<quote who="Federico Leva (Nemo)" date="Thu, May 29, 2014 at 08:40:16AM +0200">
Piotr Konieczny, 29/05/2014 05:56:
Wikia (the largest wiki farm?) appears to be drastically under-researched...
Part of the reason may be that they don't offer regular data dumps. But WikiTeam has remedied and recovered dumps for most of their top 14k wikis (as well as all images): https://archive.org/details/wikia_dump_20140125 https://archive.org/search.php?query=wikia_dump
Wikia published comprehensive dumps for all of their wikis until sometime in 2010. This is how Kittur and Kraut could write the paper they did.
Without question, the current dumps put together by WikiTeam are an awesome resource for folks wanting to do Wikia research. That said, they are a strange sample and it's not clear how they are representative of other Wikia wikis. This makes it hard to use the sample to confidently answer a question like Piotr's.
Basically, logged-in users have to "request" every dump individually and by hand. Once a dump is requested, it will be created and put in S3 and then seems to be kept around for at least several months. I've found some shockingly big and important wikis without dumps and 14k is a tiny proportion of all wikis! :-(
If I can help or provide resources to help get a new comprehensive set of Wikia dumps, let me know.
Regards, Mako