Lostpedia joins with Wikia
A quick announcement by Kevin Croy. Founder of Lostpedia and Lostpedia Admin.
Greetings,
I'm pleased to announce that Lostpedia will be joining the Wikia family of wikis. Over the next few days a migration will be taking place and I'd like to share with you a few of the factors that went into the decision and also properly set your expectations.
I had the honor of meeting Jimmy Wales a year ago at the Wikia offices. He made it clear that he was a fan of Lost and a fan of Lostpedia and offered to help us if we needed anything. Since then I've had the pleasure to meet the rest of the Wikia team. The more I learned about them; the more it made sense to work together.
Here are a few of the benefits of moving Lostpedia to Wikia:
As the Lostpedia community grows larger and stronger, site stability will become more and more important. By moving, Lostpedia will be on Wikia's world class geographically distributed hosting platform, which should increase speed and reliability for all users World Wide.
Access to the entire Wikia team which includes: Programmers, System Administrators, Graphic Designers, Spam Fighters, etc.
Due to Wikia's scale they receive better rates on their advertising and lower costs on operations. As a result we are able to immediately remove the "in text" ads and remove most ads for logged in users!
We will have access to all of the Wikia custom wiki modules such as their new Visual (WYSIWYG) editor, Multiple Image Upload tool, and Spam protection tools
From a community perspective, nothing will change. Our current team of Sysops will stay in place and Wikia will support us in every way they can. They want to see this community thrive as much as we all do.
We will switch to their servers on Thursday morning. Although I am anticipating a smooth transition, your understanding and patience during this time will be appreciated. Please rest assured that we will all work together to quickly iron out any bugs or snags that pop up. During the transition the wiki will be put in read only mode.
Please see Lostpedia:WikiaFAQ for more information. You can see a demo site up now at http://tor4.wikia.com/.
Thanks, --Admin
UPDATE : The wiki is currently locked down while the data transfer to Wikia is underway. Please be patient whilst we set up over the next day or so. The move has required a large amount of work both at our end, and Wikia's, in order to move you all over smoothly. Any questions you have should be answered on the WikiaFAQ linked above, but if they aren't, please leave a comment here, join us in IRC or on our forums where I'm sure one of the SysOps from Lostpedia, or the staff of Wikia should be able to help answer your questions.
UPDATE 2 from Santa: The new site is now Live and working at Lostpedia.wikia.com. For languages other than English, the links are at www.wikia.com/wiki/Lostpedia.
4 comments:
The switch is a good move considering it'll ensure Lostpedia sticking around on the web. The anti-spam features are good, the loading speed, the resources. All good. Just need to sort out the navigating aspects, but other than that I see this move as a necessary and positive move.
Congratulations! More stability and security is always a good thing. I'm not sure how much Wikia allows you to customize the appearance, but that test site sure could use some visual TLC. ;-)
Cheers, and best of luck for the next season.
We have a new skin ready and waiting to be launched, we're just waiting for the move to complete and its going up!
A few more informational comments:
1) We are not merging with the existing Lost Wikia
2) We still maintain our existing editorial independence as well as all important administrative tasks
3) Page histories, and editor contribution histories are retained
4) Existing usernames and accounts are retained, and in the case of conflict there are going to be very nice ways to resolve it; existing but defunct wikia accounts might be deleted in the case of conflict, or a temporary username of "Lostpedia_username" will be used with the option of changing it. If the same useraccount exists on both wikis with the same associated email addresses, it is simply moved over.
5) Newer languages will be easier to add, and importantly, easier to maintain and upgrade. Yes this probably means some long-awaited languages like a Hebrew Lostpedia is coming; Existing non-English Lostpedias also are migrated: Spanish, French, etc.
6) Adjunct Lostpedia communities remain unaffected: Forums, IRC, etc.
These were among some of the issues that I was concerned about, and were addressed to my complete satisfaction. The Wikia migration techs are wizards so we're very excited to watch as the process progresses!
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