Re: Vim Weekly

On Monday, January 27, 2014 8:53:01 AM UTC-6, Benjamin Klein wrote:
> On Jan 26, 2014, at 8:26 PM, tawheed abdul-raheeem <tawrahim@gmail.com> wrote:
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> > I am very happy to announce a new project that I have started, it is called Vim Weekly, 5 Vim tips each week! - There is a LOT of hidden gems in vim that would be uncovered. This project is open source so feel free to send any great secrets in your vimrc.
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> This sounds like a great idea. Is there a site URL (or repository URL or something) for it?
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I'm not all that excited about it. Is it just you who will be making content? If not, how do you plan to combat spam?

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> > Is this a potential replacement of vimwikkia?
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> > Well I think vim wikkia is awesome and has a lot of great tips, on the other hand I feel that it is flooded with ads and pictures and often times loose its importance!
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> It does have problems. What I think it needs is 1) a LOT of editing, both for consistency and for just general editing issues (proofreading and such), and 2) ideally to be moved away from that site. I don't spend much time there. When I do visit a page there, I get (as you said) ads and pictures, frequently obscuring actual useful text on the page I am trying to see, and things like audio automatically playing when the page loads. There's a lot of good stuff on that wiki and there has to be a better place for it. (I don't know who manages it, but hopefully whoever it is is reading this… :D )
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I've not seen a lot of really obtrusive ads recently. But then again, I also am pretty much always logged in over there. Try creating an account and logging in: when you do so, most of the ads go away.

John Beckett and I are the most active admins...but we've been pretty slow recently.

I agree it needs some editing. But so will any new content created elsewhere. At least on wikia we have a good start at that. Starting from scratch won't buy you much there.

What wikia gives us:

1. "anyone can edit" but with powerful spam fighting tools (and full-time staff dedicated to fighting it sitewide, not just on our wiki)
2. search engine optimization: you'll notice wikia is consistently near the top of search results when the article is relevant
3. technical support when things go wrong
4. great availability and decent speed; wikia has lots of servers, all linked together to serve up pages even when one is down, regular backups, and round-the-clock staff supporting them

All this takes money. Ads provide that money so we don't need to.

Moving away would be difficult. The biggest reason: search engines, bookmarks, and links would still continue pointing there. Wikia, if I understand correctly, claims some level of ownership in the content it hosts, so we probably can't just take it all down. Very few wikis have successfully left wikia, to my knowledge (although there are a couple really big wikis that did).

Now, what would we get from moving to a different hosting service?

We'd lose the ads, but we'd also lose a lot of the benefits. Content would not be improved at all. We'd need to do the same amount of editing on any content we copied over. And then, we'd need to spend time watching and porting over any changes made to wikia. That is time better spent just editing. When the spammers started noticing the new site, we'd need to figure out how to deal with them. And we might need to do that without a paid support team (depending on where the new site was hosted). Finally, we'd be competing with the old wikia content in search results probably for years. People will continue going to wikia first until the new site increases its search ranking enough.

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