Guild Wars Wiki:About

Guild Wars Wiki

What is this website about?

Guild Wars Wiki is the official wiki for Guild Wars. It is hosted by ArenaNet for the Guild Wars community to be managed and shaped by the community. The following questions address concerns and questions regarding GuildWiki (a comprehensive wiki about Guild Wars with a specialty fansite status).

See also the FAQ.

Why would ArenaNet offer to host a wiki? What's in it for ArenaNet?

We think the wiki is a fantastic resource for Guild Wars players. It's often more complete and useful than the documentation that ArenaNet generates internally. We'd like to be able to feature wiki documentation more prominently, on our web site and in our game. Right now we can't really do that with GuildWiki, for simple reasons like: the servers can't necessarily handle the load, the site features ads selling gold for cash, the site costs Gravewit a lot of money to run and we don't want to further burden him, and we can't rely on the site always being there.

A couple of years from now, we hope that all of our games have wiki support integrated into the game as a built-in help system. We think it would be fantastic if a player could select 'help' and then click on any quest, mission, skill, etc., and get complete documentation about that item in-game from the Guild Wars wiki site. This is a long term vision but something we should start working towards.

There are a few clear problems we need to solve today as a prerequisite to that vision. First, the game's wiki documentation needs to be hosted on a site that can scale to handle the potentially huge volume and huge bandwidth that would come with game integration. Second, the game's wiki documentation needs to be hosted on a site that we can guarantee will always be available. Third, the game's wiki documentation needs to be hosted under a license that permits integration with the game. For all these reasons, we think it makes sense for ArenaNet to start providing free hosting for a wiki site on our servers, and to start working with the community to bring this vision to reality.

If ArenaNet hosts the site, who will run it?

We're offering to provide free bandwidth and servers, but it is our hope that community members will run the wiki, just like community members run Guild Wars wikis today. We encourage those who administer and moderate Guild Wars wikis to contact us; we'll give you equivalent rights on our hosted servers.

If ArenaNet hosts the site, will ArenaNet own the content?

ArenaNet is not attempting to own user-contributed articles or have any special rights over them. ArenaNet is offering to host user-contributed content under the terms of the GNU Free Document License, which is the same license that Wikipedia uses. Contributors will own the copyrights to original content they write, and by uploading them to the ArenaNet-hosted wiki site, they will be making their articles available for other people to use under the terms of the Free Document License.

If ArenaNet hosts the site, will ArenaNet police or control the content?

We hope to agree with the community to some basic guidelines, like "report facts, not opinions" and "the purpose of this site is to document Guild Wars", and then ask the community to administer and moderate the site. The community is already doing an excellent job moderating existing sites like GuildWiki, and we see no reason why ArenaNet's offer to host the site should change the way that the site is administered.

Has ArenaNet been in contact with administrators of GuildWiki?

Yes. We had a series of productive discussions with Phil (Gravewit) and other administrators of GuildWiki in June and July 2006 when we first proposed to host the wiki. We learned a lot about GuildWiki, and Phil provided a lot of great advice about how we should host the wiki and how we could best support the community. After that series of discussions, we agreed that the next step was for ArenaNet to actually purchase servers and build out the infrastructure to support a wiki. At the time, ArenaNet's IT team was particularly busy getting ready for the launch of Guild Wars in China, so the wiki build-out has taken longer than we hoped, but we're done building it out now and we're ready to resume discussions and start hosting.

If ArenaNet hosts a site, will it be any different than the existing GuildWiki site?

There are a few minor things that need to be different in order to support our vision of using the public wiki as our primary source of documentation, and the long term vision of integrating wiki access into the game.

First, we are proposing to use the GNU Free Document License. GuildWiki uses a different license called Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, which places some restrictions on how GuildWiki content can be used. Especially important is that the license GuildWiki uses precludes its content from being used for commercial purposes. This could be interpreted to preclude ArenaNet from hosting the site's content or integrating it into our games, since we are a commercial enterprise that makes money from selling games.

Second, we are proposing to host the content in an ad-free environment. Because ArenaNet opposes the sale of gold for cash, we can't be in the position of directing people to a web site that advertises the sale of gold for cash.

Third, we will host the site on more powerful servers with more bandwidth, so that we can direct huge numbers of users to the site without overwhelming its hosting capacity.

These are important considerations but they're all behind-the-scenes type considerations. The fundamental structure, organization, and look and feel of an ArenaNet-hosted wiki site don’t need to be any different from what the community has already been generating with sites like GuildWiki. We think the existing wiki site administrators and community have been doing a fantastic job. We're not asking anyone to change what they're doing. We're just offering to provide free hosting, and asking to use the Free Document License instead of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Has ArenaNet considered just purchasing GuildWiki from Phil (Gravewit)?

Technically, it's not possible for Phil to sell the content of GuildWiki. He doesn't own it. The site contains articles written by hundreds of different people, and each author still holds the copyrights for the articles that he or she wrote. The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license used by GuildWiki provides certain rights, but selling the content for profit is not a right that's provided by that license. So Phil doesn't own the content and he's not allowed to make a profit by selling it.

Individual contributors still hold the copyrights to their articles and can license them however they wish. Anyone who wrote an article for GuildWiki can choose to also make that article available to another site under another license. That's a choice for contributors to make, but it's not a choice that Phil is legally allowed to make on their behalf.

Has ArenaNet considered leaving the content on Phil's site and just paying his hosting bills?

The content on Phil's site uses the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which probably prevents us from using it as a primary source of documentation for our games or building wiki integration into our games, regardless of whether Phil runs the site or we do.

Does Phil earn a living from selling ads on his site, and will ArenaNet be taking that away from him by hosting a wiki with no ads?

When we talked with Phil, he told us that the ads on his site only help to defray some of the costs of running the site, and that he still has to spend a lot of his own money to pay for server hosting and bandwidth. Phil is unfortunately in a position where hosting the Guild Wars wiki can't ever become a profitable business for him, because he is hosting it under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that disallows him from making a profit off the site's content. Phil has started building new wiki sites for other games using the Free Document License instead of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so it is possible that his new wikis may become profitable businesses for him. We are very grateful to Phil for everything he has done for Guild Wars; we want to keep his best interests in mind; and we sincerely wish him success in his endeavors.

Can ArenaNet 'fork' the GuildWiki site and use it as a basis for ArenaNet's hosted site?

We don't have the right to do that, and Phil doesn't have the right to do that. Only individual contributors have the right to upload the articles they've written to a different site under a different license.

Then how do we proceed?

First and most importantly, we want to continue our discussions with all of the people who have built and administered the existing Guild Wars wiki sites. These people have been a backbone to the community, they're the ones who know best how a successful wiki site can serve the community, and we want to be sure that they have a guiding voice in anything we do. Second, we will proceed with setting up servers and making an ArenaNet-hosted wiki site available to the public. Those of you who administer or moderate existing Guild Wars wiki sites will be granted equivalent access to the ArenaNet hosted site at your request; those of you who have written content for existing wiki sites can choose to upload that content to the ArenaNet hosted site; ArenaNet employees will try to help where we can; and together we can all start working together to populate this new site.