GTA Wiki:Community split

Towards the end of 2010, a large amount of the community on GTA Wikia decided to move away from Wikia to a different domain, www.grandtheftwiki.com. Wikia Staff decided to keep this domain, gta.fandom.com (gta.wikia.com at the time), open, and retain the content.

This page briefly details the situation surrounding the move decision.

This page was written by McJeff, who served as a bureaucrat on GTA Wiki from 2011-2014, with input by Gboyers, the founder of grandtheftwiki.

Switch to Oasis/Wikia New Look
In October 2010, Wikia removed the "Monaco" skin and replaced it with "Wikia New Look" (formerly "Oasis"). In the time leading up to the launch of Wikia New Look, the users active on Wikia were very much opposed to changing skins, by a section of about 4 to 1. However, Wikia Staff forged ahead anyway, removed Monaco and made Wikia New Look the default skin on Wiki. They did retain the old "MonoBook" skin, which they had originally planned to do away with as well, but MonoBook is only available to registered users and must be manually selected from user preferences.

The decision to move
The staff on GTAWiki at the time, headed up by User:Gboyers, felt that Wikia Staff had shown disrespect and contempt towards the users by forcing the new Oasis skin on them. Oasis supported more advertisements than Monaco and MonoBook, leading many to feel that the switch was primarily for profit, and some felt that this was, essentially, Wikia trying to make money off the work they did for free.

The community held a discussion, which is currently archived at GTA_Wiki_talk:Community_Portal/Oasis_Archive. By a large majority, the participating editors decided to move off wiki.

The changing of the staff
GTA Wikia was originally founded by User:Thai420, but he had stopped editing. Gboyers, who had run a Grand Theft Wiki not affiliated with Wikia, negotiated with Angela Beesley, and imported the content of the offsite wiki to GTA Wikia.

When the community decided to move, they felt that they still owned the content they had brought to Wikia, and attempted to take it with them by deleting pages from this wiki, citing their perceived ownership of the content. In response, Wikia Staff demoted most of their bureaucrats and administrators and in some cases banned them from GTA Wikia or even Wikia entirely. The users responded to this by aggressively promoting grandtheftwiki.com on GTAWikia. Most of this promotion took the form of posts on users' talk pages, although some users chose to vandalize GTA Wikia.

Some of the old staff decided to stay behind and tried to reimage gta.wikia.com as a wiki devoted to "modding" Grand Theft Auto games rather than about the games themselves. This, however, was vetoed by the Wikia Staff.

As the site was still open, it was adopted by two users, WikisEditor and The Tom. WikisEditor repeatedly plagiarized from grandtheftwiki.com, creating further unnecessary hostilities between the sites. Since then, WikisEditor was demoted forcibly by Wikia Staff after complaints from the Grand Theft Wiki users, and several other users have been promoted. For more information about who the current staff of on GTAWiki are, please see GTA Wiki:Staff.

Currently on Wikia
The users currently active on Wikia either chose to remain on Wikia rather than leaving for the new site for reasons of their own, or arrived here afterwards and are unaware of the incident. We do not feel that anyone should be forced to state their opinions and beliefs, although they are free to do so.

However, as it was a decision by the community at the time to move, we feel that their reasons for doing so should stand and be explained, which is what this page is for.

Neither this page, the associated talk page, nor any other page is about arguing over the move and whether it was or wasn't the correct decision. That issue is closed and done with.

What about the new site?
We who are currently active on Wikia may sympathize, to varying degrees, with the users who chose to leave, but we draw the line at actively advertising their wiki on this wiki. The link to www.grandtheftwiki.com can be found in this page several times, including in this sentence. If you wish to discuss that wiki, please go to it and speak to its staff.

Current relations
GTA Wikia and Grand Theft Wiki are not affiliated with each other. If you are a regular editor on one and wish to discuss the other one, the proper action is to go to that wiki and ask its staff any questions you may have.

Due to request of Grand Theft Wiki staff, content from Grand Theft Wiki may not be used in whole or in part on GTA Wikia.

This state of non-affiliation does not mean that the two wikis are "rivals" or "enemies". Users on both wikis are encouraged to remember that the people on the other wiki are, in fact, people, and deserving of courtesy and respect, regardless of disagreements.