Wikia is not a satisfactory alternative to Wikipedia, at least in terms of ethical status of the host (Wikia is a company and there are ads on Wikia wikis), in terms of internal consistency, and in terms of content licensing and of availability of dumps.
The problem is not the license of the software. I think Wikia also uses MediaWiki which is free software.
For the other points that I mentioned, I'm not sure I know many wiki hosts which are free as in free beer, run by a nonprofit, sustainable through donations, show no ads, have their content under a free license and dump it in a way comparable to http://dumps.wikimedia.org/.
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Wikia is not a satisfactory alternative to Wikipedia, at least in terms of ethical status of the host (Wikia is a company and there are ads on Wikia wikis), in terms of internal consistency, and in terms of content licensing and of availability of dumps.
If you want internal consistency, you have to have some centralized way to enforce that, and you're back where you started.
There are open source wiki platforms so wikia is not the only option.
The problem is not the license of the software. I think Wikia also uses MediaWiki which is free software.
For the other points that I mentioned, I'm not sure I know many wiki hosts which are free as in free beer, run by a nonprofit, sustainable through donations, show no ads, have their content under a free license and dump it in a way comparable to http://dumps.wikimedia.org/.
The quality is also much, much worse.
Right. Which is why Wikipedia is the way it is.