Comixpedia

From Comixpedia

Comixpedia was founded in early September 2005. It is a free content encyclopedia specializing in webcomics. Currently, it has over 4,627 articles.

The owner and host of this website is Comixpedia.com, a webcomic magazine. Comixpedia can be considered a fork of Wikipedia, as it was born out of the Wikipedia project and is even edited by members of the Wikipedia community. However, it is based in an entirely different set of goals from Wikipedia.

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 culuture. For example, comixpedians informally assume good faith, welcome new users, and discuss on how to best to manage the project despite there are no policies and guideline to govern their users. The vanity rule may been dropped but the Netural Point of View is kept strongly, which is non-neogiationable policy of every Wikipedia lanugage editon in existance. Like Wikipedia, Comixpedia.org also run on Mediawiki software, which is developed by Wikipedia's parent organization, Wikimedia.

Unlike Wikipedia, which aims to be a comprehensive user-edited encyclopedia and thus only includes comics it deems as notable under the provisions of its Webcomic Project guidelines, Comixpedia has no such restrictions on content.

1 History
2 External Links

[edit] History

[edit] Criticisms of Wikipedia

In his November 1, 2004 snark, entitled A Modest Webcomics Proposal, that doesn't involve eating babies. *pause* It's a Jonathan Swift reference. Honest, writer Eric Burns asserted that Wikipedia, while being a decent, rather credible source, faced several challenges. He outlined these challenges as follows:

As an open-source encyclopedia, Wikipedia is prone to have errors made in its articles that go uncorrected and stand unchallenged.
Wikipedia's rules for webcomic entry into the encyclopedia are overly strict.

In particular, Wikipedia's Webcomic Project has been oft-criticised for using the Alexa search engine as its primary method of determining a webcomic's popularity. A webcomic is found to be notable (and thus worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia), if its Alexa traffic rating is above 200,000. If a webcomic has an Alexa rating that is below 200,000, that comic's article usually faces a Vote for Deletion (now called Articles for Deletion) debate, in which the article often ends up deleted from Wikipedia's database.

This system has been effective at keeping many comics from ending up in the Wikipedia database.

Criticisms of this system are as follows:

This system is unfair because it does not allow articles to be written about comics that may have a small readership but are highly influential in the webcomicing community (for example, It's About Girls).
The Alexa traffic engine counts only Internet Explorer users and disregards Firefox visitors to sites. As many comic readers are Firefox users, this system is unreliable.
The Alexa traffic engine often does not count hits from outside the United States.

These criticisms of Wikipedia's Webcomic Project guidelines did not go unnoticed at Wikipedia, and an oft-cited "Alternate Proposal" guideline for editors at that site hoping to enter webcomics onto the page was created. However, the exact guidelines for the alternate proposal were never agreed on. Burns' alternate proposal stated that comics with 100 strips in their archives and a solid history of updates for one year be added to Wikipedia on this basis. Others felt that an archive containing 500 comics and three years of updates should warrant inclusion automatically.

The lack of agreement on the "Alternate Proposal" numbers meant that the proposal was never officially adopted and many staunch Wikipedians continued to fight against the addition of new comics to Wikipedia's database.

[edit] The Creation of Comixpedia.org

Thus, Eric Burns was led to write a Revised Modest Webcomics proposal. Written on September 2, 2005, Eric Burns' revised proposal aptly summarized the year's debate on Wikipedia in the following manner:

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]
The Alexa rating system continued to be flawed.
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 proposed that Wikipedia be dropped entirely by readers who hoped to write about comics with seminal popularity. He proposed that a new site be created... a WebcomicWiki, where creators, fans and community could build a database and information source about webcomics that exceeded Wikipedia's capacity to do so.

At the time, Burns wrote:

A Webcomics Wiki Encyclopedia could become a clearinghouse for solid information on webcomics. It could be a standardized location for cast lists, creator information and synopses. It could incorporate all the potential strengths that Wikipedia offers, without having to fight either the populist or elitist sides of things.

He elaborated that while Wikipedia was fine as a generalist resource, its role as a webcomics resource could never fully be established.

The idea to form Comixpedia.org was thus born.