Category:Artists G

My plan is to make this blog like... discuss good albums, music news, current projects, site improvements, etc

=PLEASE READ= Alright. This is up for discussion... I have been proposed a merger with http://www.wikisound.com/, which is basically the same thing as this but on it's own server/site. I'm not sure exactly what the merger would entail, but it would probably be using most of our set-up and templates. Rev and I would become administrators, and I'd hope that the rest of you wonderful contributors would follow to the new site. Hypothetically, a seperation from Wikia would give us a lot more control along with the choice of revenue-adding advertisements, etc. I would like thoughts from our regular contributors on what you guys think we should do. Feel free to talk to me over aim if you'd rather, my screenname is mpardaiolo11. Mpardaiolo 03:59, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Hm -- I'm currently of the mind of going two ways over this; on one hand, it could be interesting to have it on a different, separate server, but on the other hand, there's always the question of stability. Wikia's servers are more or less a known quantity -- they seem like a stable company, and their uptime/downtime ratio is pretty good so far. I'm not really sure about WikiSound's setup (and I mean that -- they could be way, way better than Wikia!). The revenue question is something that also comes into play; on one hand, hey, money is neat, and possible money is also neat, but there's also the issues of fairness/stickiness that can result; it might be interesting to see some sort of more info on the proposal, too (at least admin-wise, anyway).

On the good side, however: Firstly, it looks like Wikisound's doing a lot of the same stuff we are with the album/artist pages, and it looks like they've got quite a bit of content, so it looks like we'd be doing pretty well at plugging each other's holes here. Also, I know that at least the most recent versions of MediaWiki have actually fixed the whole Export/Import thing which used to just be a "This will work, eventually... probably" thing, so the exporting/importing should go pretty well. We'll have to do a lot of combining and formatting, but hey, we kicked every page on here into shape, and that would probably be an easier job.

I'd like to hear more from other folks about what they're thinking about this. Any other points of view? - Rev. Syung Myung Me 02:41, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

The more I think about it, the more I like this idea, actually. I'd still be great to hear input from some of the other folks here, like Eyeball Kid or JackSparrow or, well any of the folks who've poured a bunch in to here, but, yeah, I think I"m leaning towards merger. - Rev. Syung Myung Me 00:56, 9 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Have you considered the possibility of merging in the other direction? Rev. Syung Myung Me has mentioned one advantage of staying with Wikia, our server stability, but there are others.  We have full community and technical support, any problems you have on the site, we are here to help.  There is a lot of flexibility here in changing the styling of the site, the layout, and the features - if there are music specific MediaWiki extensions, we can look at adding them to this wiki.  We also have some great technical people working on new features - site-wide watchlists is one that I'm looking forward to.


 * You mention revenue, it's possible that you could make a profitable wiki independently, but I know that some sites have found this difficult as they got larger and the bandwidth costs increased. That's why Uncyclopedia and Memory Alpha moved to Wikia.  With Wikia you have the security of knowing that we will host you whatever the bandwidth costs, with no blank site at the end of the month when the bandwidth runs out!


 * For me, the biggest thing to consider is the licensing of wikisound, perhaps I'm too immersed in the free-source culture, but I would have big doubts about contributing to a site that takes the copyrights for my work! As the text here is under the GFDL, any text transferred would have to keep that license.  That's something you would have to discuss with them before moving.  Although you could transfer your own work under the conditions at wikisound (because, of course, with Wikia you still own the copyrights to your own text) you would have to ensure that other people's text wasn't transferred except within the terms of the GFDL.


 * So that's just some more things to think about. Wikisound looks like a nice site with a good active community, so I can understand you wanting to merge - but I hope you'll stay.  -- sannse (talk) 18:53, 9 April 2006 (UTC) (community team)


 * Hi I'm Ron Williams, owner of WikiSound, there's a few things I'd like to mention. Here's information on the server, A) it's a dual xeon 2.8GHz with 4GB of ram. It's shared among 4 users. And since beginning using the server, there has only been one time when the server has gone down. The reason it went down is a user hosting on the server received a massive influx of visitors in a 1 hour period of time. I have 500GB of bandwidth available to me with a full gigabit throughput connection. The price of 2TB is only $40 extra for me. As for moving my site to here instead of this site to there, that causes a possible branding, customization and upgrade issues. I insist on having the latest version of software for security reasons. Wikia does not keep there software completely up to date, which could lead to security problems. As for technical help with mediawiki, there are many forums that offer tech support for mediawiki, such as MW Forums. Many of the features available here are available for people to install into mediawiki. As for the licensing issues, I would like to see people agree to sign there content over. The reason is to not allow people to reuse the content on any site and put it wherever and gain revenue from it. Keeping exclusive rights at WikiSound prevents revenue drop due to it being available elsewhere. WikiSound is not greedy, but it's important to break even, it costs alot for the server. A way that the license issue could be solved is by changing the ToS agreement, stating that the information submitted is now under copyright of YSS. I'd rather not do that and find a compromise with the users here, I am quite willing to modify my license, however I am not willing to go as far as to open it to GFDL. The best thing is portability, with wikia you can not export your database, with WikiSound, you can easily move the database to a new server and the site will be upgraded. When needed, there are easy methods to move the database to one server and the website files to another.


