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Okay, now that everyone's in a tizzy, let's bring some reason back to the discussion.

First of all, almost every game out there, including Guild Wars, states in its terms of service that you can use their game content for non-commercial purposes. However, the content remains the property of the game company. That means that if, for example, you post an article in a wiki that contains verbatim descriptions of things found in-game or in documentation otherwise produced by the game company, which most articles are, you have absolutely no right whatsoever to make a DMCA claim because the content is not yours to begin with. If, and that's a huge if, anyone has a right to serve a takedown notice, it would be NCsoft, the owner of the IP for Guild Wars.

Second of all, I too own a popular gaming wiki for City of Heroes, and I too am in the process of moving said wiki over to Wikia. There are many reasons, but among the top ones is the fact that the wiki is become too popular and is overloading my server. Response times are going down, pages aren't loading, and I'm already paying a decent sum of money every month out of my own pocket for a site that has clearly exceeded the capacity of a hobbyist site. At this point, I have one of three options:

• Put ads on the wiki myself.
• Transfer the site to someone else who will run ads.
• Shut the site down.

Regarding option 1, I am not a salesman, nor do I ever want to be. Plus, I just want to concentrate on making the wiki a quality resource for the game's players, not making templates for ads and dealing with money transfers and all. Plus, as you can tell from the submitter's blurb, I don't want to have to deal with people accusing me of doing it for profit. Regarding option 3, I guess some might argue that it would be better to have the information lost forever or dispersed to the winds of the Internet so that it's a lot harder to find, but I don't think that making information less available is in the spirit of what the CC license is about, or the GFDL that the Paragon Wiki uses.

Third of all, all wikis are commercial at some point in the chain. For example, the hosting provider I'm currently using to host the Paragon Wiki isn't free. Could it be argued that because someone (i.e. my hosting provider) is making money off the wiki, it is therefore a commercial endeavor and must be removed? No, that's stupid. If you must, think of this change as the Paragon Wiki, and GuildWiki for that matter, simply changing hosting providers. Instead of me paying a hosting provider money, though, they are getting it through Google ads. I know some folks are going to be saying, "But he got paid and is getting company stock!" And I got paid, too. However, I think you're grossly overestimating the amount. In my talks with Wikia, they told me that they were going to reimburse me retroactively for my hosting costs for the wiki, to give me the money back that I sunk into it for the past couple of years. I did the math. Their number is actually slightly lower than the actual cost, but it's pretty close. I don't know the details (and don't care to) of how much Gravewit got for moving his sites over, but I strongly suspect that he's been paying more in hosting costs than I have, and that it was a similar arrangement, with the money plus the stock value being around the same as his retroactive hosting costs.

Fourth of all, the submitter's summary really portrays Wikia in a needlessly negative light. Can we please acknowledge that they are providing a valuable service here? They could pick and choose only sites that will make them millions in ad revenue to host, but that's not what they're doing. Anyone who wants to can start a new wiki on any topic that they think would build a community, whether that's a community of a billion people or a community of a hundred. They provide gr

You're making some incorrect assumptions about the difference between Elite and non-paying customers. Elite subscribers recieve the following benefits: - 24/7 Phone Support (Free customers recieve support during normal business hours) - No server queues if the servers are full, or priority access if they are absolutely maxed out. - 12 characters per account, instead of 3 for non-paying customers - A larger account-wide storage vault, which allows cross-character storage of 20 items versus 40. - Access to the Hardcore mode (you die, you start over) - Elite characters recieve better visual models and armor graphics. Likewise, Hardcore characters get the "best" graphical models. - The ability to start guilds. "Free" customers can join guilds, but cannot create them. And that's pretty much it. Free-to-play and Elite customers interact in the *exact same game world*. All it does is make the online play a little easier on you and possibly more enjoyable with the "more attractive" models and larger cross-character storage. It is unconfirmed whether Hardcore players will be able to group together with non-Hardcore players (Free or Elite) - they definately go to the same towns etc as everyone else, so you can show off the fact that you're a Hardcore character - but there's been no specific details released on whether or not they can play in the same instances with other characters, since their loot, etc would be different, and a hardcore player might potentially be a liability to a "normal" party since they will be VERY concerned with their own characters survival above all else. I suggest you read http://hellgate.wikia.com/wiki/Hellgate:_London_FAQ - it answers all of this and a lot more.

