Camera-wiki.org:Camerapedia

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Camerapedia.org (Camerapedia) was founded in 2004 by User:Lbstone. This strictly noncommercial, Mediawiki-based site provided for the creation of a serious independent resource about cameras and their lenses and accessories. It contained text, and the photographs and other illustrations within the articles were linked from other websites, with the permission of those websites and the copyright holders. User:Rebollo_fr became the most prolific author, giving the encyclopedia a strong coverage of vintage Japanese cameras and their makers. In 2006 the Flickr group Camerapedia was founded as a high-capacity, high-bandwidth illustration resource for the wiki. Camerapedia.org's webserver was financed by Lbstone, the owner of the domain name; the image resource space was provided by the Flickr community.

In January 2011 Lbstone had already negotiated the sale of the domain name to Wikia but had not announced this at Camerapedia or, as far as is known, even privately informed any contributor. When Lbstone did reveal it, various contributors could not be convinced of the benefits to a long-running independent non-commercial project of hosting by Wikia, despite the influx of experienced Wikia staff. Wikia made the individual page addresses of camerapedia.org plain redirects to the corresponding pages of camerapedia.wikia.com.[1] Two months later, after incidents of wrong user attribution of wiki texts and unauthorized image uploads - both reverted by Wikia after protests, advertisement mode was switched on. Camerapedia is a commercial site now, on thin ice since it started commercial mode without having a valid permission for most of its Flickr image links.

The project community found a response to the unwelcomed takeover. They "forked" Camerapedia in the night of January 23rd 2011. User:Voxphoto created a new Flickr group[2] (whose name changed a couple of times), and flickrmailed invitations to anyone who seemed likely to take some kind of action. User:Steevithak had done some hard thinking about what steps would be involved, and in the course of a discussion[3] in the new group he proposed a plan of action[4] that eventually was followed very closely. User:Heritagefutures and others encouraged Voxphoto and Steevithak to make these efforts to launch Camera-wiki.org as a new home for the old wiki community. Almost the whole community of Camerapedia contributors moved to the Camera-wiki.org project.

Camerapedia has found some new users since who prefer using own images which they loaded up to the Wikia server. It lacks a good admin who's engaged in keeping its community on track, and its "Wikia skin" truly spoils many of the old original page designs.

Notes

  1. For example, www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Fujica_G690 was the address within camerapedia.org of the page about the Fujica G690 and closely related cameras; since January 24th 2011 this has been a redirect to the derivative article within camerapedia.wikia.com on the same subject.
  2. Camerawiki Flickr group, at Flickr.
  3. Discussion about forking Camerapedia, at Flickr.
  4. Steevithak's proposal, at Flickr.

See also