Official Wiki vs Guild Wiki

Alright... this may be a dumb question... but... What's up with the whole Ofiicial Wiki?

Guild Wiki is great, albeit not perfect, but why did arena-net create an 'official' wiki yet are having players update the content?
I can -completely- understand if A-net updated the info and got rid of rumors or ambiguous statements and all that jazz, but from the looks of it it's simply a slightly more organized, much less content form of the Wiki we already have...

Anyone know the story behind this? Anyone care to help cure me of some confusion.

I'm definately not opposed to the "Official Wiki", because it looks far 'cleaner' and more organized than the "old gw wiki" but my question is -why-...

Well basically, Anet decided they'd like to eventually make the wiki available from ingame. Rather than having to minimize the game and whatnot, you could just open a little help menu and type in your query. Due to certain legal complications they can't use the existing wiki so they have to start compiling their own.

Wow, had absolutely -no- clue you could access it from in-game.

TYVM for the quick response, answered everything that I need to know ^_^

^Well you can't from ingame yet, it's a feature they want to add in the future.

all you have to do is minimize the game screen and activate internet exp. i do it if i need to find something. if it was an option in the menu, i think it would prolly slow down the game with updates. maybe not, but if you have an older comp, it would be slower.

It wouldn't slow down the game, it doesn't need to be updated. It isn't content stored on your machine, it would be more like an integrated browser that can only access the wiki site.

hmmm.... yeah true true.

I heard from somewhere, I think Guildcast, that Guild Wiki won't be able to keep up with the bandwith.

The new wiki is where all the main people from the old wiki have migrated to (including me), and the old wiki is now being run by some people I've never seen in my life.

Thing is, the new wiki does look cleaner, but at this time we are focused more on general articles, such as armor and gameplay mechanics, and then all the smaller things such as enemies, weapons, and frilly doodad layouts are to come afterwards.

Is this "new Wiki" a website? If so, could someone post the link?

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page

same website, same people, same policies.

i don't care much for it, but i've found my haven writing pvp tactics stuff.

who used internet explorer? but on a related not the new wiki should be good because there is actually a company to lay down the "iron fist" on decisions. the old wiki never really decides anything.

Let me clarify a few points:

That is correct. Guildwiki runs under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. As the name says, this forbids commercial use and as such Anet cannot use it directly from within the game, nor sponsor it directly and simply "take over" the existing wiki. Changing the license is practically impossible as every single person who ever contributed to GuildWiki would have to agree to that change. This, by the way, is also the reason why it is impossible to simply copy creative content from GuildWiki to the official wiki.

That is basically true, too, but taken out of context. For one, many people know that GuildWiki had performance issues before (most recently, when Nightfall was released). The server has since been upgraded. However, Anet making the wiki official would very likely increase the visits to the site significantly and thus might again lead to performance issues. But as stated above, this is not the main point.

Not quite. While most of the people involved in the official wiki are senior contributors / admins from GuildWiki, there are some significant differences in the policies and the overall organisation.

The point is, they won't. Anet will only intervene if abslutely neccessary (e.g. technical stuff that requires direct access to the server, or if, God forbid, things should really get out of hand). They want the community to run the place, all they do is provide the means to do so (this just as a note to the people who fear censorship on the official wiki ).

Guild Wiki has GW gold adverts by Gooooooooooogle. The official wiki doesn't.