User talk:Tennessee Ernie Ford/Archive 06

No longer contributing to Wikia after 20 October 2010
Wikia's new direction is taking it away from core support of community-edited, encyclopedic bodies of knowledge (wikis) and moving it a new direction of social networking. They could have chosen to implement this for all new and opting-in existing sites. Instead they have chosen to impose their concept of wiki community on the rest of us. Since I have only limited time to volunteer, I see no reason to spend any of it supporting their top-down approach to hosting consensus-driven sites. The changes might be good for some wikis, but not for this one.

(Added later)

Wikia could have approached us early to say, ''look, we have to re-brand and standardize. It's just unrealistic for a business to continue functioning in this way. We realize these changes will produce a hardship on you, and we can't help that. What we can do, however, is to offer you short-term dedicated help to adapt your wiki to take full advantage''. Instead, our 100% volunteer staff has to figure out the impact on our own, second guess which features to adapt, which to force to fit, what to risk leaving alone. In the end, it's just less work to move to someplace where we have more control and/or our hosts depend on our success to flourish.

More importantly, Wikia has shown no particular enthusiasm for GuildWiki and therefore, I see no reason why we should feel any loyalty at all to remaining here. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 22:12, October 4, 2010 (UTC)
 * I am also of this opinion, I have "loyalty" to the GuildWiki community, but I shall not be supporting Wikia (by editing their wikis, or affiliating myself with them). --  Random Time  22:15, October 4, 2010 (UTC)

Move related tasks
Please apply your flowery language skills to. This will be the "tag" for userpages to be deleted after da moooove. &mdash;Dr Ishmael 04:12, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

Flattery will get you everywhere
Re this. I thought your quote summed up my feelings quite succinctly. It's not awful, it's the principle that we're slaving away voluntarily and they're trying to squeeze profit out of it at our expense. Although if it's a problem I can remove it. Gboyers talk 07:20, October 5, 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm glad it was useful to you, I just had no idea anyone besides us Guild Wikians were looking :-) I wonder if all the groups thinking to move could work together to leverage more support from some potential host. Where are you guys thinking of going? &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 07:30, October 5, 2010 (UTC)

We've arranged to host ourselves, with the assistance of a large GTA fansite. This gives us complete control over everything, something we lack now. We might need some adverts to pay for the hosting, but they would be sensitive, and nowhere near as obtrusive as the Wikia adverts. I toyed with the idea of helping host other wikis, but if Wikia need that much money to run, we probably would too, and then we'd essentially be back where we are now. Gboyers talk 08:50, October 6, 2010 (UTC)


 * Awesome! And I agree: you're in the business of providing a good knowledge base for GTA; figuring out how to host other wikis isn't (at the moment) sensible.


 * However, Wikia's cash needs are different; they aren't trying to just host wikis anymore (and that's partly why they need to make more money). There are lots of hosting farms, a fair number of various sorts of wiki farms and they would like to create something that probably doesn't exist yet. In fact, it might end up being very cool, but it's not wiki hosting. Which is what GWiki needs, as well as GTA wiki etc.


 * Thanks for letting me know how you guys are doing. Good luck! &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 09:37, October 6, 2010 (UTC)

Thank you!
As AFK pointed out, nobody has thanked you yet for all your trouble and time. As I support the move, I would like the thank you. Thank you!one1 Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 16:55, October 7, 2010 (UTC)


 * Why thank you! TBH, I really haven't done much more than summarize everyone else's hard work. (As you have probably noticed, others are doing very heavy technical lifting (Ish/Mendel), politicking (Felix, RT, et al), research (Ish, Felix, Mendel, RT), financial (Gig), and the all-important picking apart details (above plus Jon, Gig, Naz, The Naz, yourself, and, ironically, Sannse)). I'm pretty sure this move would be successful without my help; I'm positive it wouldn't even happen without the others I've listed. We are lucky to have an awesome group of people here. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 17:10, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll thank The NAZZZZ too. But I do think you deserve to be thanked. Otherwise I wouln'd have done it. Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 17:30, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * Crud — I knew I left of two people. Naz is one (I have added him in). Who is the other? (And thank you again :-) &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 17:34, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * Aye, thanks. Sorry, hard to be organized when editing a wiki once you fall out of the habit.
 * Organization is key, so don't go and be-little your own efforts like that :) A_F_K_sig_2.jpg A F K is pro-AWA! 17:40, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Like hi there.
Greetings.