 * I say we bring WikiSound over to the dark side. It would benefit both of us.  We'd have access to things that would normally be unavailable like audio and video for artists, and they would gain a significant amount of artist, album and song information.  Plus, I think we have the advantage of the more solid server.  Even with Wikipedia down for some reason, YSS is still going strong, and I don't think we'd have the same security if we switch servers.  So I think that they should merge with us to be on our safe side. Eyeball Kid 22:39, 9 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Ron Williams here again. I'm not trying to be rude, but I like my domain name, and I like the idea of it being on my server. It gives me technical experience and I've done too much research to just stop hosting my own server. Actually YSS was offline today for quite a while. Things like this show why massive server farms are not always the best. My server can handle 40 requests per second before slowing down, and I've tested it with 27 requests per second without a slowdown. There is actually less security here than on my server because my version is higher than this ones. The ads on my site are smaller and there aren't two search boxes. Nor is there wikia information. Actually you would have the same security, I have the same version of mediawiki as is here, and tonight I will do an upgrade to the latest version. I'm quite tired, hope I did not seem to rude in this. If I did it's quite unintended.


 * No, you don't sound rude at all Ron. And defending your site is fully understandable of course :)  I hope you understand me doing the same for Wikia ;)


 * We are currently on MediaWiki 1.7alpha - which is as up to date as it gets! (it is also the reason for any error messages you see today, there are disadvantages to being on the front end of the releases sometimes).  We are working with the MediaWiki developers to keep in line with their release schedule, so I have no worries that we will ever miss an upgrade that is important for security!  It helps that we are so close to the MediaWiki developers of course - that comes from a mutual background in Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.


 * I can't speak of the technical details of the servers, I'm a community-side person, but I do know that we are committed to ensuring that we have fast and stable service. That will include servers at more than one site in the near future - which will buffer us if any one site has issues.


 * humm... what else did Ron mention?... "with wikia you can not export your database" - well, that's not true. All the data from Wikia is fully available as a database download.  That's part of our commitment to free-content.  You can not export it and then lock it into a non-free site (that's free as in freedom - which is why I said you would have to consider this if you were to move to WikiSound), but you certainly can export it to another site under the same licence.  And your own work remains yours of course, so you can use that as you like.  Wikia does not take away your copyrights, and so does not take away your right to use your own work as you wish.


 * I'm not sure what other facts you want to know to help you make this decision. Just let me know, and I'll try and answer any questions you have.  -- sannse (talk) 13:47, 11 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Well I can honestly say you do make a good arguement, but don't you want your content to be yours? So why should users or admins be forced to use GFDL? I actually have a redundent server. It is for WikiSound only to keep costs down, and it pulls every 15 minutes the database and files for WikiSound in case the server were to go down. As I said above, I was working on a license that will be very liberal regarding how authors can use there content. It will be available soon. It will address many concerns regarding authors content being locked to my website. And while this may be a free website, so is mine, it costs no one anything, there are no popup ads, and the text ads are smaller than the ones here. Additionally there is no wikicities and google searches, and wikia boxes. There not in the way of users. While Wikia is up to date now, at the time I made the post here, the service was still running 1.5.7. Thus I wasn't lieing, it was using that.

No, I know you were not lying Ron :) We have been upgrading all the Wikia over the last week, your message was before we had done this one.  We jumped over 1.6 to get us in sync with Wikipedia, that will make it easier to upgrade alongside them in future.  Yes, your site is free as in cost, which is a great thing.  I meant that it isn't free as in freedom.  My background is Wikipedia, so I'm very much a fan of the free-source movement.  I'm very happy to see others use my content - it's quite a compliment!  The content is still mine, I haven't signed away my copyright by using GFDL, but I'm happy for people to use it under licence.  That's not for everyone, I understand that.  It's up to the community here to decide which they prefer :) -- sannse (talk) 08:05, 12 April 2006 (UTC)