i wanted to call your attention to http://www.paganwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page, a larger wiki called paganwiki. perhaps you two could merge.
- Thank you for the information. I could have sworn there were no pagan wiki's when we started out. I'll check it out to see whether our goals are compatible. -- Reginald (Talk) 17:14, 4 Jan 2006 (UTC)
- I've had a look at the Statistics, theirs and ours. They outdo us in the article department 3 to 1, but we have a much larger user base and a higher number of views and views per edit. They just started, and they're growing faster than we were at the time, and we have, for the last month or so, been at a standstill. They rely on donations for serverspace and bandwith, while we have wikicities. What do the rest of you guys think? -- Reginald (Talk) 18:00, 4 Jan 2006 (UTC)
- Hello, my name is Peter Beckley, the founder of PaganWiki. I, too, received a message about a possible merger between our two wikis. I wanted to stop by and add some information to the above comments to give a more complete picture of what the PaganWiki is about, and what my future plans are for it.
- The PaganWiki does have more articles, but, possibly, less users, I found it hard to tell since all WikiCities users seem to be on the user list. We are experiencing rapid growth in size and traffic. The PaganWiki is adding an average of 3 new users a week and almost 100 articles a month.
- We have a marketing program started in cooperation with places like Witchvox, which now accounts for about 20% of our traffic, and ranking sites like FaDrasha, PaganVortex and Pagan100. We consitently rank in the top 10 on most of these.
- The PaganWiki Project does accept donations to help cover the cost of hosting, which comes out of my pocket, but doesn't rely on them to remain operational. I gladly pay the money to keep the project up with or without donations.
- While I think that a merger between the projects would benefit the overall goal of both projects, I think it is most beneficial to merge over to PaganWiki with it's independent servers, lack of advertising (which I dislike about wikicities in general), and potential for growth with other project ideas. PeterBeckley
- I must say you make an interesting case. I think I'll vote for merging wikipagan with paganwiki, but we should wait untill we hear from the other contributors. I'll see if I can't contact them and ask for their opinions. -- Reginald (Talk) 17:44, 6 Jan 2006 (UTC)
- Thanks for the notice Redge. I'll throw my hat in the ring. I fully support this idea. Seeing what happened with the split in the Spanish language wikipedia and knowing how little the pagan world can afford more of those kinds of splits, I think a merger is definately in order. And although I've been a heavy contributor at wikipagan, I wasn't able to garner the sort of cooperation with witchvox and others that it sounds like you have. Self-hosting sans advertisement is certainly a plus as well. Count me in. I look forward to contributing to the new joint project. --Aremis Asling 17:59, 6 Jan 2006 (UTC)
- Wouldn't it be better to merge the wikis into this one rather than leaving a stable site for one on hosting that you don't know will still be around in a few years?
- I don't know of Peter Beckley, so I don't know if he's experienced with running wiki sites or not, but as you grow, (and there's a lot of potential in this community for the wiki to really take off) the server costs and time involved in maintaining the software and hardware are going to increase, possibly beyond what one person can manage on their own. At Wikicites, we have staff dedicated to keeping the site running, and are expecting financing which will enable to keep growing the number of servers and staff, so you'd not have the worry of the site suddenly going offline, which happens with many popular wikis. Look at the hosting costs for something like the Homestar Runner Wiki, which also tries to rely on donations. I've seen that site down numerous times at the end of every month because money for hosting runs out. This isn't going to happen with Wikicities.
- At Wikicities, the community runs the wikis, rather than one person, so you need to consider whether you're happy with Peter Beckley owning the site, domain name, etc, rather than having a trusted third party (Wikicities) hold those things for the community.
- Leaving Wikicities means not only leaving this wiki, but leaving a network of wikis. Your login here lets you edit every other Wikicity (almost 1000 wikis now), allowing you to be part of a wider wiki community, from which you can get advice, via the Central Wikicity, on any aspects of running your wiki here.
- I can understand the preference towards a site without ads, but in the long term, this is a very scalable approach. Unlike relying on one person to pay for the site which can't continue forever, with ads you can grow the wiki as much as you like, knowing that more visitors lead to more ad clicks, leading to more money to pay for the hosting and related costs. You are also supported by the larger wikis at Wikicities, so even though this one isn't making very much money, you don't need to worry about that since we're more than happy to continue to host you for free.
- The license the content is under also needs to be considered. The PaganWiki uses something called the PaganWiki Open Content License, which is not compatible with the GFDL, and by some definitions, not a truly free license since it prevents the use of the content in commercial situations. This means the content you add to that wiki can never be shared with the hundreds of other projects using the GFDL (including Wikipedia and other Wikicity projects). It is also not a license developed by any trusted organisation, so there's no guarantee that the next version of this license is going to be in the same spirit or even whether it would be acceptable to the users of the wiki.