I've done everything there is to be done in Guild Wars and... well, when younger, less mature and testing boundaries, bored, (whole load of things can go here) I earned myself a reputation here at GuildWiki. So I no longer play the game and... with the way things are I feel little reason to be active. I've been watching the latest disaster and simply had to log in to thank Felix, who I gathered from maybe-right sources that he was a big player in picking up the pieces.

I'll always respond as soon as I notice any talk page message / e-mail from you, and I'll always welcome both.

How are you, my friend? A F K is pro-AWA! 17:10, October 7, 2010 (UTC)


 * Heya! I'm glad to see that you are alive and well (if not great). (PS give yourself credit: near as I can tell, you have twice re-invented yourself and started one of the funniest sites in wikidom; wouldn't surprise me in the least to see you at GWW2 or GWiki2 as The Un A F K or some such.) IMO, you are correct that Felix is among the short-list of contributors here without whom the move would not happen (or go very poorly if it did).


 * Are you still playing MMOs at all? How are you satisfying your RPG fix? &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 17:21, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * (EC) I flirted with yet another EVE Online trial. Two days and a few hours left. Still with the all-important decision to make.
 * I've also, with no MMORPG I've particular interest in exisiting, gone over to WoW where RL pplz hang out. It's something else to have in common with them, so /shrug.
 * On other news I'm currently installing LOTRO (free = good). If it seems promising (everyone I know has wanted it to go die in a fire) then I might pay up.
 * And finally I've been running around with games from other genres as well. Started playing Dawn of War II again, but won't be for long I imagine. Got Dead Space from a friend, but that'll likely be a two-three day thing at most. Thinking about investing some time in Warcraft III and StarCraft II so... yeah. Busy busy.
 * Also, an old flame of mine, I've been playing Freespace II again. It will forever be my favourite game, despite being the wrong side of a decade old. While basically an older Eve Online, since the franchise was commercially abandoned due to legal issues, a community has gotten its hands on the source engine and has been responsible for all sorts of brilliant ideas which they've gone about implementing. Perhaps most impressive of all is replacing the old low-res models and making the game look brand new. You can buy the game for about $3 these days, so if you're bored and in anyway interested in space simulators I could give it no higher recommendation. If you get Freespace II you can download the original Freespace for free, should you be in anyway interested (It's free for a reason, tbh, and hasn't gotten the love that the second game in the series has, but free is free).
 * I looked at your edit and didn't think I'd have much at all to respond with so... yeah. Sorry about that.
 * How are you keeping yourself busy? :) A_F_K_sig_2.jpg A F K is pro-AWA! 17:39, October 7, 2010 (UTC)


 * WoW (pun intended) ! I heard some people found a way to host their own no-monthlies World of Warcraft, but didn't realize there were other games where ppls had done the same. I think I have too much to do in GW to consider dedicating some hard drive space to another game (although I will certainly buy the next Elder Scrolls). Conceivably, I might join a current pay-to-play that cost $50-75/year including the download of the client; I absolutely refuse to pay twice or to pay twice as much in total costs. ANet has proven that you can get millions of satisfied customers w/o charging $100s.


 * My main toon has hit 28 titles. One is consumable-based, so no trouble at all. The remaining titles are... very far away and cannot be done simply be executing a series of unique tasks. (My favorite was skill hunter &mdash; you get to go everywhere, increase your chance of a variety of greens/hour, and each outing progresses the title quickly. The worst was Proph VQ: so little benefit, so tedious to acquire.) So, I'm considering becoming an ordinary farmer and repeating the same area until I become efficient. Previously, the longest I've been able to do that is about 45 (raptor farm) to 90 minutes (creating new toons to run Chahbek Village takes me about 5 min, including zoning); I just get bored too quickly.

Oasis is a good thing
I submit that it is not. Everything that Oasis leads you to believe is wrong and geared to Wikia's vision of a community; it doesn't fit with working communities.
 * Wiki activity lacks display of Project: namespace and any other namespace, including user talk. You can't catch vandals with it, and it strongly reminds me of the "community" on Wikianswers that doesn't use these types of pages either.
 * MyTools is just bad interface, the list is completely unstructured, and you can't count on users being shown the "Good ones".
 * "Photo attribution" that doesn't really give teh creator credit makes open source seem like "upload what you want, no matter where you got it from".
 * Blog comments and article comments are impossible to keep track of unless you keep rereading your blog. They don't appear in any watchlist, and you can't see them in context from RC.
 * Don't get me started on the RTE.
 * The skin is geared more towards readers than editors, and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't very effective in turning readers into editors. It may be effective in getting more people to leave comments, but whether that translates into more community participation (and more signups) remains to be seen.
 * Wikia will not be able to leverage any people moving trans-wiki well until it complete rethinks its "community" central policies.
 * In a nutshell, the skin is made for the "casual user". Casual users don't make wikis.
 * People report eye problems because the font size is so small.

