Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-18095-20151007212617/@comment-24473195-20151007223602

Fandyllic wrote: Being curated makes it special. Not having to specially request access to its images and files makes it special.

Also, you can request many options from staff, but that doesn't mean the request will be granted. It makes a huge difference.

Community Central could already be used as a central repository, but Wikia doesn't want to open it up, likely because they would feel obligated to manage it, but have it not interfere with the current purpose of CC. Personally, I think community central has too much junk to serve as a central repository for wikias. But you made a valid point.

I'm one of the  people who actually pestered Wikia staff until we got global lua modules, so I entirely agree with the concept. From a community standpoint, maintenance of such a repository would be hell. Wikipedia only deals with encylopedic content, although they allow pretty much anything in commons. The problem is that wikias are far too diversified, there are wikias on books, games, education, anime, movies, and some obscure topics that few people have ever heard about.

The biggest problem with images and media, that wikia and wikimedia face is that unlike text it isn't easily searchable and sortable. There is also the sheer amount of duplicate content anyone would have to sift through.

That's beyond the fact that wikians don't share a common goal like wikipedians. To take a simple example, if I had to ask all wikians who have ever created a general purpose lua module to put it in dev.wikia.com, most wouldn't make the effort despite the fact that they may need a module in another random wikia (that they don't know about).

So while it is an interesting concept in theory, making it work in practice would be challenging to say the least.