No, not "The Good Place"-type forking, but forking in the software sense. Also, standard no-promises disclaimer, as I'm just spitballing here and haven't discussed this with anyone else yet.
I assume there's a large overlap between people who use this forum and people who are active Memory Alpha editors, so I thought I'd ask here:
Is there any interest in moving MA away from Wikia (umm, I mean, FANDOM powered by Wikia®)?
I for one hate navigating MA these days, the "Oasis" skin Wikia forced on it a while back is a complete eyesore. I know there's a decent level of anti-Wikia sentiment in the community like in other large communities that have been screwed over multiple times by Wikia's shenanigans. To be honest, given what's happened with those other communities (like Uncyclopedia, D&D Wiki etc), I'm actually quite surprised this hasn't been done already.
I'm one of the sysadmins and board members for a not-for-profit service hosting some other special-interest wikis - we actually grew out of a Wikia fork ourselves, way back in 2013. So, we have some of the existing infrastructure (and all of the expertise) needed to support this. However, this would only work if two conditions were achievable:
1. Most of the community would actually move away from Wikia to the new independent wiki, and
2. Enough of the new community would be willing to support the new wiki with donations, especially a large donation drive at the beginning to cover the additional infrastructure we would need to host MA.
Our existing model is donation-based (much like the Wikimedia Foundation) and we don't run ads on our wikis, so I think I'd only be able to convince the rest of the team to attempt this if we had a serious shot at keeping MA ad-free too.
I assume there's a large overlap between people who use this forum and people who are active Memory Alpha editors, so I thought I'd ask here:
Is there any interest in moving MA away from Wikia (umm, I mean, FANDOM powered by Wikia®)?
I for one hate navigating MA these days, the "Oasis" skin Wikia forced on it a while back is a complete eyesore. I know there's a decent level of anti-Wikia sentiment in the community like in other large communities that have been screwed over multiple times by Wikia's shenanigans. To be honest, given what's happened with those other communities (like Uncyclopedia, D&D Wiki etc), I'm actually quite surprised this hasn't been done already.
I'm one of the sysadmins and board members for a not-for-profit service hosting some other special-interest wikis - we actually grew out of a Wikia fork ourselves, way back in 2013. So, we have some of the existing infrastructure (and all of the expertise) needed to support this. However, this would only work if two conditions were achievable:
1. Most of the community would actually move away from Wikia to the new independent wiki, and
2. Enough of the new community would be willing to support the new wiki with donations, especially a large donation drive at the beginning to cover the additional infrastructure we would need to host MA.
Our existing model is donation-based (much like the Wikimedia Foundation) and we don't run ads on our wikis, so I think I'd only be able to convince the rest of the team to attempt this if we had a serious shot at keeping MA ad-free too.