And let's not forget that there are apparently no gay people at all in the future...

Oh yeah?

I also found a picture of what the eclipse will look like.

What with the D&D Tactics game for the PSP coming out just a few days ago. That made the decision for me to rent it instead of buy it. Not the brightest marketing folks..

Wow. You could bury that Torus in the ground for even more passive savings, and geek style, too.

Sure it's not USA?

http://images1.wikia.com/uncyclopedia/images/5/5c/ Worldmap.jpg

I'm the guy that started Grub back in 1999. In 2003, after getting a little bit of press, I sold the company to LookSmart. I was hoping for a continuation of the OS license for Grub, and the financial backing of a larger company that could help develop the product out to it's logical conclusion - distributed, open search.

Unfortunately that didn't happen with the situation, and I decided to move on to other opportunities. Now here I am again, and I fully support what Wikia is doing with Grub, and what their resources can do for the project and the problem it can solve.

Myself (Kord Campbell), Igor Stojanovski and Ledio Ago (both who work at Splunk BTW) are three original founders of Grub. We are now helping Wikia out with getting it up and running, and explaining how things work (or don't) and will continue spending a bit of time helping out where we can as the project matures.

I would like to point out that Grub itself isn't all that interesting right now. About all it does is distribute jobs that consist of URLs to crawl. Yes, something similar could be done with BOINK. Yes, nothing is being done with the crawled data. Yes, it breaks occasionally and it's full of bugs.

However, it's a start. It's the first pass at fully distributing the job of search, and putting it where it belongs - in the commons. Search doesn't belong to Google, or Wikia, it belongs to everyone. It's your data, and it should be your search engine crawling, indexing and searching that data - not some monolithic profit hungry company.

Go and read the page on search over at Wikia: http://search.wikia.com/ - Jer Miller (worked on Jabber) explains what they have in mind for Atlas. It's a fully distributed, OS, open protocol dream of making better search. Like Wikipedia (which is non-profit), Jimmy Wales wants search to be open, and community driven/managed - it's not about making gobs of money off your CPU/Bandwidth - it's about making better search for everyone.

Ideally the current Grub clients/server will go away, and be replaced with something better. For now, you have to crawl before you walk, and you have to walk before you run. Given time, and support from the OS community, I'm sure Wikia will do the right thing here.

If you want to get involved and help out, start by hitting the wiki and contributing your thoughts. We are going to need coders working on different aspects of the project as well, so think about volunteering in your particular area of expertise.

This is a part of Wikias search engine project, that is supposed to beat Googles web search monopoly. Everything will be open sourced, and there will be a public protocol for communicating between different users. The goal isn't to make one search engine to beat Google, but to create an infrastructure to make it really easy to create lots of search engines, where each is really good at something (say, tech blogs, or the semantic web, or NGO:s, or whatever). The different search engine front ends are supposed to be able to choose what crawlers they want to use, and what "rankers" they want to use to rank the crawlers data. To make it near real time, the system that displays the results will probably have to use a lot of cache.

There is also hope that commercial entities will be able to take part of this, by for instance modifying the crawler to include ads - and, as I said, the front end will be able to choose if it wants to use those results, or not.

Read more about it at http://search.wikia.com/. The selling point (actually, there's four) are on the top of that page.

You have to give Google some context. If you use con kolivas sd as your search terms you can just hit "I'm Feeling Lucky" and go right to this.

That was Scorpius, you insensitive clod!!

