Talk:Suggestion/@comment-25494824-20150405222128/@comment-25637142-20150406190122

First, let's me quote myself http://kancolle.wikia.com/wiki/Suggestion#comm-218377 What Gensui is trying to pull here does have a historical basis and several communities have done it before us. It's an ongoing controversy. If you have time, you can really get a lot of information from guildwar wiki's discussion when stuffs hit the fan on their side.

TL;DR: Guildwar wiki, being a high-traffic donation-driven independent site at the time, was sold to Wikia by the founder for 62 grands (legal but unmoral). Wikia forced the merge on them. The community got together and reacted to the acquisition, evaluating gains, losses and coping strategies.

They settled on a move back to independence. The move was outlined and carried out as mentioned in the second link. The old wiki which is acquired by Wikia was slowly converted into fanfic wiki (making it unofficial) and the new wiki projected itself as the official one. The process took them 9 months

I'd mention several other cases such as Uncyclopedia's acquisition, Transformer wiki's move, DOOM wiki's departure, GTA wiki's departure and of course Touhou's wiki situation. All of which you can find in the wikipedia link of my previous post.

Second, it's impossible to remove a wikia's wiki in its entirety, especially a wiki with high traffic such as this. Not to mention, if you look at this article, you'll see that

"There is no easy way for individual communities to switch to conventional paid hosting, as Wikia usually owns the relevant domain names. If a community leaves Wikia for new hosting, the company typically continues to operate the abandoned wiki using its original name and content, adversely affecting the new wiki's search rankings, for advertising revenue"

As far as I can see, it's more of a conflicting interest issue than anything. Wiki format in essence is a non-profit, community-driven, encyclopedia format. Wikia is a for profit company. Shouldn't be that surprising. To the argument that "Wikia is supporting the site so they should be receiving payment", review guildwar wiki's case. They offer better insight to this that what I can say in a single comment.