Feel free to point out that I'm just being pessimistic. :-P -- ◄mendel► 21:13, October 7, 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree. You should see the font that the name is in. It is horrible! Even the background does not fit a wiki. [[File:User Ariyen sig icon.gif]]riyen 22:20, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * Font and background can be configured, though admittedly what you're seeing comes with the theme designer. -- ◄mendel► 06:19, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict)
 * Wikia isn't about wikis anymore, so I'm trying not to measure their execution against my criteria. We're not the target audience. So, although I think your description of the tool set is mostly accurate, I think Wikia is indeed headed towards casual communities, or those dedicated around a single, narrow and short-term goal (e.g. family reunion). To make this happen, Wikia needs to standardize and simplify their interface and setup tools of little use to us. Even given this, would you or I advise them to do it this manner? Probably not.


 * Well see some interesting test cases over the next few months: Tardis (Doctor Who Wikia) is not moving (seems more trouble to them in the long run) and we'll see if they can generate enough smaller sites (in fact, maybe that's what they were seeing the last 12 months &mdash; more eyeballs at micro wikis).


 * (Ohai, Ariyen: how are you?) &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 23:04, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * Grant it, this may benefit the wikis like Farmville and Alice in Wonderland. However, I strongly do not feel this will benefit big wikis like this one. Not when a lot of hard work will or may be messed up when Oasis takes over. I have seen my userpage looked messed up in Oasis as well as a few more pages and I don't see a lot of benefits at all. I don't see quite so many wikis coming here either for gaming. [[File:User Ariyen sig icon.gif]]riyen 02:45, October 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree w/you Ariyen: this is bad for gaming wikis of any size. But, I really don't think Wikia is about wikis anymore. They might even be glad to see the whiners and whingers like us go, leaving the site filled with a higher percentage of groups that get something out of the new direction. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 02:53, October 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * It's been mentioned that they might be attempting to emulate geocities. ;-P (In fact, I believe "wikicities" was their original name, and that's why we do w:c: for interwiki links.) -- ◄mendel► 06:19, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

I've got a new theory about why Wikia introduced the floating toolbar. (The old theory is that they copied it off mine but did it wrong.) They found out that the fixed width and wide sidebar made pages so long that serious scrolling up was required to get to the page toolbar. (It still begs the question why they only put half of the useful stuff in it.) -- ◄mendel► 06:52, October 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * Floating seems cool, so they made the toolbar floating. (Your version is somewhat more plausible from a what-purpose-does-it-serve storyline; mine fits more of the design sessions I've sat in.) As for why they only put some stuff in it, again, I'm trying to look at it from the viewpoint of what their goals are. Simple is first on their agenda...and sometimes, they get so carried away with that they usefulness is lost. I think Following is an example of that. It looks friendlier than the watchlist, but that's b/c they took everything out of WL that made it such a great tool for us. But reviewing their rollout of same (and reading their blogs), one definitely gets the impression that they thought it was the greatest thing since CSS. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 08:07, October 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * Mmmmh-hmmm. I'm a bit loath to explain these features by incompetence. -- ◄mendel► 13:39, October 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * There's the old saying that's true (as well as witty) that the camel is a horse that was designed by a committee . That's not incompetence, that's losing sight of the original goal. Also, the camel, not the horse, is best suited, of course, for the course that's designed for a land in the sand. Which has been my central point about Oasis: it's not meant to be helpful for sites like GWiki (and certainly not for PvX).


