One problem I immediately notice is that Comixpedia doesn’t allow anonymous edits. I’m sure there are good reasons for this (probably to do with spam), but for a wiki that’s trying to build content, the last thing it needs is barriers for potential contributors.

A wiki requires a certain critical mass to be successful. You need enough content to attract a ton of people, a percentage of those people update it and the cycle repeats. Comixpedia isn’t there yet.

A major factor slowing down the adoption of Comixpedia, at least from the perspective of an interested webcomic creator looking to promote the crap out of her work (i.e. people like me), it comes down to a few things that need to be dealt with immediately if not sooner:

1) The hosting of images on Comixpedia as opposed to allowing hotlinked images (it’s a needless complication for users, and every other wiki seems capable of handling this, so it makes Comixpedia look “poor” as a result)

2) The inability to create new templates for pages, possibly based on series (so if I wanted to create a template for my Comic where I could have the main pages of the comic, characters, settings, story arcs, major events, etc. pages all accessible from one single template, I should be able to do that). As it currently stands, there is no (easy) way to do this, even though there SHOULD be.

3) The lack of “user bling” i.e. templates designed for use only in userpages to convey information as well as enhance the page. My wikifur userpage, for instance, lists several other sites I have accounts on, along with a few other useful details. Why there isn’t a similar accessory for the Comixpedia pages to at least identify users who are writers/artists/creators is beyond me.

And, possibly even more important than that… the only rationale I’ve heard for using Comixpedia is that “Wikipedia is being mean and won’t let me have an article there”. There HAS to be some sort of value added to Comixpedia besides just “well at least it’s not Wikipedia!”, because as I said, there are LOTS of alternative wikis to plug a webcomic on besides Comixpedia. As long as Comixpedia sees itself as ONLY a Wikipedia alternative, it’s dead in the water.

WikiFur
TVTropes: Webcomics

That said, I went with Comixpedia since that site has helped me a lot when I needed to do research on certain strips in the past. Comixpedia, while woefully out of date, seems to present more indepth information compared to TVTropes, at least it seems so when I went to check on the entries for 8-Bit Theater and Penny Arcade. Also, if I wanted to check up on a specific author — say, if I wanted to see what projects T Campbell was doing beyond Penny & Aggie — there doesn’t seem to be a separate article for writers. I think the Comixpedia format has the potential to be more comprehensive.

And the stuff I get from TVtropes puts both of them to shame.

It just doesn’t make sense from any sort of perspective to waste time with Comixpedia when alternative wikis (especially TVTropes) exist that bring in far more interested eyeballs. It’s one thing to suggest alternatives, but Comixpedia ain’t it.

http://comixtalk.com/why_aren%E2%80%99t_we_all_updating_comixpedia