Wikia, Wikipedia and advertising: A clash of ethics

Wikipedia prides itself on being a bastion of free content on the Internet, its non-profit Wikimedia Foundation a strong advocate of community ethics, a ‘made by everyone, for everyone’ approach that even Henri de Saint-Simon himself would have been proud of.

Wikia is a wiki web hosting service co-established in 2004 on the back of Wikipedia’s success by founder Jimbo Wales, and is sometimes referred by the media as ‘the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia’. Both the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikia themselves disagree with this description, but to the untrained eye it is easy to see why this ‘misunderstanding’ can and does come about.

Wales is famously the figurehead of Wikipedia and a strong supporter of the non-commercial GFDL license, which has been an integral part of keeping the project ‘free’. His involvement in the startup of Wikia Inc. lends the organisation an unavoidable association with Wikipedia, and thus its ‘keep it free and non-commercial’ mentality rubs off, to some extent, on its for-profit smaller brother.

In reality, Wikia is in complete contrast to this – whereas the Wikimedia Foundation go to great pains to stress their charitable foundation status, Wikia generates profit via advertisements placed on all wikis hosted on their servers.

And it’s this aspect that many are objecting to. In June 2009, Wikia imposed forced changes in each wiki’s design, moving advertisements to the head of each content page. Registered users could switch back to the old design in their preferences, but new visitors to the Wikia’s sites were greeted with a differently designed version of the site than the collective communities had worked hard to create.

Wiki leaders began to complain about how the advertisements became so intrusive they switched emphasis away from information and towards commercialisation with the new forced design, known as the New Monaco skin.

Currently, Wikia are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Like so many other free-content websites, they are faced with a difficult decision: monetise or perish, and the users don’t like it. A general feeling of marginalisation is beginning to creep in amongst many of the farm’s communities, leading to a continued mass exodus from Wikia’s servers.

The same complaints appear time and time again: robotic, characterless representatives bound and restricted in their responses by boring legal mumbo jumbo. In the world of wikis, community is everything, and commercial ethics really do not fit into the whole DIY, volunteer spirit that is the lifeblood of so many online user forums and wikis.

But Wikia are determined to make it damn hard for anyone looking to abandon ship at this time. The Transformers wiki and Illogicopedia, two notable Wikia deserters, have now been re-established at independent servers, yet the original Wikia wikis still remain in the form of the Transformers Wikia and Wackypedia respectively.

Effectively, this means there are now two of each wiki, with both independent sites running in direct competition to the old Wikia sites. As you can imagine, Wikia’s Google PageRank status is always going to be larger than any independent site, so a simple search for ‘Transformers Wiki’ will bring up the Wikia wiki first every time without fail.

Illogicopedia has largely avoided such a problem as it managed to reach a deal with Wikia to rename the abandoned site ‘Wackypedia’. This does not mean to say, however, that its Google positioning has suffered as a result: Google searches for any article on the wiki will still bring up pages on the old Wikia wiki ahead of the new, independent one.

These cases, however, are small fry compared to the example of the Uncyclopedia. A Wikipedia parody formed in early 2005 by two independent fans of Wikipedia’s now-defunct Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense section, it soon became a massive hit with the Wikimedia community. It wasn’t long, though, before the site was acquired by Wikia in a deal that would see Uncyclopedia’s Creative Commons license and domain name remain intact.

Fast forward to 2009, and the Credit Crunch is biting down hard on Wikia. As part of their cost-cutting measures, Uncyclopedia was switched from uncyclopedia.org to uncyclopedia.wikia.org and advertisements added for the first time since the original ‘no ads’ agreement was drawn up.

Coincidentally, the wiki suffered a massive drop in activity as users’ general sensibilities and priorities changed, with many of the site’s core userbase moving on to pastures new with the dramatic u-turn in the world’s economic climate. Whether Wikia’s imposed changes had anything to do with this remains to be fully seen, though there is no doubt that numerous disgruntled editors jumping ship can be attributed to Wikia’s shift in attitudes.

The upshot of it all is that the Golden Age of the humour wiki has well and truly passed, ravaged by the recession and, more directly, the tightening of Wikia’s belt.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, continues to thrive and expand at an enormous rate, with the article count shooting past the three million mark in 2009. As a charitable organisation, Wikimedia relies on donations, so funding is not as large a problem as its commercial counterpart.

Wikipedia would do well to learn from the decline of its ailing little brother and beware the temptation of commercialisation.

Further reading

• The Wikia Complaint Wiki: cataloguing the mass Wikia exodus.
• The last word on Wikia? - Illogiblog