Let the user become the crawler- and do not eliminate the search giants (just don't rely on them completely). Already I sort of operate like a (slow) crawler with my queues of links to read, bookmarks (be weary- big load) and indexing those very interesting or important pages, sharing related tidbits, etc. Just feels like the natural extension, though I am sure that many people will want to stick with traditional GUIs and "back/forward" habits. There is also some interesting discussion in ATLAS-L re: future search infrastructures. So, in the spirit of promoting development in this area, linkage:

* Grub article (now defunct)- was distributed peer-to-peer crawler. (see also)
* Boitho, another distributed crawler
* YaCy- another peer-to-peer crawler
* How to build a web spider
* C++ web crawler lib
* LibWWW (perl)
* W3C's WebBot
* The Internet Archive's Heritrix crawler
* WebSPHINX- customizable crawler

Somehow, this is like an extension of surfraw. I imagine that soon enough we will start up an open source crawler-browsing hybrid software package, though have been surprised that nothing like it has popped up yet- it's (usually) the way of the programmer to make sure that he has the ability to do what the giants are doing. Maybe we have all been collectively blinded by graphical web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.) and "click-click-click" thinkware?

I was not referring to any of the Wikis Wikia is hosting, but to this site.

Yeah, I've gone to great lengths to try to get an old copy of X-Wing and Tie Fighter to work on my current XP setup... to no avail. What's the closest thing to Tie Fighter that's available now for my PC? I've tried to find some kind of decent space shooter, but no luck. Any advice for this poor, helpless Tie Fighter fan???

Get thee X-Wing Alliance, my friend.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/X-wing_alliance

Star Wars: X-wing Alliance, or XWA is the sequel to Star Wars: TIE Fighter. Due to player disregard for the multiplayer focused Star Wars: X-wing vs. TIE Fighter as a part of the X-wing computer game series, XWA is considered the third installment.

XWA presents the story of Ace Azzameen, the youngest member of the Azzameen family, a neutral family of traders. The player assumes Ace Azzameen's place in the all missions in the game. These missions gave rise to assumptions that Ace was perhaps one of the crew appearing in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

Apart from the usual badges and medals for winning missions which are featured in the other games of the X-wing series, progress is also indicated by the number of souvenirs collected in Ace's room. Additionally, an E-mail delivery system helps to evolve Ace's background story and provided deeper looks into his personal relationships and his family's whereabouts.

XWA is the first game of the series to offer a full voiceover soundtrack and full dialogue in-flight. Flight control is marginally updated from the previous games of the series, allowing the player to link their cannons together, the ability to board and pickup other craft, as well as the addition of rudder support. Graphics are also overhauled in this game; high resolution textures, more complex models, and full three-dimensional cockpits were added. However, the cockpits are not faithful to the other games; all indicators and screens are separated from the cockpit as an in-flight HUD depicted as floating windows.

It also introduces missions that span multiple star systems, similar to the "autopilot" feature of the Wing Commander games; rather than ending the mission, jumping to hyperspace (when the option is available) will progress the mission to a new location and a new mission objective.

Ok, so why did this game rock so incredibly hard? First, the original X-Wing was not that great of a game. It was a nice try but it lacked wang. TIE Fighter rectified that lack of wangage and was GOOD. Missions were balanced, varied, and fun. The universe was immersive and gripping. The only niggle I had with it is that it didn't have quite the same storyline angle as the first two Wing Commander games, my alltime favorite space shooters. Oh, well, I thought, you can't have everything, right? Wrong. X-Wing Alliance said you can have everything but a Slave-Girl Leia lap dance.

How was it good?

1. The game-invented characters are sympathetic and believable, unlike the typical wank you find in the Star Wars expanded universe.
2. The flight models are lifted directly from TIE Fighter and the graphics are given a scrubbing and update. It feels just like the previous game, even down to the keyboard hotkeys being the same. The whole game has a mixed feel of comfy, broken-in boots along with shiny new glitter.
3. The missions are inventive, the combat intense, and the storyline plays into it well so you are reacting emotionally to the story instead of sitting back with a bored comic book guy expression muttering to yourself about how so little effort goes into doing a licensed game properly.
4. Huge number of flyable ships in the game along with scads and scads of non-flyable models included, makes the universe seem gargantuan as a proper Star Wars experience should.

