Forum:This is an announcement about the future of Darthipedia

Good evening Darthipedians and Wikians.

My name is Darth Muscare. Several months ago, I was elected by the Darthipedia IRC community as one of the wiki's newest administrators during one of our IRC meetings. As such, I figured I'd create this thread to elaborate on our current situation pertaining to the future of Darthipedia as we prepare for the new year impending apocalypse.

It's no secret that throughout our history on Wikia, several of our former administrators (and even a few current admins, too) never particularly saw eye to eye with Wikia's Community Support Team. Our shared determination for world domination (hurr hurr, that rhymed) has left both parties with an impeccably ego-driven incompatibility that typically ends any and all conversations between Darthipedia and Wikia staff with requests to lick a certain female staffer's feet. As sannse has so eloquently put (paraphrased), "Darthipedia is a wiki that likes to have fun with drama sometimes." Between the incompatibilities with our gracious host and the somewhat limiting rules that they've laid down for us in the past, it was only natural for our dwindling community to feel a sense of claustrophobia.

Which leads me to the subject of independence from Wikia. As some of the few contributors to this site may have already known, Darthipedia established a mirror site in late 2009 on a competitive wiki farm (who will not be named out of respect for both farms, not to mention Wikia likely has even the slightest mention of its name on their blacklist witchcraftery). This partnership between Darthipedia and its new host ended in April 2011, when upon our request, the mirror was deleted. Instead of limiting ourselves to a wiki farm, the community decided to instead establish a mirror of Darthipedia as a fully independent website, which can be found at Darthipedia.com. Shortly after, this mirror site was subjected to a vote among the community, and the overwhelming consensus was to adopt Darthipedia.com as the official Darthipedia website and later re-establish the purpose of the original, Wikia version of Darthipedia.

Why not flat-out delete the Wikia version of Darthipedia? Well for starters, that's simply out of our control. Wikia would be in charge of that, and given their reluctance to delete larger wikis (especially with Darthipedia being the largest wiki in existence), it would definitely seem unlikely for them to delete this wiki in favor of Darthipedia.com's independence. Even so, many of us don't even want the Wikia version of Darthipedia to be deleted. It still receives its fair share of edits from both new contributors and even old, and it would hardly be in our best interests to have an entire wiki deleted that still receives edits on a semi-regular basis. That's why during the very meeting in which I was elected an administrator, it was decided once again by overwhelming consensus that we would keep the Wikia version of Darthipedia very much alive, however with a slightly altered goal….

So henceforth, Darthipedia is no longer the Star Wars Humor Wiki. That title goes to the official wiki, Darthipedia.com. We will instead become a sister-project to the official site, simply known Simple Darthipedia, the Simple English Star Wars Humor Wiki, with all articles to be re-written from a strict "Ric Olié point of view". This allows the Wikia version of Darthipedia (Simple Darthipedia) to remain active, while the official Darthipedia (Darthipedia.com) continues to prosper. This also means that article splintering will gradually decrease until both sites offer a completely unique experience, but with the same ultimate end goal.

'''With this upcoming change, you can expect to see a whole slew of newly-written content incoming from myself and others within the next few weeks, during which time you'll also notice an update to our Monobook and Wikia skins, not to mention the main page. Additionally, a request to Wikia staff is being sent for an official name change.'''

Finally, I'd like to make it abundantly clear to any Wikia staff currently viewing this thread that by no means are we giving up on this site. When we sat down and had our meeting about the subject, we went out of our way to make sure that we were doing what was best for the future of this site. And frankly, we didn't see a future in which this Wikia version of Darthipedia could strive in its current state. There's been little interest in our active community to keep up with this site (as you can tell by our very outdated skins that are currently visible at the time of writing this), but considering this has been our project for the last five years, we simply couldn't sit by and let this site die out. To reiterate what I said earlier, the entire community voted completely in favor of becoming Simple Darthipedia, with IRC logs of this decision publicly available should you need them. This is our way of keeping the site alive by the community that created and expanded it into what it is today. We hope you understand this.

Should anyone have any questions about this update to the wiki, feel free to leave them in the discussion section below. On behalf of the entire Simple Darthipedia administration, I thank you very much and hope you have a Darth-tastic Day.

&mdash; Edward "Darth" Muscare Darth Muscare (talk) 21:28, November 18, 2012 (UTC)