Forum:Things don't add up

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Forums: Index > Village Dump > Things don't add up
Note: This topic has been unedited for 6702 days. It is considered archived - the discussion is over.


The following, from what I have available, are facts (please correct me if I'm wrong):

  1. Wikia was in contact with User:Chronarion, owner of the uncyclopedia.org domain, for a minimum of three months.
    1. Within this time, Wikia negotiated with Chronarion for transfer of the domain ownership.
  2. Wikia has managed the domain name servers for uncyclopedia.org since uncyclopedia was transferred to Wikia hosting.
  3. Chronarion has always acted in the best interest of the uncyclopedia community and would have supported subdomains for additional languages to ensure the continuity of the project and community.
  4. From a technical standpoint, as long as the domain name servers on the domain record for uncyclopedia.org were pointed to Wikia's domain name servers, Wikia was the only entity that could add subdomains to uncyclopedia.org.
  5. Wikia refused to create subdomains which were requested by the community for the uncyclopedia.org domain, despite regular contact with Chronarion, the domain owner.
    1. Wikia cited "legal issues", which do not add up with 1, 2, 3, and 4 above; these have not yet been explained.

I do not understand this. (unsigned)

  1. Wikia was in contact with User:Chronarion since we started hosting this site. We discussed domain ownership from then onwards.
  2. I don't know if we've managed the domain name servers for uncyclopedia.org since uncyclopedia was transferred to Wikia hosting. We don't for Memory Alpha which has recently led to DNS issues since they were still pointing to some other name servers (possibly Wikimedia's), not Wikia's.
  3. It wasn't up to Chronarion to add subdomains for additional languages. Wikia weren't prepared to take the risk of hosting new sites on a domain we don't own. For a long time, Uncyclopedia was at the address mrpalmguru.com/uncyclopedia which is now a domain squatter site. We didn't want to take the same risk of losing Uncyclopedia.org.
  4. I think it's correct that Wikia was the only entity that could add subdomains to uncyclopedia.org. I don't know for sure.
  5. I don't remember Wikia refusing to create subdomains. Where is this suggestion from? Which ones were refused?
    1. Wikia did not cite "legal issues" for this. The reasons were, as I explained above, about avoiding the risk of losing the domain name.

--Angela

As far as I know, "Mr. Palm Guru" was a rather short-lived experiment; during the time I'd been part of this project (May'05-Jul'06) the wiki was at uncyclopedia.org - originally as an independent site. Stillwaters, Chronarion et al didn't start posting their patented nonsense™ until Jan'05, so odds are that the "palm guru" name was something they'd scrapped in the first few months at the latest. Odd that MSN's search still returns it among the results for "uncyclopedia" (it's the only major engine AFAIK which does).
The domain name servers have been at wikia.com and the entire site content duplicated between uncyclopedia.org / uncyclopedia.wikia.com for as long as this had been Wikia-hosted. All possible *.uncyclopedia.org domain addresses still resolve to the same IP (rr-ext-squid.svc.wikia-inc.com: 84.40.25.253) as all of the other wikicities/wikia projects. Certainly, only Wikia's web server would technically be the only to be in the position to split any requests for es.uncyclopedia.org, en.uncyclopedia.org, xx.uncyclopedia.org and the like and determine which database to use for each if they're all resolving to the same IP and wikia operates the domain servers. --Carlb 17:16, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I would like to hear more from the parties involved

What would like to hear? Are there questions other than the ones at the top of this page that are answered? Angela

I don't see the problem

Could anyone explain this to me in layman's terms? -- The Colonel (talk) 18:57, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

The reason given for the domain problem isn't adding up with what we know of what happened. We just want to clear up the inconsistency/contradictions/whatever. --Keitei 19:03, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
What I don't understand is point #4 - you see, I am not a big geek in this. -- The Colonel (talk) 19:31, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
See DNS for more information. It's a distributed system, the zone authority for uncyclopedia.org was at Wikia's DNS servers. Dawg.gif » Brig Sir Dawg | t | v | c » 19:40, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Forum:Announcement:_Wikia_&_Uncyclopedia#Blame_me_a_bit claimed that "more domains for us" was somehow Wikia's justification for taking control and ownership of uncyclopedia.org - whoever controls uncyclopedia.org could (in theory) use it to create http://de.uncyclopedia.org http://es.uncyclopedia.org and the like. Likely not the real reason for their having done this with no prior consultation - if all they wanted was to create a bunch of languages as subdomains of the same site, they could've registed any ol' name and started putting individual-language projects under it. For instance, some of the external projects are using .pedia.ws as a rather "generic" base name to build http://hiki.pedia.ws http://desciclo.pedia.ws and the like. A previous "experiment" used an external site full of redirects to redirect variants of xx.uncyclopedia.info for each language xx to the scattered individual wikis. None of this was done by Wikia, although there are a few xx.uncyclopedia.wikia.com domains (China, Germany, Denmark and a fork of Finland's hikipedia) which use a similar pattern.