Unfortunately, this was the last space sim to be released in the Galactic Civil War era. Lucas wanted all future Star Wars games to be set during the Clone Snores era. That's bullsh

I'd prefer to be able to dual-boot directly into Windows or Linux (for when I want the fastest performance in Linux, and give it 100% of the RAM), and also be able to run that Linux installation inside of Windows. However, this requires the VM to support booting off a separate partition, and apparently VirtualBox doesn't support that. (yes, booting the same Linux setup under two very different sets of "hardware" has its challenges, but it is possible)

TrueType was developed as a joint effort between Apple and Microsoft, because of Adobe's refusal to open their font format to third parties. For a while, it offered better font rendering than Type 1, at least on the Mac.

However, Adobe subsequently opened up their formats, and Apple pretty much lost interest in improving TrueType further. They shipped QuickDraw GX (based on TrueType), but pretty much killed it immediately by refusing to license any of it back to Microsoft. It has been replaced with Apple Advanced Typography (AAT, the system on OS X), which supports PostScript as well as TrueType, just as OpenType does.

http://mac.wikia.com/wiki/Apple_typography#QuickDr aw_GX_and_Apple_Advanced_Typography

Reminds me of something from the Myspace 95 Thesis:

"Information wants to be free, but then so does misinformation. Protect your identity by freely applying a layer of misinformation."

Good advice.

Viceroy Gunray has one of those... http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mechno-chair

I'm the Administrator of my school's homepage and I use the software MediaWiki also used by Wikipedia. Of course, it's designed mainly for community projects such as Wikipedia and Wikia-Wikis but it works equally well with few editors. And you have the big advantage of being able to open up your homepage, making it editable by others (in my case, the teachers and perhaps even students).

What I don't like about Joomla and all those WYSIWYG-Editors is, that the homepage is not standardized. Every editor has his own way of formatting and making headlines and so you get many pieces instead of _one_ homepage. With MediaWiki you just enter
== Headline ==
and every headline looks the same.
IMHO, MediaWiki is a great choice, particularly if you have more than one editor.

FTFA:
"There should be a belt of moderate temperatures somewhere near the twilight ring between light and dark."

Sounds VERY similar to the Twi'lek homeworld

I take you've never written a search function for a website? It's not simple, especially if you want the results to be as good as or better than Google.

A distributed search system could easily employ the same search and indexing mechanism as Google -- here's a centralized one that does exactly that: Wikia Search. The Google algorithms are open, after all.

The choice of local indexing mechanism doesn't have to be uniform across all the nodes in a distributed search network, though. Indeed, it would make no sense to require this to be uniform. As data gets ever more semantic tag information, specialist indexing and search methods become ever more efficient. All you need is a framework to embrace them all.

Think out of the box. Google does not represent the end of invention.

And compared to the power of distributed computing (which includes search) and aggregate bandwidth, Google would be very much the underdog.

Heh, reminded me of this.

And just for fun, this.

Even before Quake, there used to be thousands of maps available for DOOM

There still are...

ID even shipped a CD, and I forgot the name, which had both a top 10 list for WADS to play, as well as a directory with hundreds of levels.

Sounds like Master Levels, which was a set of 21 good levels (some of which were made by authors who would later be hired by id Software to work on Episode 4 of Ultimate Doom), but also a couple thousand not-as-good levels which were basically dumped from the idgames archive of the time.

Creatures was a masterpiece for its time, and is still a good game for children today - the author did some technically challenging work, without a background in AI. Perhaps that's what we need - more general developers thinking about how to do AI rather than people who have been trained in current techniques.

The article links to a wikia article on the subject, which provides a very nice summary of the arguments. My question is how is this stuff even patentable?

Patent 6,282,574 clearly states that no one except Verizon can legally translate an IP to a telephone number and vice versa. The rest of the patents are basically saying Verizon owns the only right to transmit other various phone communications over TCP/IP.

WTF? How can someone be awarded a patent for their idea for an application layer protocol that depends on something like TCP/IP to even opperate?

From what I've heard, they counted them with Wolf Blitzer.

We define unacceptable comments as anything included or linked to that:

• is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
• is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person.
• deliberately misconstrues the posted matter with the purpose of quarreling
• is overly quarrelsome or intended to cause strife through quarreling or objecting.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we'll tell them so (privately, if possible) and ask them to publicly make amends. If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the perpetrator doesn't withdraw them and apologize, we will cooperate with law enforcement to protect the target of the threat.

