The Warhammer Online Wikia rethemed to promote World of Warcraft

The Warhammer Wikia has received a new look. Or maybe I just didn’t notice until today. Either way:

Warhammer Online Wikia promotes WoW

That is more than a random advert. That’s a whole deliberate theming of the site portal, clearly specially designed for the purpose, and whether it is the owners of the wiki, or wikia themselves who have done this, I consider it to be pretty poor behaviour. I wonder how much Blizzard are paying them for such base treachery. A wiki is put together by a great number of people willingly sharing information and content, because they love the subject. How many of the contributors would be happy to see their work used in such a cynical way?

Maybe the privatisation of wiki, by companies like Wikia, was not such a good idea. Far better to use some of the perfectly functional public domain wiki software. By ceding control to a company that is quite naturally in it for the money, rather than out of love of the wiki-subject, something has been lost of the spirit of the enterprise. At any rate, I don’t see me ever contributing to a Wikia wiki ever again.

Neither the Age of Conan wikia, or even the WoW one has received such an extreme makeover. The whole thing smacks of a dirty tricks campaign by Blizzard. Certainly, as Lum recently pointed out, there is little love lost between the two companies.

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