GTA Wiki:Community split

Towards the end of 2010, a large amount of the community on GTA Wikia decided to move away from Wikia and founded their own wiki for the Grand Theft Auto series, http://www.grandtheftwiki.com

This page briefly details the situation surrounding the move decision.

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 sysops on GTAWiki at the time, headed up by User:Gboyers, felt that Wikia had disrespected 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 and posting as many links to grandtheftwiki.com as they could. In response, Wikia's staff demoted most of their bureaucrats and administrators and in some cases banned them from GTA Wikia or even Wikia entirely.

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.

Currently on Wikia
Most of the users who remain on Wikia disagree with the grandtheftwiki.com's staff that this wiki is an illegitimate copy. 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.

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 http://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.

Spamming
Spamming is considered completely unacceptable by the staff of GTA Wikia. Users of this wiki are forbidden to advertise this site on other wikis regardless of where they are hosted. Users from grandtheftwiki.com who spam this website will be blocked and their spam revision-deleted.