Very interesting, Seth. Thanks for this news break. I also wrote a short news item about the failure of a particular Wikia wiki, which your readers might enjoy:

http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikia-takes-down-squirtage-wiki

The "Squirtage" Wikia was actually more successful than most, in terms of user activity. It only failed because somebody told the Wikia staff that it existed! Otherwise, it would probably still be in the Top 2 percent of all Wikia subdomains.

The "ultramodernistic skin," called "Oasis" (they considered calling it "Blur," but felt this would be confusing), definitely favors the hosts over the users. For the first time, the Wikia logo and menu bar will now be at the top of every single page, with the logo occupying the coveted upper-left corner where most people expect to see the wiki's own logo. It also hides most of the "Special" links, like Recent Changes and page histories, even more than they were before.

This is really part of a slow, deliberate process that's been going on for some time now. The purpose is almost solely to maintain Wikia's Alexa and Google rankings.

Also, I don't know when this started, but nearly all user-supplied images on Wikia are now being served from a subdomain of nocookie.net, which is good if it means there are no cookies associated with those images. But knowing Wikia, there's probably some reason for their doing this that involves improving their search-engine positioning.

wikibias.com

Have you seen this blog?

I just signed up to your blogs rss feed. Will you post more on this subject?

The new skin *was* called "Oasis". Now they want to just call it "Wikia" because, uh, it's the skin Wikia uses. I'm not sure how this will work in another two years when they change the skin again.