[Zhiroc]

One thing I read is that the original maintainer took donations, and then ran ads himself to support the site? So what is the difference with Wikia running ads? I'm not familiar with the site, CC, or Wikia for that matter, so I'm new to all this.

I tried to look up the CC licenses, and there was no clean link to the legalese, just links to summaries. One thing I noted is that it says: "Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder." (which includes the non-commercial clause).

So, next question: who holds the copyright to a wiki? It's easy to say "the individual authors" but in a wiki, the seamless collaborative effort seems to make this impossible. If I write a section, and it gets modified over time, and it gets linked to, etc., the idea that I could somehow later revoke my permission to use my edits seems untenable.

I guess the original maintainer did say that he doesn't hold the copyright at least (which would have been an out to the non-commercial clause).

Also, it seems like Wikia is not asserting ownership of the database (I saw some talk in the Guild Wiki page that corrects that part of the Slashdot article). So technically, someone could take the information there, and port it to another server, but then you get the same problem that led the original maintainer to give it up--it costs too much to run.

And then there's the question of what defines "commercial" in this sense. Obviously, the original maintainer was paying hosting fees. Thus, I could claim that the original Wiki was providing commercial advantage to the hosting services--just that the community thought it was free (well until he started asking for donations and then started running his own ads). If the ads are used in lieu of anyone paying hosting fees directly, and without any "lockdown" that keeps the site at Wikia, is there any difference?