Wiki autonomy

English Wikipedia says the following about autonomy: "Autonomy [...] is also used to refer to the self-governing of a people."
Now, what's one of the largest wiki hosts? Probably Wikia.

Wikia's principles on wiki ownership are, to say the least, interesting. Their ownership page states that "The wikis are owned by the communities. No one user owns any wiki on Wikia. Founders are those who requested a wiki be created, but ownership of that wiki resides with the community as a whole, not only with the founder."
This comment, although not directly related to this issue, by a Wikia staff member is also interesting: "we make those rules, we can break them for our own reasons". (See this page for the source of the quote)

All wikis on Wikia are somewhat autonomous, it's just that some wikis are more autonomous than the others. Like Wookieepedia. It's one of Wikia's biggest wikis. It also has administrators, who block people on the "I don't like you" basis. People like me. See my block log entry there. Now, I admit that I may be a bit controversial sometimes, but if you know me or have read through my MediaWiki.org user page, you're able to tell that I'm not a troll, vandal or spammer. I asked a Wikia staff member to help me with this issue; the person contacted a couple Wookieepedia admins, and after they refused to reply, gave up. To me, that felt like a slap in the face. Or even a punch. I did quite a lot for Wikia before I left the site — thus I believe that they could help me out here. But of course, that cannot be done since "this is a local issue". While my block is indeed unjustified, it's not the subject of this post, I'll be discussing more about it in another post later on.

Darthipedia is one of the wikis where I'm an admin. It is also the largest wiki ^[source]. But some time ago, it was even larger than nowadays. This, naturally, caught Wikia's attention. They proposed a deal to Darthipedia and Darthipedia accepted it (did they have any other choice, I wonder?). Then Wikia sends in their deletion script to delete the "excess" Jax Pavan pages. The bot targets the wrong pages. One of our admins blocks it. Does Wikia respect this? I think the following log excerpt answers that question nicely:

23:03, 10 October 2008 Toughpigs (Talk | contribs) unblocked TOR (Talk | contribs) ‎ (that was not part of the deal... we can talk about it in IRC or on the forum page.)

22:05, 10 October 2008 Pinky49 (Talk | contribs) blocked TOR (Talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 2 hours (autoblock disabled) ‎ (Once you've gone through with your end of the deal, you can delete the articles, but until then, no)

Or let's take a different example. Arkhampedia is a wiki run by the same people behind Darthipedia. To Wikia, this apparently means that local policies can be overridden. Here's the proof, from Arkhampedia's block log:

19:44, 12 July 2009 Uberfuzzy (Talk | contribs) unblocked WikiaBot (Talk | contribs) ‎ (please do not block staff accounts)

18:32, 12 July 2009 Madclaw (Talk | contribs) blocked WikiaBot (Talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 1 year (account creation disabled) ‎ (unwanted changes "invisible on the Recent Changes" without consulting/informing local community. Please contact administration for eventual unblock)

A recent good example is a wiki where I used to be a bureaucrat until a Wikia staffer came along, deopped me and undid many of my administrative actions. I got my admin powers (but not my bureaucrat power) back after a long talk with another Wikia staff member about why I did such actions. Apparently using your bureaucrat powers or trying to opt-out of Wikia's great new features is a bad, bad thing and that makes you a (possible) troll.

Yet another interesting situation where a small wiki has no autonomy is Gislewiki. Gislewiki is a wiki about Gisle Martens Meyer and its URL is Gislewiki.com. Before that, it was hosted on Wikia. The community, however, decided to move off-Wikia at some point.
As you may know, Wikia rarely closes a wikia.com wiki. They didn't close that wiki either, though I'm not sure if it was ever requested. Before September 2009, Wikia's Gislewiki's main page was displaying a notice, telling people to use the new site instead of the old one. Most interface parts were also hidden with some CSS tricks. Then Wikia noticed this and reverted most of the changes. Keep in mind that the founder of Gislewiki did almost everything from content creation to interface customization all by himself, without much outside help. The community was pretty much the founder. So, anyway, back to the "two wikis" situation. The founder of Gislewiki.com noticed that Wikia tried to revive the Wikia site. He made some subtle changes, such as adding a normal link to the new site on the main page, to the Wikia site. To Wikia, that was vandalism so the founder got deopped — on the site he built all by himself! I wonder when they'll block him for vandalism...

I'm not trying to speak against Wikia, I'm merely trying to show you the other side of the coin.