From Forum:.de_displaced,_.fi_finished?:

Is the xx.uncyclopedia.wikia.com working for all foreign uncys?--Rataube 15:17, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
No, because most of them have their own names (anegkyklopaideia, inciclopedia, desencyclopedie and so on). We can set unique names up for de. and fi. as well if that's what they want of course. It might be a good idea to set up some redirects though, to help in finding different versions. -- sannse 15:39, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

The idea also was mentioned briefly in Forum:Uncyclomedia.org?#whatever.uncyclopedia.org.3F. It never was a priority for Wikia until suddenly needed as an excuse for the shenanigans with uncyclopedia.org's ownership. --Carlb 19:54, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

  • Perhaps they should be more communicative but I'm sure everything's fine. I think you're all being a bit over-suspicious, but maybe I'm just too trusting. Of course, my opinion doesn't matter since I'm not an admin.—Sir Mandaliet ♠ CUN PS VFH GN (talk) 08:18, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Comment: What does admin status have to do with anything? It's just the ability to delete hundreds of unfunny one-line substubs on site (instead of QVFD'ing them) and to block evil vadnals. A thankless task, perhaps. The Uncyclopedia, however, belongs to the individual authors who wrote the darned thing in the first place. All any individual website hosting Uncyclopedia content has is a non-exclusive license to use this text for non-commercial purposes, subject to the conditions set forth in the Creative Commons deed. That's it.
The domain name is an important tool used by various stakeholders in the Internet community to find the site. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone has the right to start one or one brazillion sites with an infinite number of monkeys reposting an infinite number of copies of the Uncyclopedia content, provided that the original CC-BY-NC-SA terms are respected and complied with. That much isn't in any way Wikia's decision (or even something they would've wanted). It dates right back to the very early days of Uncyclopedia as an independent project and website... the text belongs to the authors, always has.
If ownership of the uncyclopedia.org domain name has been lost, we need to do whatever we have to do to ensure that all affected can find us (and find all domains that have anything to do with any of the Uncyclopedian projects) regardless of what happens to uncyclopedia.org. That much has little or nothing to do with the 'admin' flag, which is used to delete useless substubs from this site. We all (as authors of some piece of this project) have a stake in this, so by all means don't be afraid to speak up. Please. --Carlb 16:32, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
I was kidding about the admin thing, because it seems that the only people talking about this are admins.—Sir Mandaliet ♠ CUN PS VFH GN (talk) 06:58, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Who cares?

Hot fudge brownie

Huh?

Where were legal issues cited? Angela 16:42, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Cited here:
Some interesting links: [1] [2] [3]
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dawg (talk • contribs)
I would like to note that Wikia as the entity did not officially explain anything, and I believe that this could very well be just a difference in individual accounts of what happened, which is very normal. However, since there's confusion, it'd be nice if someone who does know could tell us what we need to know. --Keitei 19:12, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Currently unanswered questions?

A week after this turned up in whois (and hit the fan in IRC), many of the questions we've been asking still haven't been answered. Here are the first few that come to mind, feel free to add more: --Carlb 15:40, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

