, MediaWiki software, which has a multitude of benefits over other wiki engines. Extensions such as hieroglyphics are available to Wikia on request. Extensions such as timelines are installed on all Wikia. See Wikia with extensions.
 * 8) Become part of a large wiki community, with full support for the social and technical aspects of running a wiki.
 * 9) Spam blacklist and protection of pages against severe vandalism.
 * 10) Support for communication within your community via talk pages, mailing lists, an IRC channel, and community pages within the Central Wikia.
 * 11) Freely licensed content ensures it will remain free.
 * 12) Database download available so your data can never be locked into the site.
 * 13) Completely open site. No annoying hidden pages or login required.
 * 14) If you choose to log in, only one account is needed to edit any wiki since a single login operates across all wikis.
 * 15) RSS feeds for recent changes and new pages.
 * 16) File upload feature allows to upload graphics or sound files.
 * 17) Customisable site style and navigation, including accesskeys and tooltips.
 * 18) Personal watchlist to keep track of pages in which you are interested.
 * 19) Editing toolbar to insert common formatting markup.
 * 20) Wikia is run by Wikia, Inc., which passes the open company test.
 * 21) Full text search.
 * 22) Automatic lists of new pages, old pages, more visited pages, pages with spelling errors, images, users, admins and many more special pages.
 * 23) Many user preferences.
 * 24) Categories and tagging.
 * 25) Detailed statistics are available on the number of users, articles, visits, page requests and more, for each Wikia.
 * 26) Complete version history. Every edit is stored, so can revert bad edits or check old revisions.

If you think Wikia offers something else that ought to be in this top 21, 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 formulae 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.

Wiki of the same topic elsewhere
Some reasons to use Wikia even if another wiki exists on the topic:


 * 1) Is the existing wiki free content, that is, explicitly licensed as such? If it is proprietary content, a free new Wikia is desirable. Or, it may not be explicitly licensed as free content. On Wikia, content is explicitly licensed under the GNU FDL or a free Creative Commons license.
 * 2) Does the existing wiki use CamelCase? CamelCase makes pages difficult to read and search, and it is irreversible without manual work (a program cannot know whether a title of "MicroSoft" is meant to be CamelCase or not without a dictionary, which is likely insufficient). Wikia allows you to use free links. Wikia also avoids confusion by allowing the initial letter of an article to be written (and retrieved) in lower or upper case and converts spaces in the URL into readable underscore ("_") marks rather than confusing code.
 * 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, functionality, or 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. Wikia 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) Is the existing wiki privately owned? Either an individual hosting the wiki on a machine at his home, or if an individual personally pays some company to provide the hosting service. Even if the content is available under GDFL, if something unfortunate happens to the "owner", and the community doesn't hear about it, the wiki might vaporize without warning.  A single unfortunate traffic accident can cut off the bill payment for the privately-owned wiki, vaporizing it without warning.  With Wikia, it'll take a highly coordinated international conspiracy to take out the owner (Wikia), and even then it'll probably make headline news so the community will know and quickly make a latest backup of the database before the hosting service stops.

Miksi käyttää Wikiaa? ウィキアを使う理由 為什麼要用 Wikia?