Tag Archives: wikia

Wikia and WikiFur licensing: to clear up confusion

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If any users of the English WikiFur have noticed talk page announcements posted this Thursday regarding Wikia’s exclusive switch to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license this Friday, we would like to inform all users that WikiFur is already mentioned as an opt-out candidate, as we have already switched to a dual-licensing scheme involving both the CC-by-SA and the GFDL as of the last week. The English WikiFur is already slated for resettlement onto non-Wikia servers owned by by the end of the year (the last and largest WikiFur project to do such), and, as stated in an earlier post by

[info]greenreaper,

all WikiFur subprojects will retain the dual-licensing scheme for the foreseeable future on the new servers.

Wikia Search: some post-mortem assessments of what could’ve been

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 Wikia Search didn’t have to do as poorly in its short life as it did. By the time that Jimmy Wales announced the end of the project on March 31, the search results had improved somewhat, but the user interface was still mixing the cutting-edged with the half-assed and the non-existent, and most user input or activity for the project had ended by the Fall of 2008 (that includes the project’s blog and mailing list). 

Wikia Search could’ve followed other major search engines (Live Search, Google, Yahoo!) into the realm of vertical search, with separate search modes that made use of Wikia Search’s backend to search specific types of content (Video Search, Blog Search, even – HELLO! – Wiki Search, one that’s better than Wikipedia’s own in-site search), and it could’ve provided custom search for domain name owners.

It could’ve done so much more in such an amount of time, but it didn’t.

What went wrong?

EDIT: Wales’ latest gig, Wikianswers, will probably get into a legal tiff with WikiAnswers soon; they both lay claim to having been the first to use the name. Not necessarily saying that Wales may have to save face in light of Wikia Search’s end, but this will get ridiculous before it gets better.