So, what's the difference between the wiki and the wikia?

Linguica said:

I hate that Google invariably changes "doomwiki" to "doom wiki" when I try and search for a page, and then to add insult to injury, often fails to list the doomwiki.org version on the first page of search results at all.

The "verbatim" option is handy for that. If you disable javascript it's conveniently right there in the left sidebar. Otherwise it's hidden three clicks deep in a series of nested menus.

Linguica said:

http://www.wikia.com/Licensing

Also explained on our end, with the newer version of the license to which we upgraded as legally allowed back in June:
Doom_Wiki:Copyrights

We also have FAQs about it, which nobody reads:
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Wiki:FAQ#Other_Doom_wikis

The more unique and interesting articles in the DoomWiki that can't be found in the Wikia, the better.

IMX said:

The more unique and interesting articles in the DoomWiki that can't be found in the Wikia, the better.

I was quite pleased to notice that my Xaser and Memfis articles hadn't been pinched. :P Those things took fucking ages.

The Memfis article is full of wrong info tho... Not all of these maps came out in 2014: they were posted on the forums years ago and absolutely nothing about them was changed when they were uploaded to the archive. Putting them under year 2014 is just misleading.

^ Then maybe you should edit the article yourself!

kuchitsu said:

The Memfis article is full of wrong info tho... Not all of these maps came out in 2014: they were posted on the forums years ago and absolutely nothing about them was changed when they were uploaded to the archive. Putting them under year 2014 is just misleading.

I just put when they were released onto the archives, so it's still technically correct. *Shrugs* If you want to change the dates around then go ahead.

Quasar said:

Also explained on our end, with the newer version of the license to which we upgraded as legally allowed back in June:
Doom_Wiki:Copyrights

We also have FAQs about it, which nobody reads:
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Wiki:FAQ#Other_Doom_wikis

Something that can't be stressed enough:

If you wish to republish content found here, you should provide proper citation in the form of either a backlink to the page where you found the information, or a complete serialization of the page's revision history as is available through the MediaWiki API.

Never ever use the word 'should' in legalese. It invalidates everything you say. Replace it with *must*. (Just in case someone wants to butt heads with Wikia, this single word could render the entire case futile.)

Wait, what? Is that how English really works?

"Should" = you're encouraged, but not obliged; "must" = well, you must.

kuchitsu said:

Wait, what? Is that how English really works?

I was talking legalese, not the implied meaning. In legalese each word has precise meaning, which is why legal documents are often overtly verbose and explicit - to the point that normal people have trouble understanding them. People have stumbled over that little distinction a few times too often and yet the same mistake always gets repeated.

If you want to make a case in a court of law that single word could make or break your case - especially if you want to fight someone like Wikia whose entire business model depends on monetizing other people's data. That single 'should' effectively tells them to take what they want, the owner can't do anything should things turn sour, because he just *asked* for attribution but did not *require* it - at least that's what the opposing lawyer would tell the court, and they had a good point with it.

"Should" is for expected events ("I should arrive in Berlin tomorrow") or a moral duty ("you should write a thank-you letter for this gift"). It's not binding, behind every "should" is the idea that it might not happen anyway.

"Shall" is stronger, it takes the probability away. "I shall arrive in Berlin tomorrow" or "you shall write a thank-you letter" -- here you're no longer entertaining the idea it won't happen. These things will happen.

"Must" is even stronger, because there's the added idea that you'll be held accountable: now it's "this will happen or else". "I must arrive in Berlin tomorrow" -- if I don't, something horrible will happen, like I won't be there in time to thwart the evil plot of Professor Badguyovski or whatever. "You must write a thank-you letter" -- if you don't, I'm gonna drag you to your writing desk by your ear and make you.


Likewise, for "can" and "could". "I can do it" is a guarantee and the implication if you say that is that you will actually do it. "I could do it" isn't a guarantee and the implication is that you won't actually bother trying.

Oh that's interesting, thanks. I guess I kind of felt this difference but never seriously thought about it until now.