 * A possible good Guild Wars use for the new Wikia might be for organizing a multi-guild alliance. It covers their modest information sharing needs (favorite farms, teams, special events), sharing progress (blogs), chats (forums), and so on. So, bad for GWiki, but perhaps great for a specific guild...or 1000 guilds. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 15:30, October 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * A good thing.
 * Please define thing.
 * A good option for other types of community / project? Sure, options are good.
 * A good thing to force on wikis which weren't intended to provice such a service (namely all existing Wikia wikis)? Hell no.
 * Something to bear in mind is people don't always state exactly what they mean. While people are talking about how good the new skin is, they are doing so in context of Wikis designed mostly to be a single topic based Wikipedia clone. Which the new skin does not cater for, and thus has no business being forced on such projects. A_F_K_sig_2.jpg A F K is pro-AWA! 16:06, October 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * I guess I haven't been clear enough: Wikia has every right to re-invent themselves in an effort to become highly profitable (instead of barely breaking even) and I will continue to measure those efforts as objectively as I can. That new direction has nothing specifically to do with wikis and we can no longer evaluate Wikia on the basis of how well they support that one tool out of many.


 * At the same time, this new direction is terrible for GWiki. Whether we remain, move or self-support, there will always be a tension between the hosting service and this community. As long as the vested interests of the host run parallel to our mission, the tension is easily mitigated. In this case, the new Wikia will require that we re-invent our format rather than maintain our focus on content (not the least of which is whether there ought to be a GWiki 2).


 * I think it is no contradiction to say that Oasis is good for Wikia, but bad for established communities here that are dedicated to maintaining encyclopedic knowledge-bases in an easily-digested format. Apparently, those provide little benefit to the corporation (but do add to their expenses). Wikia has no obligation to us; we have none to them. (Of course, it's far easier for them to let us go than it is for us to move, but that's the nature of the relationship between producers and consumers.) Even if Wikia provided us help converting to the new format, it's clear that their needs and ours are now in conflict; things are only going to get worse. Thus, it's not the skin which is the problem for GWiki; it's the new mission of Wikia that makes it sensible for them to impose a skin with its requirements.


 * In all this, I haven't said whether I think Wikia has acted morally or in good faith with us because I think that's largely irrelevant to the questions that interest me: can the new Wikia succeed? (Yes, I think so) and how should GWiki respond to the new Wikia? (by moving to a Galaxy Far Far Away). &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 17:17, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

Now that's interesting. Since we'll be forking, I assume there'll be a fractional community left behind who are going to run guildwars.wikia.com. If what you write is true, that remaining community will have to orient this site towards something more in line with the New Look - you suggested something like Guild Wars Guilds (which would profit from traffic driven here), maybe with a promise of more freedom in how pages can be made and what they can contain. Maybe we could have article comments enabled and make this a "game guides and discussion" type of site. Scrap the encyclopedic approach, socialize the web2.0 out of it. What do you think? -- ◄mendel► 20:06, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

Forks and knives?
So, there are two ideas in Mendel's post above.
 * 1) Could Oasis/New Wikia really be a good place for certain types of communities? As TEF suggested, perhaps embracing the full set of tools would be perfect for a large alliance and be much better than the current kludge of forums that most groups use.
 * 2) Once GWiki forks, is there a better or alternative use to which guildwars.wikia.com could be put?

Obviously, I think (1) is plausible. But should this wikia site be re-aligned to support that? I don't think so for two reasons. (a) I think each guild/alliance is going to want to be independent. Which either means creating a Guild space within a single Wikia site (which defeats the benefits of standardization) or every alliance taking its own subdomain. (b) I find it hard to imagine that Wikia would allow us to repurpose without claiming (perhaps unfairly) that we were doing it to prevent the competition. Plus, we really have enough to do to prep, move, and deal with the aftermath. (Or, perhaps I don't understand what Mendel has proposed, above.)

Instead, I think we would be better off spending time reaching out individually to each person who contributes here now and giving them good reason to move with us. In 3-6 months, if this site starts to lose traffic (and GWiki.com starts to flourish), then it might be worth helping who ever has remained here to reorient the site to something else with symbiotic relationships with both Wikia and GWiki. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 01:48, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
 * I doubt this site will lose traffic (much); whatever traffic it loses will be shortly after the fork; it makes no sense to have a third encyclopedic English Guild Wars wiki open; so if the remaining community doesn't want to compete with the other two (who will remain? maybe people who want to figure out what purpose the new skin can be put to?), then it should find a purpose of its own.
 * If we turn Wikia into an "alliance wiki farm", then it would still be good to have a central page that provides
 * a directory
 * a template repository (to be carved out of GuildWiki?)
 * help forums
 * a graphics repository (good use of the GuildWiki legacy)
 * guild pages (else move your page every time you change alliance)
 * That is, if alliances wish to run sites that they can't password-protect any part of. -- ◄mendel► 05:50, October 9, 2010 (UTC)