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Forums: Index > Rin's Travel Agency > Archive > Affiliation Request (The Keyhole)



Hello all. As requested by Technobliterator on Fenrir9's talk page, I have created a thread in this forum. I will paste below the message which I wrote on Fenrir9's talk page. Do with it as you wish. I will of course keep my eye on this forum.

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Hello there! My name is Aixon, and I am a staff member at The Keyhole, which is currently titled as the Kingdom Hearts Fansite Wiki. The Kingdom Hearts Wiki encyclopedia split from our site some years back, and since then we have continued to function as a separate wiki, with friendly ties to the official site. (We co-run the Twilight Times Kingdom Hearts wiki magazine with them, in order to maintain ties with them.) Recently, we have decided to undertake a project to transform our wiki from its "fan site" status to a somewhat simplified form of the main encyclopedia site. This new look will not completely change the wiki, but will instead allow us to store more information related to the Kingdom Hearts franchise, as opposed to storing much of the information in "list" articles.

In accordance with this imminent change, we have decided to update our affiliations list. The Final Fantasy wiki has an icon, and is linked to on our main page, however we are aware that it no longer links back to our site, but instead only links to the main Kingdom Hearts encyclopedia site. My reason for approaching you today is to ask your wiki to consider re-affiliating with our site. We are a serious site, and are working to make our wiki even more accessible to readers and users alike. I would be very willing to communicate with you about this, should you require clarification about anything which I have stated. I will ensure that I check your talk page here regularly so that I do not miss any reply which you might make.

Thank you very much for your time, and I shall look forward to hearing from you soon. Aixon 22:55, December 27, 2015 (UTC)

You're already on our affiliate list. If that's not noticeable enough, I've asked Techno to bring more attention to affiliates as part of his main page redesign, so hopefully we'll address that soon.
If you meant the KHWiki referral template, you're going to have to prove to us that the Keyhole meets our needs as a resource better than KHWiki. -- Some Color Mage ~ (Talk) 00:37, December 28, 2015 (UTC)
As my own response, and the following is mostly rambling:
For several reasons, I feel there is more to gain from being on Wikia than there is not. For more info, I'd look up Wikia's portability and structured data programs - and how the Keyhole on Wikia could cross-reference data easily with the FFWiki using it - as well as fan programming on the side. But the main other reason is SEO, wikis hosted on Wikia tend to perform just below Wikipedia on search results if not outright beating it, and this has led most Wikia forks to fade into obscurity.*(Wikia's Nukapedia wiki on Fallout is currently the second most visited Wikia site, while The Vault fork on Gamepedia barely ever shows up in the first page of Google search results, and the Wowpedia fork for World of Warcraft still performs poorer than the less active WoWWiki on Wikia, mainly managing because Blizzard.com links to Wowpedia)
With that said, at present, I do not support replacing {{KHWiki}} and {{SeeKHWiki}} links with links to the Wikia one. Maybe this is only in its current state, and you are planning on improving things eventually as you say, but there doesn't seem to be a clear strategy in mind. A "somewhat simplified form of the main encyclopedia site"...what does that mean? Does that mean less content? If so, why would I visit the Keyhole instead of the KHWiki? Or will it eventually be comparable in coverage to the KHWiki? If so, how do you still plan on keeping "ties to the official site" then compete with it directly? Having the Keyhole be fandom oriented isn't a bad thing, Wikias are fan communities (and with the new Discussions feature - currently viewable on Wookieeedia and Fallout wiki's app - and fan contributing programs, it definitely fits their strategy), but I think it'll struggle if its goal is just to contain broad strokes of information.
Unfortunately, until these questions are answered, I can't really support linking to the Keyhole over the KHWiki on the templates. I do believe there are ways you can improve - and I'm willing to help, hell, there are ways I think this wiki can be improved - but for now, I'd just think more about the structure or plan.--Magicite-ffvi-ios Technobliterator TC 02:13, December 28, 2015 (UTC)

You have my sincere apologies. I didn't come across that particular page when I was originally searching for a clue as to whether your wiki still linked back to us. As such, my message has lost much of its purpose. KHWiki split from our site about four years ago now, due in part to their dislike of Wikia's policies and also a desire to be free of what they felt was oppression from the company. Since then, they have run their own wiki on a privately hosted site, and they have done well. However, The Keyhole continued as a site during the time of the split, and has gradually become its own wiki; albeit to a lower standard than KHWiki. An example of this would be that while KHWiki hosts articles for every type of Heartless enemy in the Kingdom Hearts series, The Keyhole has all the Heartless condensed into an oversized list on one page; this was one of the standards which was set out for our site when the split occurred. The users moving to KHWiki did not want the two sites to be competing against one another, so as a consequence we had some guidelines imposed on us. It has only been after long discussions with the other wiki, in addition to two lengthy forums on our own site that we have decided to become a simplified version of the encyclopaedic wiki that is KHWiki. I realise that the term, "simplified" might seem a bit strange, but allow me to give some examples of what we would do to achieve this. Firstly, we will expand all our articles which were ordered to be condensed down after the split. Our next main purpose will be to create new articles for those which were condensed down into lists, or were not given an article at all, but were instead given external links to KHWiki. This will eventually allow us to host the same information as them. However, I did say that we would be "simplified", and this will come through how we structure our articles. Our aim will be to make them more "user friendly" to readers. Whilst KHWiki articles host technical, and often detailed information, we will not include this. Our goal is to create pages which readers will view and will understand and be able to gain useful information from; not to shove statistics at them which they often will not have come to read about. In short, we will be our own unique wiki site, but we will endeavour to reduce competition with KHWiki by having them link to us, whilst we will also link back to them. We will continue our magazine collaboration in order to maintain friendly ties between the two sites. I am not asking for our site to replace KHWiki's as the one linked to in our templates. Rather, I would ask that you consider this as a message confirming our new purpose and stating that we still want to be affiliated with your wiki and continue our friendly relations with you.

If you have anything else to say to me, I'd be more than happy to continue the discussion. Aixon 10:52, December 28, 2015 (UTC)

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