User:Warwick/Issues with Wikia

I've been feeling lonely because everybody else has written huge walls qqing about how bad wikia is, so I've decided to jump on the bandwagon. As is pretty clear, I quit wikis a while back, coming back only once or twice to check on things. This whole dramafest, to my mind, seems pretty stupid. I can understand the issues, and I can understand why wikia are doing what they're doing- They're a company, they want to maximize revenue, because that's what their job is- To make sure they make a profit year-to-year. There's clearly pressure on wikia from companies who are threatening to pull advertising and/or funding, because that's the only logical reason any company would make a decision this bad. If it happened to Fox News, it can happen to a company on the internet.

But anyway, onto my issues with Wikia.


 * Essentially, the main issues I've had with wikia are that they have absolutely no care whatsoever for the opinions of the users (they're probably shrugging it off as the "vocal minority", but I'm fairly sure that isn't the case by any means. Not with the amount of people who have signed the anti-wikia letter on this wiki alone, and the whole Anti-Wiki alliance thing). I actually jumped on the #wikia channel on freenode, and I remember a paraphrased quote from Sannse I had in my QFT bar for some time:  Either you all stop calling me a dictator, or I remove everybody calling me one
 * Needless to say, I was amused by this. I quipped Sannse for it, and the response was a mute followed by a ban from #wikia. I'd said maybe 3 lines prior to that, one of which was (paraphrased) "I've never really had a problem with you Sannse, I suppose it's your job to defend this idiocy".
 * Now, clearly, I don't care about bans from #wikia, because it's a channel I went on soley for the opportunity to get a quote like that. I don't know who is dealing with everything else, but if it's just Sannse dealing with the community support, Wikia are severely understaffed. I feel kind of sorry for Sannse, because she's probably frustrated with the fact that it's her job to deal with these people in the most promising manner for wikia she can.
 * However, that's no excuse for the response she's given to a lot of people. For instance, Karate_Jesus was globally blocked from Wikia. Nobody seems to know who it was done or what for as far as I'm aware. People have been deadmin'd all over the place, they're been replacing bureaucrats and admins with their own staff because they're scared that people will devalue their articles and their advertising revenue.


 * Another issue is the ridiculous skins they're been forcing on us. Originally, it was that ugly monaco bullshit, but we could at least choose to use monobook if we wanted to, and some people made the monaco skin look more like the default monobook with some style changes, but this "Oasis" thing is really rather over the top. It's ridiculously ugly, causes massive ad spaces and sidebars either in the articles or to the sides of articles, obscuring text and actual content in the articles themselves- Which is detrimental to the point of a wiki, which is to provide information on a topic.
 * Again, this is something to do with the advertising and probably caused by the pressure from their funding- They need to maximize advertisement space as much as they reasonably can without causing a huge shitstorm with the community. They're maximized advertisement time, all right- But they've failed if their goal was at any point to prevent a huge shitstorm being raised by the community.
 * They should at the very least listen to community input on the matters- It's quite clear the Oasis skin is not satisfactory by the mass exodus of their users. Something like this is only going to harm their ad impressions, which will make less profit over time. The less impressions they get, the less money they get- And if their unique impressions have halved but their amount of advertising has only increased by say a quarter, they are only going to end up losing money.
 * Actually, I could be wrong about the above point- I'm not sure if Wikia gets paid per impression or per advertisement bought, but either way if the amount of impressions decreases and those who are buying the advertisement space become aware, they'll be less willing to continue paying for the advertisement- Because less people are seeing it and they're still paying as much as they were.


 * Now, perhaps I wouldn't mind all this so much, if wikia provided decent hosting. But, the fact of the matter is they do not. I'm not sure if it's just me, but I really doubt it is- I take somewhere between 15 to 40 seconds to load one page on wikia. I dunno, maybe Wikia's servers don't support the UK, but either way it's not good enough for what they're forcing on us.

The title for this is probably somewhat incorrect, and a lot of these points are probably totally fallacious, but I felt like writing something and so I did. &mdash; Warw/Wick 02:08, November 9, 2010 (UTC)