User blog comment:MEffect Fan/New wiki skin opinion/@comment-217683-20101014085427/@comment-2088100-20101014181521

Some of the bans were related to people who were actively vandalizing wikis that they're admins of. Admins justified it as: "We're leaving, we're deleting all the pages here so that people know we've moved" Wikia said "Uh, that's vandalism, you obviously don't deserve to be an admin here anymore." I'm paraphrasing of course.

Wikia has little recourse other than demotions/bans in that case. Former admins on the Wikia site were sabotaging it... You can spin it as "The entire community is leaving, we're just cleaning up after ourselves," But Wikia obviously doesn't see it that way. They see the forking of some wikis as a minority of the community that's upset and protesting the only real way they can: leaving and starting up an alternate site. They claim that the majority of the community will remain on Wikia. It's hard to judge who's correct, since there isn't much data available, and there's a self-selection bias if you look at people who vote on whether to leave a wiki on that wiki. Traffic stats are the only way to look at it... data that's not readily available.

And you're absolutely right, SpartHawg. This is bad for Wikia no matter how you look at it. They kinda screwed themselves. Marketing is already all geared up for the new skin, which looks great for attracting new people to wikis. It seems they might have underestimated the backlash from veteran editors though, and they're handling the backlash in an extremely poor way. The blame is not solely theirs though. I fully believe everyone that Wikia banned was deserving of it in some way. They definitely could have made their reasoning clearer to both the people who were banned and the gawkers observing it from the sidelines, though. Making it clear from the start that any removal of pages from a wiki constitutes vandalism would have helped a lot of people understand these bans.