Maybe one day we'll have a special language for legal documents? Similar to programs with "if\else" statements, etc. Something with much less potential for misunderstandings...

I doubt it, that would put half the lawyers out of work... :D

kuchitsu said:

Maybe one day we'll have a special language for legal documents? Similar to programs with "if\else" statements, etc.

UML could be ideal for that...

ChekaAgent said:

If Wikia is as evil as everyone says, then I'm 100% sure that they paid Google to not list doomwiki.org on the first page of the results.

It's not possible to do that.

ChekaAgent said:

Anyway, this is probably a dumb question, but is there a theoretical possibility of Wikia taking legal action against doomwiki.org because of.. plagiarism? I mean, when doomwiki forked, it just copied the already existing content from Wikia, didn't it? So.. or Wikia just doesn't give a shit?

Linguica already answered your question in a terse way, but to expand on his answer: everything on Wikia, Wikipedia, and most other wikis, is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Just like a piece of open source software, the license guarantees certain rights, like the ability to take all the text and make a competing site without there being any chance that someone will take legal action against you.

fraggle said:

It's not possible to do that.

Linguica already answered your question in a terse way, but to expand on his answer: everything on Wikia, Wikipedia, and most other wikis, is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Just like a piece of open source software, the license guarantees certain rights, like the ability to take all the text and make a competing site without there being any chance that someone will take legal action against you.

I know the company's line and what they say, but the way it behaves is extremely biased against sites like ours. Apparently I'd need to commit a blood sacrifice to the elder gods to get Google to stop penalizing our site sharply for any slight downturns or problems we run into, meanwhile wikia is completely invincible. It really doesn't matter if there's an exchange of money, if the system is still rigged to prefer certain content providers just because of other factors.

Also occasionally (like right now), when there is a flurry of news activity, Google will drop us from the front page completely in preference for placement of 4-5 news links or YouTube videos. Prioritizing their own content over being a search engine. Conveniently however, the wikia link stays entrenched above it at #1 when this happens (to see this in action right now, query for Phobos Mission Control on Google, and now, turn around and query for it on DuckDuckGo, and tell me you don't see the bias).

I continue to implement more and more of Google's SEO suggestions and yet at the same time watch my web rank either stagnate, or turn down sharply every 3 weeks due to this news/videos issue. The pattern of it can be seen in Webmaster Tools quite clearly. I add microdata to our pages and Google ignores it. I add images to our site map and Google won't index them. I add rel="canonical" to pages and Google still complains about duplicated content. You cannot please it.

Right, and I share your frustration with search rankings for the wiki. But ChekaAgent's specific claim was "they paid Google to not list doomwiki.org", and what I said is true: it's not possible to do that.

But the ranking makes a strong likelihood that some money is flowing so that Wikia is not subject do these penalizing methods. It's quite obvious that Google has some kind of whitelist that excludes certain websites and I can't imagine that they do that for free.

Stuff like this is why Google is constantly on the EU hitlist for some kind of violation.

Is there a rivalry between the Wikia users and the DWiki community? Because I've noticed that the people behind the Fallout Wiki (Wikia) and the people running the Vault (Gamepedia) seem to have some strong tensions between them that often result in flame wars.

dethtoll said:

Is there a rivalry between the Wikia users and the DWiki community?

Well, back when I was using the Wikia as a main information resource about Doom, I thought that the Doomwiki is a rip-off of Wikia,... until I realised that the Doomwiki is the correct Wiki. Many Wikia users probably just don't know that fact and still think that Doomwiki is just a rip-off (because it lists second on search engines).
By the way, the Wikia is run by Justice Infinity (also known as Doomguy 2000) and he's pretty famous for having negative attitude towards Doomworld, and since Doomwiki is run by Doomworld users, that means he's probably negative to Doomwiki as well.

dethtoll said:

Is there a rivalry between the Wikia users and the DWiki community? Because I've noticed that the people behind the Fallout Wiki (Wikia) and the people running the Vault (Gamepedia) seem to have some strong tensions between them that often result in flame wars.

