User blog comment:Klow/We are leaving/@comment-8-20110711232258/@comment-85393-20110713091926

Thank you Sannse for giving us your toughts.

So! Our message is not misleading. I don’t know why you bring the “We” thing up, this is irrelevant, but it seems it needs to be clarified, so here goes: "We" relates to Combine OverWiki's current community, which made it what it is today, gave it its spirit, and made it a renowned name in the Half-Life and Portal community. This has nothing to do with Wikia, which has nothing to do with the quality or completeness of our content, and has rather tainted our reputation in exchange of its free hosting. Plus most of the active contributors (or what you call "the community") have been consulted and agree with the move, and so far the comments I saw at our other official channels or here in the comments have been overwhelmingly positive.

We never really considered us as part of the Wikia community anyway, our community being the Half-Life and Portal one. So when we move, that won't change anything for our community. We will just be the same wiki, known and appreciated, but only better; where we are hosted doesn't matter. It's like a reputable store: wherever it moves, it's still reputable and keeps its faithful customers. If another unrelated store replaces it at its former location, the faithful customers won't care and will continue going to the store they know, wherever it has moved. People come on Wikia not because they love Wikia, but because they love a particular wiki Wikia happens to host and of which Wikia has no relevance or effect on the quality of its contents.

So yes, "we" are moving. The wiki that will follow here will be any wiki but not the Combine OverWiki people know; this is why taking the name with us makes so much sense. This will be just another Half-Life wiki reusing our work, and that happens to be hosted on Wikia.

As for the license and author attribution. The license will not be changed; I rewrote that part in our announcement after checking my facts. As for the author attribution, the user accounts will be cloned to the new wiki. These accounts will only be attributed to their respective authors, nobody else. Nobody will be allowed to take over an account that’s not theirs, so that’s fine on that end. We can even put a link on each unused userpage to its counterpart on Wikia. And most prolific contributors are leaving anyway, so that's just cosmetic. Let’s seen some numbers, whether it changes anything to you or not: I personally have an editcount of ~90,700. This is not far from the half of the ~208,500 total editcount of the wiki. You can also add the editcount of our bot Dog (coming with us), ~34,300. Around 11,000 in total for the other current and former admins (coming with us), 3600 for the rollbacks (coming with us). We end up at 68,860, which is less than half of the total, and less than my personal editcount. Remove from that talk pages which are not actual content, redirects, anons who have no real authorship, so in the end there’s not much left. If most of the authors move, I don't see the big deal in (properly) attributing the work to ourselves.

And as we said, people are free to stay, but you don't need to encourage us to do so. Just encourage who's left when we are gone. There may be good reasons to stay on Wikia, but they don't fill our needs anymore, and we are not the first in that situation. Present the choice to who's left when we are gone, because the choice, we made it. And ask them to choose a nice name for their ready-made wiki based on ours, because “Combine OverWiki” is already taken.

I see a very good future for us as well, as good as that of the ex-Wikia Transformers Wiki, because we have our community behind us, the new one won't, and we never needed to do any ass kissing to achieved that. The Half-Life and Portal community has no particular tie to the Wikia community, and has no reason to do so.

Sorry for the possible harshness Sannse, but while (again) we are grateful, it's time for Combine OverWiki to move on. We are determined.