User:Mendel/wikianswers vision

WikiAnswers has the opportunity to be really big. The concept is novel, and it has had two massive pushes of advertising, one back at the end of January, and this one now, that reached a large segment of Wikia's huge clientele, but few of them stuck around for the long haul. It is not making the most of its potential because the vision for this wiki holds it back.

Well, what is the present vision? Going by the press releases, this is going to be like Yahoo answers, with lots of questions, contributors, and everything will be looking very professional and family friendly. However, this is a statement about the wiki content; my credo is that "wikis are people", meaning it is the community that makes or breaks a wiki, and the vision for this wiki's community comes down to [ this]:
 * 1) People answer questions
 * 2) People edit answers to improve them
 * 3) People rephrase questions to be easier to understand
 * 4) People add categories to questions to help others find them
 * 5) People ask questions to expand the size and usefulness of the wiki

What is completely missing from this "vision" is any meta-thought about the framework for these activities. How do you motivate editors to answer questions that people who are too dumb or too lazy to look them up on wikipedia took 3 seconds to write; where half of whom will never even see the answer, and the other half won't care, and you don't get any recognition anyway?

As an editor on WikiAnswers, I am expected to serve Wikia's vision, and nothing else; I realized this back in January/February, when I decided to end my engagement here. I laughed out loud when I found out that the wikipedia search pane had been added, because it reinforces precisely the vision: "We research stuff on Wikipedia for people who are too dumb to look it up themselves". I can see no intention on the part of Wikia to allow the community to evolve this vision, even though clearly it is not working. Why does Wikia stick to it?

If I assume that the current state of this wiki is no accident, I can speculate what needs it serves in its present shape. This wiki is a prestige project for Wikia, one that keeps it in the press releases; it has to be what it has been sold to be in order to make a good presentation point when Mr Wales goes courting investors and playing with other big web entrepreneurs. Wikia had a "search engine" project; it now has an "answers" project, and I hear a blogging project is in the works, and the "facebook" aka social tools are also showcased here; I predict that in 2010 Wikia will try to roll a clone of google wave, if it still has funding then.

The possible other raison d'etre that comes to my mind is even more cynical: that the value of this wiki lies simply in its set of article titles, which has been "digitally sharecropped" from everyone who asked a question, because they closely correspond to search terms entered into any search engine. Wikianswers, with its set of "related questions" on every page that never seem to be related looks like the kind of bogus website that spammers liked to create 5 years ago, and if that's the case, it exists simply to make wikia.com look sweet to search engine algorithms. It needs only enough of a community to disguise this. That the Wikianswers widget which has been placed on every wikia wiki's sidebar gets easily mistaken for a search box might be no accident.

This widget campaign brought me back to Wikianswers because I saw that users from our wiki found themselves misdirected here, and I feel the need to direct them back to us. And why not: Wikia runs a wiki about Guild Wars, full of editors who invested an incredible amount of time to create almost 20000 pages of information, and it doesn't make sense to create another repository of this information (and, incidentally, to expect those editors to also maintain this one). Seen like this, WikiAnswers could be a tool that supplements every Wikia wiki out there, by providing a way to ask and reply to questions, and as a gateway to other wikis: a user on any wiki could just ask a question about any game, and hope for that game's editors scanning WikiAnswers to pick it up once we have removed the category that assigns it to our wiki. It would become a way for wiki admins to find out what our readers can't find on our wikis (but should be there, or in fact is there!), and to find new readers from other wikis. (I've a few changes in mind that could be implemented to further this end.) The current policy seems to discourage me doing this [], because it requires me to spend my time contributing content here (building up a competitor!) if I want to create links to my (really Wikia's) wiki.

Clearly my vision for this wiki is different. It not only involves networking Wikia wikis more via WikiAnswers, I also have ideas about making WikiAnswers fun to read and fun to write answers to, by allowing answers to be short, surprisingly simple, and yet correct. By showing these kinds of answers to people, I have gotten other editors interested in contributing and received compliments and recognition. That style would make WikiAnswers into a site that wouldn't be a clone of the other Answers sites out there, but rather something different; since Uncyclopedia is one of Wikia's strongest wikis, it should have been clear to Wikia that this could be a recipe for success. But this vision isn't compatible with Wikia's plans; back in February, I was strongly discouraged to contribute in this manner (I think close to half of my then answers have now been outright deleted along with the questions, others replaced), and left WikiAnswers in disgust.

My current visit to WikiAnswers has done nothing to change my disgust; Wikia has continued on its path (as I foresaw in January, despite a huge marketing effort WikiAnswers has yet to attract a lively community), and I am still treated like a troll and [ vandal] by Angela, the [ unwritten] Bureaucrat of WikiAnswers: despite having been one of the strongest contributors here, despite helping successfully run one of Wikia's top ten wikis in adverse conditions, despite suggesting successful features to Wikia, despite extending support to editors and admins on #wikia whenever I find the time, despite having created and run two successful gaming websites before.

Manning Bartlett, you propose that WikiAnswers has obstacles to overcome, not problems. Now that may have been expressing things diplomatically, and secretly you know much of what I discussed just now. If not, please realize that of all editors (excluding myself and bots) that had 100+ edits a month ago, before the widget campaign, exactly 8 are still listed as recently active on Special:WikiaStats, while 11 editors of that caliber are recently absent. WikiAnswers is turning off interested editors on a large scale. The remaining community isn't exactly vibrant, either: to 150,000 content pages, there are 150 pages in Talk:, 21 pages in the project namespace, none in the project talkspace, and 21 Forum pages. Unless there is much you are not telling, your comments don't address this.