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WoWWiki
File:WoWWiki.png
Type of site
Fan site (Wiki)
OwnerWikia
Created byRustak and Alexander Yoshi
URLwowwiki.wikia.com/
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional

WoWWiki is a deprecated wiki about the Warcraft fictional universe, and one of the largest wikis about a specific subject. It began as an independent project in 2004, and in 2007 joined Wikia. In late 2010, the administrators that were unhappy with Wikia mandated changes started an independent fork known as Wowpedia.

History

WoWWiki.com was launched on November 24, 2004, the day after the release of World of Warcraft (WoW), as a source of information pertaining to WoW and the interface modification suite Cosmos. The wiki later expanded to cover the entirety of the Warcraft universe, including RTS games, novels, RPG reference books, manga,[2] and other written sources, along with the WoW expansion packs. At various points in its development history, it was described as the "best known MMO wiki",[3] "the second largest English-language wiki in the world behind Wikipedia",[4] and the "mother of all WoW informational sources."[5]

On May 2, 2007, it was announced that WoWWiki would be moving to Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company.[6] In September 2009, WoWWiki was noted as Wikia's largest wiki at that time.[7]

On November 1, 2010, in an interview with the Toronto Star, Jimmy Wales described sites in entertainment and gaming as the most popular part of Wikia, stating that "in gaming, every major video game has a huge wiki about it. World of Warcraft is probably the biggest. ... Just for that particular wiki alone, I think we see 4 to 5 million people a month."[8]

Research

In March 2008, SXSW held a panel on "How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way", which heavily featured WoWWiki and focused on the wiki as a collaborative strategy space for players.[4][9] In a 2009 article, Lee Sherlock argued that WoWWiki constituted a collaborative writing genre, distinct from forums and walkthroughs (e.g. GameFAQs).[10] Rik Hunter treated WoWWiki as a fan "affinity space". Both Sherlock and Hunter argued that WoWWiki was a primary example of a broader trend in digital media where consumers and users became producers of information.[2][11] More recently, Hunter has analyzed talk pages for patterns of collaboration and suggests that "Successful collaborative writing on WoWWiki is a result of writers sharing common 'habits of mind,' and collaboration can be disrupted by those who hold more author-centric perspectives of textual ownership."[12] In a follow up article, Hunter further analyzed talk pages to "describe a model of writing that accounts for readers-as-writers."[13] Faltin Karlsen saw WoWWiki's size and complexity as evidence for the scale of emergent complexity in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft.[14]

Wowpedia

Wowpedia
File:Wowpedia.png
Type of site
Fan site (Wiki)
OwnerCurse, Inc.
URLwow.gamepedia.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional

In late 2010, Wikia introduced a new fixed-width skin, which caused layout issues with many articles and broke JavaScript-based features such as tooltips as well as generating reports of eye strain and headaches.[16] The dispute with Wikia led some of the WoWWiki community to seek a different host. As a result, the content and article edit history was forked by duplicating the WoWWiki database on 20 October 2010.[17] The administrators of WoWWiki, as well as the other active contributors, moved to a new site called Wowpedia, which was announced shortly thereafter.[18]

On December 4, 2010, Blizzard Entertainment began to incorporate links to Wowpedia, as well as the database site Wowhead, into the new version of its World of Warcraft Community Site.[19]

See also

References

  1. ^ "wowwiki.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2013-06-11.
  2. ^ a b Squire, Kurt; Duncan, Sean; DeVane, Ben; Wolfenstein, Moses; Hunter, Rik (2008). Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Video games. ACM Siggraph Video Game Symposium. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 31–33. ISBN 978-1-60558-173-6.
  3. ^ "Tip of the Day: Wikia Network". Massively. 2008-06-26. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
  4. ^ a b "SXSW08: How gamers are adopting the wiki way". Massively. 2008-03-08. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
  5. ^ 1-06-2008 (2007-12-31). "Adventures from the Back Row: World of Warcraft priestly resources". Massively. Retrieved 2009-10-13. {{cite web}}: |author= has numeric name (help)
  6. ^ Warschauer, Mark; Grimes, Douglas (2007). "Audience, Authorship, and Artifact: The emergent semiotics of Web 2.0". Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 27: 1–23. doi:10.1017/S0267190508070013.
  7. ^ Oshiro, Dana (September 8, 2009). "Warcraft and Twilight Fans Make Wikia Profitable". ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
  8. ^ "The wiki world, according to founder Jimmy Wales - the star.com". Toronto Star. 2010-10-01. Retrieved 2010-10-03.
  9. ^ JC Fletcher { Mar 8th 2008 at 11:00AM } (2008-03-08). "SXSW08: Edit Me! How Gamers Are Adopting the Wiki Way". Joystiq.com. Retrieved 2009-10-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  10. ^ Sherlock, Lee (July 1, 2009). "Genre, Activity, and Collaborative Work and Play in World of Warcraft". Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 23 (3): 275. doi:10.1177/1050651909333150.
  11. ^ Sherlock 2009, p. 276
  12. ^ Hunter, Rik (March 2011). "Erasing Property Lines: A Collaborative Notion of Authorship and Textual Ownership on a Fan Wiki". Computers and Composition. 28 (1): 40–56. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2010.12.004.
  13. ^ Hunter, Rik (November 2014). "Hypersocial-Interactive Writing: An Audience of Readers-as-Writers". Literacy in Composition Studies. 2 (2): 17–43.
  14. ^ Karlsen, Faltin (2007). Emergence, game rules and players. Universitetet i Oslo, Institutt for medier og kommunikasjon. Oslo: Nordisk medieforskerkonference.
  15. ^ "wowpedia.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2013-06-11.
  16. ^ "The Obscurecast Ep 23: A Room With A Moose". The Obscurecast. October 30, 2010.
  17. ^ Henry, Alan (October 21, 2010). "WoWWiki is moving to Wowpedia".
  18. ^ Ex-WoWWiki Admins Join Curse to Create Wowpedia - Curse
  19. ^ "World of Warcraft: The New World of Warcraft Community Site". Blizzard Entertainment. December 6, 2010.
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