  1. If this was being discussed in secret for a few months, why was nothing said in the open during this time?
  2. For that matter, why was changing something as fundamental as the ownership of the site not discussed with the community as a whole?
  3. Would any of this name manipulation have been announced at all if we hadn't already found out through whois at that point?
  4. Why was no one in the Uncyclopedia community (and no one except Wikia Inc.) informed that the domain was even for sale until after it was supposedly too late to respond to this issue?
  5. For that matter why, immediately after all this hit the fan from whois, were we told in IRC "it seems jwales doesn't quite know what you're talking about"?
  6. What were the terms of the sale? What was the purchase price?
  7. "Twenty pieces of silver" is just an outsider's random guess, not a straight answer from anyone in the know - that (or "another ferrari") is the only 'info' out there? Without either being told that this was for sale nor the asking price, we weren't given a fair opportunity to see if the name could've been kept within the Uncyclopedia community by organising a counter-bid for this bit of IP that we had (for whatever reason) entrusted to someone who sold it out behind closed doors.
  8. If all parties involved were aware of the prior use and of the unrelated printed books with "uncyclopedia" names, why were the spurious claims to being able to trademark the name made?
  9. Furthermore, why was Jimbo asking me to sell the domain name out from under *.uncyclopedia.info? Does he even have a legitimate proposed use for it (other than preventing some other individual Uncyclopedian community from using the name and domain)?
  10. Can we in en:, should we defy Wikia in any way, expect to be treated in the same way as the Norwegian-language sista Ikkepedia when they moved external "due to unspecified performance issues"? They find not only an empty wiki (of the same or similar name) being run on the old http://ikkepedia.wikia.com site in direct competition to their http://ikkepedia.net but any reference on the old site to their having moved or their new location routinely deleted by Wikia staff.
Are we even going to get any answers? ~Sir Rangeley Icons-flag-us.png GUN WotM UotM EGA +S (talk) 15:10, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
  1. Why would anything be said in the open? This would just lead to a third party trying to buy the domain and would obviously not be beneficial to the community if that third party had no intention of continuing to host the site.
  2. The community never owned the domain - Chronarion did, which is why the discussions were with him.
  3. We were working on an announcement for this before the whois information was available, so yes - it would have been made public regardless of that.
  4. No one was informed the domain was for sale because it wasn't for sale. It was a deal between Chronarion and Wikia - he didn't just put it up for general sale.
  5. I wasn't on IRC at the time, so I've no idea what the comment "it seems jwales doesn't quite know what you're talking about"? means. From what I was told, he disconnected before being able to answer the questions on IRC.
  6. I'm not going to disclose the terms of the sale since it affects future domain transfers that Wikia might want to do,
  7. There wasn't an "asking price". It wasn't generally for sale to anyone who wanted it, but specifically for Wikia who were already hosting the site for free.
  8. I wasn't aware of unrelated printed books with "uncyclopedia" names, and I don't see how that affects the trademark if they're unrelated. You can have two different companies with the same name since trademarks cover particular areas of use.
  9. I expect Jimmy wanted the .info domain for the same reason we have wikia.info etc - to prevent other sites trying to mislead people into thinking they're on the real Uncyclopedia site.
  10. Wikia can't stop you leaving if you want to, but that doesn't mean we're going to remove this site just because you do.
  1. Angela 15:31, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Angela. It means a lot, to me at least. :] --Keitei 16:01, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
For that matter why, immediately after all this hit the fan from whois, were we told in IRC "it seems jwales doesn't quite know what you're talking about"?
I believe you were told that because I said it, because I asked jwales what was up with the domain, in #wikia, and he said he didn't know, then he left. But he came back and explained things, that he bought the domain from Chron, etc. So that quote is very out of context. I could be wrong, but I think I was the one who said that, or something similar to it. --Sir ENeGMA (talk) GUN WotM PLS 16:13, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
I wasn't in #wikia (haven't been on that channel since well before all of this) so I don't have that portion of context. In any case, I thank you and angela for whatever clarification you've attempted to bring to this whole situation --Carlb 16:26, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Responses from involved parties

The Fall of Uncyclopedia: An Inside Perspective

As we all know, Chronarion has been the owner of uncyclopedia.com for the last sixteen years. As Father of the Fatherland, founder, and member of the First Triumvirate, Chronarion has shown a steadfast dedication to the republic of Uncyclopedia and its publicani clients.

Unfortunately, it seems that during this time, he has become close friends with Jimbo Wales, best known for his family's collection of Sibylline Books housed in the archives of Wikipedia. While from a good family, Jimbo (or Junius, as his sister calls him) is a strict wikia-ist, and seeks to consolidate all wikis under that group's iron-clad fist.

While we the people love Chronarion dearly, and would take control of our Uncyclopedia if given the chance, it seems that Jimbo is now in firm control. Why would Chronarion, founder of Uncyclopedia and all-around good guy, throw away this prize, this jewel of a community? Indeed, why would he? Has something sinister happened, that we are all unaware of? Perhaps.

While Jimbo's family has a history of power-grabbing, it seems odd that he would undertake such a visible and publicly disliked overthrow of a popular leader. One wonders if he has perhaps pondered a career in philosophy. Perhaps not, but maybe he should. However, the likely cause of this hostile takeover is the recently discovered (via myspace it seems) images which seem to indicate that Chronarion has had an affair with his (Jimbo's) mother. Yes, it is true.

As both a business man and a politician, Jimbo can see the value in taking control of Uncyclopedia. And with such a connection to Chronarion, it was easy for him to slide our beloved leader a false petition, in order to blind him to the crime that was about to happen. But did no one else know of this? Could no one have warned Chronarion?

It was little more than four months ago, on March 15th, that Splaka got wind of a plot to overthrow Chronarion. Splaka tried to intervene in this plot, but was turned aside by Jimbo, his current boss. Unable to assist, he slipped into the shadows, a slave to the man. As Splaka fled, the plan was put into action, and Chronarion was cast down from his post as founder and owner of Uncyclopedia.

Perhaps we would never have heard of this brutal dispatching of our beloved leader, if Splaka had not come back to deliver his eulogy. Now we learn of the terrible crime that was perpetrated on dear Chronarion, and we see the veil of secrecy removed to show the terrible wounds he has sustained at the hands of Jimbo and his fellow conspirators.

Et tu, Jimbo.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Famine (talk • contribs)

1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 3

Hey, you're right!—Sir Mandaliet ♠ CUN PS VFH GN (talk) 08:18, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

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