Not actively and I do not promote this kind of obstructive and antagonistic attitude, but they have certainly angered me in the past by stealing our content and then quoting supposed Wikia policy as to why they can't make it right by citing where they got it from.

The main person I've had this issue with is RobertATfm, who is a long time editor of multiple Wikia subdomains and, as far as I know, helped found the Chex Quest wiki that is still hosted there. Personally I'd rather be on the same civil page with him about this stuff, but he has never attempted to make a peaceful form of contact to discuss it further. Justice Infinity (Doomguy2k) has been more correct in his handling of it so far, but that hasn't stopped some probably well-intentioned editors from plagiarizing anyway (some text was recently taken from our article on Heretic keys, for example; I am not the only editor who was plagiarized so I have not bothered sending a DMCA this time - I've sent them ones recently due to material stolen from my Dungeon Keeper Millennium site and would rather not raise suspicions that I could be abusing DMCAs by sending too many too quickly over minor shit like this).

I will also note that Justice Infinity has still made constructive edits at DoomWiki.org while being an admin at the other site, and that is the kind of thing I would rather see happen than to have infighting and pointless rivalry.

If we change "should" to "must", will it only affect the republications from now on or will it work retroactively?

kuchitsu said:

If we change "should" to "must", will it only affect the republications from now on or will it work retroactively?

That change has already been made and, because that page is not a legally binding set of terms, it makes no difference. The only legal agreement on DoomWiki.org officially is the Terms of use. This is linked on every page, and linked doubly through the policy portal template on all policy pages. It is also referenced from Policies and guidelines (the community's policies, not those of the website -ie. MancuNET and myself as webmasters), and in the FAQ.

The governing license for DoomWiki.org textual content is not the Doom Wiki:Copyrights page, but the canonical text of the CC BY-SA 4.0 International license, which states that you must provide proper citation (it is what the "BY" term in the license short name denotes).

I don't know much about the long standing war between the two factions, but I can personally attest that the Wikia page is a pile of hot garbage. It's unfortunate that Google has allied itself with such an unholy entity. A thousand deaths upon the Doom Wikia. Doom Wiki forever.

Quasar said:

That change has already been made and, because that page is not a legally binding set of terms, it makes no difference. The only legal agreement on DoomWiki.org officially is the Terms of use. This is linked on every page, and linked doubly through the policy portal template on all policy pages. It is also referenced from Policies and guidelines (the community's policies, not those of the website -ie. MancuNET and myself as webmasters), and in the FAQ.

The governing license for DoomWiki.org textual content is not the Doom Wiki:Copyrights page, but the canonical text of the CC BY-SA 4.0 International license, which states that you must provide proper citation (it is what the "BY" term in the license short name denotes).

So I think the point is that the Wikia is CC-BY-SA 3.0 while the Doom Wiki is CC-BY-SA 4.0, so "technically" Wikia can't use our content. Is that correct?

Assuming so, I personally don't really strongly agree with this kind of approach. When it comes down to disputes over particular versions of open content licenses, while you may technically be in the right to complain, it's hard to see why it's worth getting riled up about. Is there something in this that's really essential to protect for example?

Ultimately the whole point of an open license like the creative commons licenses is to promote free sharing, distribution and reuse, so trying to stand against that seems like rather a futile move.

fraggle said:

So I think the point is that the Wikia is CC-BY-SA 3.0 while the Doom Wiki is CC-BY-SA 4.0, so "technically" Wikia can't use our content. Is that correct?

Assuming so, I personally don't really strongly agree with this kind of approach. When it comes down to disputes over particular versions of open content licenses, while you may technically be in the right to complain, it's hard to see why it's worth getting riled up about. Is there something in this that's really essential to protect for example?

Ultimately the whole point of an open license like the creative commons licenses is to promote free sharing, distribution and reuse, so trying to stand against that seems like rather a futile move.