From the slashdot summary:

In partial response, O'Reilly and others have proposed a code of conduct which could include restrictions like the outlawing of anonymous accounts."

From TFA:

5. We encourage anonymous comments.

Apparently, this was only recently added by an anonymous prankster, but it shows why it's important to link to the specific revision of a wiki page you're discussing in addition to the "latest trunk"...

In any case, I'm not sure how requiring the use of a valid email address is going to help. Anyone who wants to make a threatening or otherwise comment will just use dodgeit or a similar service to do so - you could ban them, I suppose, but good luck to you finding them all. And even if you do manage to, trolls will just create hotmail.com addresses; sure, you could ban hotmail as well (although you'd probably already be hurting some legitimate contributors that way), but then, trolls would use simply move to other free services. Do you need an alternate email address to sign up for Google Mail, Yahoo or so? I'm not sure, but even if you do, a troll could just use a hotmail.com address (or, for that matter, a dodgeit address or so) to create a GMail address, for instance. Ultimately, requiring valid email addresses (and I'm assuming you actually mean working ones, not just well-formed addresses, as some sites do) will not hurt trolls; it will make their job more difficult, but anybody who's already wasting his life on something as idiotic, useless and unproductive as trolling likely won't care much.

Of course, this is symptomatic of a bigger problem: a code of conduct, by definition, is a convention that is voluntarily followed - but those that agree to follow it are precisely those who're not a problem, anyway, and for whom a code of conduct is wholly unnecessary. The trolls, on the other hand, will simply disregard any aspect of it that is not guarded by technological measures.

If you really want to weed out trolling, the best idea is to a) delete obvious troll comments; b) possibly require approval for comments prior to them being published (I personally don't think that this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but it would solve the problem, at least); or c) implement a moderation system like Slashdot's - if you have a sufficient userbase where the trolls are outnumbered by the "good" folks, it should work quite well. Oh yeah, and in any case, d) grow a thicker skin, stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. Stop running around like headless chickens after some troll managed to scare you - calm down and think sensibly and move beyond fear.

For those unfamiliar with Wikia, the work isn't actually all done by the one organization. Anyone can come up with an idea for a wiki, write up a mission statement, and submit it to Wikia. If the admins like, then you've got yourself a host for your wiki.

Wikipedia creator Jimbo Wales may have started Wikia itself, the engine behind this and the other bajillion wikia out there, but he doesn't seem to be actually working on this particular wiki.

http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Seiken_Densetsu

No, it was a spinoff from Final Fantasy. It later spawned the Mana series.

Doesn't matter, cuz it's the wrong one. It was Final Fantasy Legend that I was thinking of. I haven't played it in over a decade, and couldn't remember which it was. And yes, FFL was actually the SaGa series renamed. But it's enough like FF1-3 that it doesn't matter.

I guess the question if EssJay would leave Wikia (his paying job) has been answered: "Essjay was a member of the Wikia staff from January to March 2007." (http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User:Essjay).

I don't think there was another option for him. Apparently he had possitively contributed to Wikipedia, but there was not much to discuss after his claim to have so many degrees was found to be a lie.

Why would you think that "last January" means anything other than January 2007? The relevant URL is here: http://www.wikia.com/index.php?title=User:Essjay&o ldid=66364

Not to worry. I think all of the soldiers will look like this soon...
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Stormtrooper_armor

FULL ARTICLE

I post anonymously out of fear of retaliation (people have been banned for pointing out some of the shitty things that ZDaemon does, including this and illegally downloading the commercial Doom 2 data files over GETWAD). Hopefully, the open source alternative to ZDaemon, Odamex, will become stable soon...

Notice what happens when you go to http://local.wikia.com/ and try to "choose your town"? Notice what all the articles at http://politics.wikia.com/ are about? See any Bollywood stars at http://entertainment.wikia.com/ ?

Seems to me it's not focused in three areas, it's focused in precisely one area and one area only; outsiders not welcome.

Notice what happens when you go to http://local.wikia.com/ and try to "choose your town"? Notice what all the articles at http://politics.wikia.com/ are about? See any Bollywood stars at http://entertainment.wikia.com/ ?

