This is a message sent to me by Orodromeus:
Hello!
Sorry, your e-mail went into my spam and I only saw it now while cleaning up!So: first of all I'm a very small contributor to the XF wiki (http://x-files.wikia.com/wiki/User:Orodromeus) however I've been doing my X-Files thing elsewhere, with the site Eat The Corn which was first done to analyse the mythology but now has extended to general dossiers and to the 1013 Interviews Database.
The reason why I haven't contributed to the wiki much is first of all time, that goes for my site as well, and also because I don't like the temporary structure of the XF wiki as it is hosted in Wikia -- it's full of ads and links to other Wikias and the fact that nobody among the contributors controls the Wikia site means that Wikia can decide to take it down or freeze it or censor it as it wishes.
My thinking was that it would make sense to have a wiki database on 1013 projects that stands on its own, that has a domain name of itself, like xfwiki.com or xfilesdatabase.com or 1013info.com. You have more flexibility with themes, you can have portals for different languages, you can have a news feed, and more importantly you can have a domain name that is easy to refer to. Do something like the Battlestar Wiki. There's been a huge amount of work done on the XF wiki, there have been similar attempts elsewhere for comprehensive information databases (XF Lexicon, Big Light, ...) but none has reached the level of detail of the XF wiki and (this is an important point for me) as the fandom grows smaller over time it makes sense to pool our resources rather than to disperse them! This is a similar thinking to a kind of webring that we tried to build (but with little impact as of yet), the Syndicate Consortium.
Of course there's the hosting issue and the money. I have enough space on my hosting with Eat The Corn to transfer the site, but I don't know technically how visitors would be routed to a new domain name like 1013info.com and not eatthecorn.com/1013info/ ... we'd need a tech guy here. The other solution would be to pool together along with a number of sites/contributors and take a hosting (what's costly is the hosting, not the domain name, and still we're talking about around 50 € er... 65 USD per year).
Share your thoughts and do pass this around to whoever you think relevant -- I contacted you as one of the admins but this is a decision that can only be taken together.
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So, I would like the idea of an X-Files database that doesn't have all these ads like Wikia does but its been tried before and failed.
Let's talk about this a bit. Do you think we should try that? Do you think we should just try and build up the X-Files wikia?