We originally discussed this on wiki and I stated that a lack of backwards compatibility was only part of the motivation. At that time you stated you didn't have any objections to upgrading (http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Wiki:Central_Processing/2014#License_upgrade_proposal)

There were other good reasons to upgrade to 4.0 that I also strongly support - you can't apply technological measures to works under 4.0, so ie., making and selling a DRM'd eBook of the wiki isn't legal with it under 4.0 for example. It also uses a more clear and concise terminology and incorporates official internationalizations, whereas the "Unported" part of the name of 3.0 means that translations of the license weren't official and thus there were potential barriers to interpretation of the license in jurisdictions outside the US. These are all very similar to improvements that were made in the GPL 3.0 license.

I was asked by community members to go ahead with the license change in the wake of E3 2015, when we started development on Doom 2016 content. The fears that it would all be immediately taken to the other site were certainly present in some of our members, obviously. Anyway, it wasn't a unilateral decision from me in any case. It was discussed ad nauseum in #doomwiki before the transition, and a 3-day comment period was available on the wiki for the proposed changes to take effect, as our terms of use state are needed for changes made for legal or administrative reasons.

Also as far as barriers to open sharing go, you might take that argument to wikia first, since they're the ones instructing admins to take content from other sites and remove the citations. Ultimately, they chose to not cooperate with the open wiki ecosystem. I feel no guilt about making it harder for them to use our content when they're behaving this way.

I have no issue if other community or free-and-open wikis under 3.0 want to use our content, properly. Things could be arranged.

Quasar said:

We originally discussed this on wiki and I stated that a lack of backwards compatibility was only part of the motivation. At that time you stated you didn't have any objections to upgrading (http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Wiki:Central_Processing/2014#License_upgrade_proposal)

Right, and I have no objections to the licensing change. It just seems to me like a waste of time and energy to go complaining about Wikia taking content from the Doom Wiki, accusing them of plagiarism etc. I see it as a letter of the law vs. spirit of the law thing. Ultimately it's going to be a losing battle since no doubt Wikia will eventually upgrade all its wikis to CC-BY-SA 4.0 anyway. You can see I said exactly the same things back then on the page you've linked to.

fraggle said:

Right, and I have no objections to the licensing change. It just seems to me like a waste of time and energy to go complaining about Wikia taking content from the Doom Wiki, accusing them of plagiarism etc. I see it as a letter of the law vs. spirit of the law thing. Ultimately it's going to be a losing battle since no doubt Wikia will eventually upgrade all its wikis to CC-BY-SA 4.0 anyway. You can see I said exactly the same things back then on the page you've linked to.

TBH I've not yet wasted any time on it; I have yet to file any complaints with them for my own content which has been taken which, to my knowledge amounts to a few sentences so far. It's not worth fighting over those little things. I encourage other people to file a DMCA if their stuff is stolen w/o attribution, if that's what they want to do though. Keep in mind under the wiki model each author owns their own content so, for example, if your Art of Doom article is copied to wikia w/o attribution or editing history, you're the main one who would have to complain about it since you - not MancuNET, and not DoomWiki.org - own that content.

I agreed back then and still agree that focusing on creating original content is the most productive thing we do that gets immediate results. At the same time however, keep in mind how it does us negative service IF all that original content we slave over ends up on the other site immediately.

PS I find wikia upgrading to 4.0 to be really unlikely for several reasons:

• Technological inertia: They're still on a customized MediaWiki 1.18 to my knowledge. They update things VERY slowly. By contrast, DoomWiki.org is in the process of upgrading to 1.26.
  
• Corporate/legal inertia: Changing over that many wikis is a big deal and they've only done it once before, back in 2006 IIRC (GFDL -> CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported). That was ~10 years ago.
  
• Lack of anything to gain by it. Most content sources are 3.0 Unported compatible, so they're less served by upgrading to 4.0 IMHO than a smaller content provider is.
  
• Every indication right now is that they're drifting away from open-content wikis as a business model entirely. See fandom.wikia.com for evidence.
  

Ctrl+F-ing a term finds words buried some depth in this bar.



I thought that was quite weird. I've never used a site that does that and I was confused for quite a while wondering where the word "Heretic" was on a certain page. Just something of note, to be fixed if that is feasible.