I thought people should be aware of the recent creation of a fork off of Wikipedia at www.comixpedia.org.
This is a wiki intended for webcomics.
It exists separate from Wikipedia because we blew it big time with the webcomics community.
We blew it by creating webcomics inclusion guidelines that were just plain stupid, based on Alexa rankings and not on any sort of artistic or critical notability. That meant that comics that lots of people cited as influences were getting ignored. We blew it with moronic votes for deletion debates that drove people who wanted to write good, detailed articles on things away by telling them their work was "fanwank." We blew it, in short, because of the mob of pissy deletionists who dominate VfD, and who have gotten plenty of people to call VfD a pit that's hurting Wikipedia.
If you want an example of this, I encourage you to look at the case of [[Elf Only Inn]]. Elf Only Inn is a webcomic on a syndicate called Keenspot. Keenspot is a business. Keenspot makes its money publishing webcomics. They are an online publisher. Being published by Keenspot is a big deal, and I would argue should be grounds for notability.
It turns out my argument wasn't the prevailing one on VfD, and the article got deleted. What really sticks in my craw, though, is that the webcomic inclusion guidelines say that the top twenty comics on Keenspace are notable enough for inclusion. What's wrong with this? Keenspace is a free webcomic hosting service offered by Keenspot. It's also one of Keenspot's main talent pools - they move comics out of Keenspace and into the main Keenspot. So, in theory, every comic in Keenspace is less notable than any comic in Keenspot.
But following these frankly idiotic guidelines, the comic was deleted. It got recreated later, but still - it NEVER should have been deleted. The guidelines would also have us delete [[Athena Voltaire]], which is on Graphic Smash, a webcomics syndicate that doesn't pass the Alexa test of top 200,000 sites. Athena Voltaire was nominated for an Eisner award. There is something wrong when a comic that can get an Eisner nomination could be deleted. [[Digger]] is similarly indisputably notable - except for the fact that it fails the Alexa test.
Equally annoying was the deletion of [[Gossamer Commons]], nominated with a simple "nn four-month-old webcomic" nomination. A case can be made for deletion - the webcomic's creator even made it. But the case for its deletion is not as simple as "nn four-month-old webcomic," especially considering that we have an article on the comics' writer already, that the comic has attracted considerable praise and attention among notable webcomics artists, and that the comic as a whole was something of a Big Deal at its launch.
And it's not enough to say, "Oh, [[Gossamer Commons should have been kept." The point is that there shouldn't be endless deletion debates on articles where people wave guidelines around that are transparently crap. Deletionists should not be running rougshod over a substantial group of people who want to contribute on a topic. There should not be a webcomics fork born out of frustration about how unfriendly we are to people who want to contribute on webcomics. A fork born of a desire to have even more detailed coverage than is appropriate for Wikipedia, and that wants to supplement Wikipedia's coverage? Fine. Neat. That would be cool. But this isn't that. This is a fork. This is good people taking their ball and going home, because of the toxic culture on VfD.
We blew this one.
-Snowspinner