Forum:SH:Wookieepedia and the Licensed Insider Video Proposal

I'm going to start by addressing some concerns. As you know, Wookieepedia had a booth at Celebration VI, and Wikia assisted with our production costs. Many of you were concerned that we were making a deal with the devil and that Wikia would use this as leverage later on.

I'll be frank: Wookieepedia has a reputation amongst the Wikia staff. We are a hard-headed force to be reckoned with, and Eric Moro (Director of Programming, Entertainment), who assisted in getting us support from Wikia, was warned about us. I feel the support at Celebration VI was a means of extending the olive branch to us.

During Celebration VI, Master Jonathan and I had a chance to meet with Moro over dinner, and there we were able to voice not only our concerns, but the concerns of the community. It was this meeting where we learned more of the Wookiee's reputation. Wikia is aware of our community consensus on the site feature policy and exercises care when new features are introduced Wikia-wide. He acknowledged the size and strength of Wookieepedia, and that we are liable to pull Wikia's arms out of their sockets if we lose. Staff know it’s unwise to upset Wookieepedia, but also wish it were easier to communicate with us.

Now, some of you may be proud of this reputation. However, as a professional entity, this is not the reputation that we want. We are the ultimate online Star Wars database, not a temperamental five-year-old. But, I am not here to condemn that, but rather to just share the experience we had at Celebration VI and introduce a topic for discussion.

At the Celebration VI meeting, Moro brought up that Wikia is working on partnerships that would give us access to licensed, behind-the-scenes, and never-before-seen videos from Lucasfilm. This intrigued me. Never-before-seen stuff, if Wikia is able to get it, could actually be beneficial from an encyclopedic standpoint by enabling us to better flesh out BTS sections.

Moro is aware of our site policies, so we talked about how this could possibly be implemented. Since we have no use for such things within the articles themselves, I will let you&mdash;the community&mdash;decide what to do. Wikia has designed a related videos module, which could be enabled, but is wiki specific rather than page specific. They are still building out this feature, as well as partnerships with more video providers. Their current offerings can be found at video.wikia.com.

Now, onto the nuts-and-bolts. If we were to use these videos in some fashion, it was already determined that the best way to do this would be to have a dedicated, moderated account used solely for those videos. Only that account would be able to upload licensed videos. Videos would otherwise still be disabled and only those approved videos would be used. Nothing else.

So, the tl;dr:


 * Moro, Director of Programming, Entertainment, can get us licensed videos.
 * Should we decide to use this content, a dedicated account would be used to upload it.
 * That account would be moderated and only that account would be able to upload such content.
 * Only approved content would be uploaded and featured.
 * Up to you guys to determine a use for the content.

Go ahead. Pile on the cries of "we told you so." Then, before your knee-jerk vote... take a moment and give this some thought. Then vote. As for me, I'm abstaining until I see what others have to say.  Trak Nar  Ramble on 04:13, November 12, 2012 (UTC)

Discussion
Let the chorus of "I told you so" begin! But, stay civil, kids. :)  Trak Nar  Ramble on 04:13, November 12, 2012 (UTC)