Forum:CT Archive/French interwiki links and what to do with them

Hello, all.

I present an issue which is more-or-less on the periphery of the everyday functions of most users. As someone who lurks over at our French sister site, I became aware about three months back of a movement among some of the most active users to move from the wikia-hosted site (fr.starwars.wikia.com) to another site, called Wookiepédia, which had been established as an offshoot by the user Trazeris. The purpose, from what was expressed by the administrators, was to rejoin those who had established the independent site to create a "free" encyclopedia. The questions is, should we ask wikia to update our interwiki links to support this change? Let me explain what happened and what I see as the pros and cons to a change.

Politics of the French wiki:

Basically, a handful of users abandoned the French wiki for another independent site. I provide details so that we can discern whether or not to associate with the new site and how to handle any discussion with Wikia about our decision. It was, in some ways, an organized exodus. Now, I use the term abandon intentionally, because those who participated in the departure never went through the proper channels with wikia to fuse the two sites together as they originally intended and not all the users left. A site-wide vote was held after a marginal discussion and those in the community who voted agreed to merge the sites&mdash;save for the two schism-minded admins who voted to blank the wikia-based site. Rather than contacting wikia, they simply blanked the main page and replaced it with a message of departure and expected everyone to follow. Angela reverted the edit and provided an official response from Wikia. Their intention is to keep the wiki open in spite of the other users abandoning it because there was no attempt to resolve the issues or to merge the sites.

Reasons to change the interwiki links:
 * 1) The most prominent reason is that Wookiepédia is now the most active French-language Star Wars wiki. I waited to bring this up because at first very few articles exist. That said, it now has 1,149 articles.
 * 2) A handful of these articles have higher standards and are written better than their counterparts on the wikia-hosted site. Consider Alliance Rebelle verses ''Alliance pour la restauration de la République and Yoda verses Yoda.
 * 3) Another significant reason is that a little over two hundred pages are marked as plagiarized from another French fan site called Holonet.fr. I will be going through our interwiki links and removing the ones that link to plagiarized material if any exist.
 * 4) This is trite, but they do link to us. After all, we are the largest English language wiki for Star Wars.

Reasons not to change the links:
 * 1) First off, not all the users left the Wikia-hosted site for "greener pastures." We probably should not abandon them as they had been by their fellow wikians. Again, Wikia has expressed their intentions to leave the wiki open for new users as they come around.
 * 2) In spite of its problems, the new wiki is neither on the path toward complete nor gaining new users. There are many missing templates and the number of edits to the wiki are not substantial save for Pemon uploading images. In reality, it is basically the few people who departed which are doing the work on a very sporadic level.
 * 3) Ironically, one of the reasons for outright abandoning the Wikia-based site, as expressed by Emojo in his response to Angela, was plagiarism. The new site takes material from sites such as ours and simply translates them, possibly by machine, and tacks them into their pages. (See Obi-Wan Kenobi.) This runs into a problem, in my opinion since Wookiepédia uses GFDL as its license, while the wikia-hosted site uses CC-BY-SA.
 * 4) Lastly, I see no marked change between the two wikis other than a couple articles being sourced better and more properly written. Images are still not properly sourced on either site; most articles are not vast improvements; it does not, contrary to what the admins there would tell you, have a more notable rating with search engines; and, it appears that any potential momentum that was gained by leaving has left.

All that said, I open the floor for discussion. Voting will begin after a period of discussion. This issue may not especially important to the overwhelming majority of the site, but I would like it discussed first, before we start voting.

Thank you, all. &mdash; Fiolli  {Alpheridies University ComNet} 15:47, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Discussion
For the record, I am torn about what we should do. It appears there are advantages to associating with the new wiki, but we are a Wikia-based wiki and there may be some responsibility to continue to support the growth of our French sister site. Consider the floor open. &mdash; Fiolli  {Alpheridies University ComNet} 15:47, 24 August 2009 (UTC)