How Comixpedia forked from Wikipedia

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Comixpedia consists of a magazine, portal, and wiki encyclopedia.

The encyclopedia is actually a fork of Wikipedia. Before Comixpedia.org started, many editors contributed webcomics articles to Wikipedia, a general encyclopedia. The resulting problems caused the creation of the Comixpedia wiki.

The content of this Wikinfo article is mostly of interest to those interested in Wikipedia, and those interested in contributing to webcomics articles in Wikipedia. The Comixpedia wiki also has editors who are not involved with Wikipedia.

How it forked

Eric Burns, author of webcomic Gossamer Commons, noticed that Wikipedia was deleting many of its webcomics entries. Burns aptly summarised the problems with Wikipedia in the following manner:

  1. The original system of determining Webcomics significance was based entirely on popularity. Specifically, the Alexa ratings of a given webcomic were used -- anything below a certain cutoff got in, everything above it got cut. The flaws in this should be self-evident, but just in case, let me summarize: art significance has little to do with the numbers and everything to do with influence. A webcartoonist with only 500 daily readers who counts 300 other cartoonists among them has had a dramatic impact on webcartooning as a whole, even though his strip might not be popular. [1]
  2. The Alexa rating system continued to be flawed.
  3. Wikipedia's goal of being a credible source often blinded editors to the needs of webcomic readers and their ability to use Wikipedia as a source of information.

Burns then suggested the creation of a new wiki encyclopedia. Xavier Xerexes installed MediaWiki, Wikipedia's wiki engine, and opened the new wiki.

Because the Comixpedia wiki is devoted to becomming a complete webcomic encyclopedia, its rules for inclusion and notability are more relaxed than those at Wikipedia. Despite this, the influence of Wikipedia is strong in Comixpedia. The policies and user behavior of this site reflect some of the fundamental concept of Wikipedia and their culture. Many Comixpedians support the "neutral point of view" concept inherited from Wikipedia. (Wikinfo rejects the concept.)

History

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