Seems to me it's not focused in three areas, it's focused in precisely one area and one area only; outsiders not welcome.

Notice what happens when you go to http://local.wikia.com/ and try to "choose your town"? Notice what all the articles at http://politics.wikia.com/ are about? See any Bollywood stars at http://entertainment.wikia.com/ ?

Seems to me it's not focused in three areas, it's focused in precisely one area and one area only; outsiders not welcome.

In the Politics magazine they have a listing for Democrat and Republican sections that appear to be pretty active. The Libertarian section is empty. On the main page most of the topics seem to be arguments between Democrats and Republicans. There is an article on Bill Redpath but there are no comments. It didn't take long for this place to just turn into another partisan battle ground between Dems and Reps.

I can't wait to read the threads at this place as the elections get nearer. They should have some really insightful information by then.

So I was very interested in seeing what the WikiLocal site was like and checked it out. The main portal page is there, but try clicking the links on the page. It's pretty much a 404 farm right now. The site should have been tested before it was announced for general use. How many people now will just walk away from it instead of contributing right away? And how long before they get around to checking it out again? This site could have had a strong pop from day 1 if it were actually ready to start handling visitors and contributors.

Clicking through the politics wikimag I was surprised to see (announced as breaking news, no less) the story Anna Nicole Smith 1967-2007 DEAD. And that's politics?

(Now if someone edited the story to make it that GWB had authorised the raising of ANS from the dead, that would be politics).

Clicking through the politics wikimag I was surprised to see (announced as breaking news, no less) the story Anna Nicole Smith 1967-2007 DEAD. And that's politics?

(Now if someone edited the story to make it that GWB had authorised the raising of ANS from the dead, that would be politics).

The Politics Community ( http://politics.wikia.com/ ), which features national, state and local sections where users are able to search and contribute by state and/or zip code. Contributors can share and discuss their political opinions, build out historical resources and voter guides, or simply just read and comment on the others thoughts and learn about political issues.

The OLPC has a LinuxBIOS but it would be able to run Windows as well (and it probably will [1]). If the Linux community was really pushing Linux to gain market share wouldn't you expect a dramatic increase in activity on edu.kde.org by now?

There would also be some larger development projects to be done. (How about some educational games like Genius - Task Force Biologie, Chemicus II - die versunkene Stadt, Mathica for the OLPC, using Wikipedia articles as the knowledge part of the game?)

Of course it probably doesn't matter much if Microsoft offers a more or less free copy of Windows for the OLPC or Linux is used as the OS.

The OLPC has a LinuxBIOS but it would be able to run Windows as well (and it probably will [1]). If the Linux community was really pushing Linux to gain market share wouldn't you expect a dramatic increase in activity on edu.kde.org by now?

There would also be some larger development projects to be done. (How about some educational games like Genius - Task Force Biologie, Chemicus II - die versunkene Stadt, Mathica for the OLPC, using Wikipedia articles as the knowledge part of the game?)

Of course it probably doesn't matter much if Microsoft offers a more or less free copy of Windows for the OLPC or Linux is used as the OS.

The OLPC has a LinuxBIOS but it would be able to run Windows as well (and it probably will [1]). If the Linux community was really pushing Linux to gain market share wouldn't you expect a dramatic increase in activity on edu.kde.org by now?

There would also be some larger development projects to be done. (How about some educational games like Genius - Task Force Biologie, Chemicus II - die versunkene Stadt, Mathica for the OLPC, using Wikipedia articles as the knowledge part of the game?)

Of course it probably doesn't matter much if Microsoft offers a more or less free copy of Windows for the OLPC or Linux is used as the OS.

It's the hardest metal known to man. Duh.

(Note to mods: Yes, this is an old joke.)

It seems like Wales is on a project creation frenzy, it seems like every month theres yet another project launched from Wales and Beesley. Actually I exaggerate but the previous big announcement http://campaigns.wikia.com/ seems to be pretty inactive now. I fear the same will happen for the new search engine. Does jimbo have the time to dedicate to making this happen, or is it vapor-ware?