Since we now have an article on Wikipedia, I’ve wondered how many times people actually read the thing.

With a new (beta) tool, we can now find out. Check out the results for December 2007 and January 2008.

Following suit with the English Wiki’s recent milestone, our German Battlestar Wiki has reached — and quickly surpassed — 700 articles. Its 700th article is on the Zeusuda, a ship in the Fleet.

The rapid advancements are primarily by Enabran’s hand, who has had help from CC-Mel, Azrael, and others! So if you’d like to contribute, venture into the fray!
Das hoffen wir alle!

The English Battlestar Wiki has reached 3,000 articles. Ironically enough, the 3,000th article is on the penis lantern — David Eick’s name for the decorative, metallic chrome, semi-flaccid, phallic-like lighting fixtures on Pegasus.

Our 2,999th article was a disambiguation page on those with the name Tom (including Thomas and Tommy).

In other news, the German wiki is five articles shy of 700 articles!

I was recently approached by Angela Beesey of Wikia with an offer to buy out my ownership of Battlestar Wiki. Of course, this is not the first time we have been offered “free hosting” in return for some fancy tools and gizmos. Gil Pechina, CEO of Wikia, had approached me more than a year ago and wanted us to move to Wikia.

In talking with Battlestar Wiki’s core group of people, we declined then.

The new deal (sounds like an FDR thing) I was offered as incentive to surrender my ownership of Battlestar Wiki included two options: $2,500 up front payment or 30% in advertising revenues.

Of course, after discussing this with my core group, I politely declined. I have yet to receive a response from my e-mail, which I sent out three days ago.

So I want to share my insight into why we have rejected Wikia’s offers over the years. It stems from four things:

1. The community has done well for itself independent of a large, bureaucratic group. While the Wiki has grown tremendously since its inception in February 2005, it has remained smaller than larger wikis, such as Memory Alpha, and we’ve been able to keep the quality of our offerings extremely high. Actually, the quality of our wiki has increased over the years, which is something I’m very pleased at. Also, it doesn’t hurt to have various reputable news outlets agree, including AOL and the New York Times.
2. I find it completely unethical to “profit” from the Battlestar Wiki. The buy-out I was offered incensed me, even as I relayed the e-mail to my core group. The various vulgarisms I used in the private communication to my group were unbecoming of me, but sometimes… vulgarisms are necessary, if only for cathartic reasons. Now, to the reasons such an offer incensed me:
   1. If I am to “profit” from the Battlestar Wiki, the people who contributed to its development should as well. $2500 is hardly enough to disperse to several people who’ve developed the site over the years. Additionally, there are many, many people who put their free time into the project when they can be doing other things; they don’t contribute to the Wiki for money. Neither do I.
   2. Relating to the aforementioned reason: I began the wiki as a means of giving back to the fan community. It has succeeded beyond even my humblest expectations, due to not only myself, but due to thousands of people. I do not want to see it “absorbed” by a for-profit company who would rather profit from the hard work of others financially and not re-imburse the people who created the site in the first place.
3. My core group decided against it. Simply put, the core group of people spoke up against it. They spoke up against it before, and they have done so again.
4. Given the various issues that have faced Wikia in the past, it is not in our best interests to mire ourselves in that felgercarb, particularly in light of the fiasco with GuildWiki and, less recently, the lack of accountability in an organization who hires on someone who lies about their credentials and repeats said lies to reputable news outlets. (Yes, I do pay attention to these things. No pulling wool over these eyes, motherfrakkers!)

Now that I’ve probably pissed some people off, I imagine that people will want to react. So, if there are any questions or concerns that you want to address, feel free to talk about them here on the blog, on the Wiki or on the Battlestar Forum.

So say we all! Keep the faith!

As you can see, we’ve started adding links to The Planet, the company that we rent our web server from. They’re a wonderful data center and we highly recommend them for all your web server needs.

If you want a low cost server to meet your needs, please check them out by going here.

Coincidentally, we also recommend 1and1, which was our previous server before the Battlestar Wiki grew to Galactican proportions. Check them out by going here. They are currently having a 50% off sale on select products to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a company, so you may want to take advantage of it now!

I’ve found out today that both Battlestar Wiki and Battlestar Forum have been mentioned in an article by Virginia Heffernan. While the article’s subject is primarily about the failure of Friday Night Lights to become a franchise, it mentions both the Wiki and Forum in its text rather prominently as contrast between established franchises (like Lost and BSG) to FNL. Read the article here!

The dry run beta of BattlestarPegasus.com has launched.

Please visit the site by going here.

Right now, I’m working on many of the wizard-like submission features which will make contributing to the site easier than contributing to Battlestar Wiki. However, my time is shrinking, given that I am now editing manager for the startup comic book company I work for. Which means that my weekend is dedicated toward reading comic books, going over artwork, etc. (More on that later.)

In the meantime, feel free to start throwing content on the website, because there’s not much there now. Don’t worry so much about neatness or breaking some rule, as the beautiful thing about the website is that editors can go through and fix things.

Also, any suggestions, comments, criticisms, and concerns can be left at the BSP.com forum.

We’re looking for contributors to start up an article on the WGA Strike and how it has affected the Re-imagined Series.

Feel free to get started by going here. You may wish to discuss changes or needed additions to this article by going here.

So say we all! Keep the faith!

While I’m a little late in announcing this, I’d like to formally announce that Enabran is our newest administrator on our German Battlestar Wiki!

Please drop by his user talk page and congratulate him for his hard work! He’s been a driving force on the German Wiki as of late and deserves recognition for his hard work on the project!

So say we all!

Thanks to the hard work of our contributors to the German Battlestar Wiki, we’ve passed our 666th article! Well on our way to 1000 articles in German!

The German Wiki’s 666th article is on the flattop ship.

Please cheer them on — or, if you are fluent in both English and German, help them out!

For the January Membership Raffle, we’re raffling off three prizes:

• Two (2) copies of the Season 3 soundtrack OR two (2) $15 USD gift cards to the online retailer of your choice. One copy or $15 USD gift card per person; minimum and maximum of two  (2) winners.
• One (1) year of free membership to Battlestar Wiki/Battlestar Forum (and Battlestar Pegasus!)

If you want to be eligible for the raffle, become a paying member. A one year membership only costs $10 USD — less than $1 USD a month!

So say we all!

One of Frak Media’s on-off projects is to create a repository for fan fiction, theories, and other interpretations to the Battlestar Galactica series.

I’m pleased to announce that this is being worked on as we speak in the form of BattlestarPegasus.com. While the public beta is not yet launched, I’d like to give people a sneak peek on the work that’s been done on it so far. The screenshots in question are for the main page (still a work in progress) and a page covering the publication of an online e-zine, The Galactican.

The PDF function seen below will also be used for scripts and other lost Battlestar Galactica treasures! Cool, eh?

Even with that in mind, we are looking for people who want to submit content to the new site when it launches Friday, January 18. So if you’re interested in submitting content for the beta launch, please contact me via e-mail or submit your content through the Battlestar Forum’s special Battlestar Pegasus board.