User talk:Warwick/Issues with Wikia

They claim they did take community feedback (and just disregarded it all) - they also claim that the skin will be good for users, as it increases editing. (They did this with monaco, too - when anyone questioned it, they mentioned that they had statistics, but never gave them out). I'm not sure what your Fox News point is, but then again I'm not really a fan of american news broadcasters. Sannse isn't the only one assigned to PR -Sarah Manley also helps out, but she seems to not know what she's doing more than Sannse. Otherwise, good post, good summary and correct on all counts.
 * Some members of the community (particularly community central) - are taking this whole thing too far, though - and there were several times I would have wanted to block those users, simply because they were being irritating and not adding to the discussion (this guy in particular). Perhaps that shows us what the Wikia community (and target audience) is - a bunch of people who play Club Penguin and whine. Then again, if that's the only community Wikia seems to be able to attract, good luck with your long-term advertising goals. --  Random Time  07:25, November 9, 2010 (UTC)
 * Turtleshroom is the best comedian among the unintentional trolls - his impressions about what matters are not too far off, but his rhetoric style on the WoTs he does (he's club penguin initially and had some awesome speeches there) -- his rhetoric stlye is just so far out of "normal" and into "information ministry" slang that I always enjoy reading him. -- ◄mendel► 10:52, November 9, 2010 (UTC)

Key points:
 * the main paradigm change is to make all wikis subsites of Wikia, both in terms of design and organization (i.e. Wikia starts dictating content)


 * If I was Wikia, I'd be doing this for the money, see w:User:M.mendel/Why Oasis
 * Forum:Community_Outlook-_Wikia's_"New_Look" (made by Warwick in 2008)
 * We have to standardize the way our site looks across all wikis, [...] as advertisers strongly prefer a consistent look-and-feel.
 * Based on your feedback, we're making some changes to Monaco that [...] moves the content higher on the page. -- not happening with Oasis, though they did shave a few pixels off the Wikia bar at the top.


 * re: disregarding community feedback
 * if they wanted community feedback, they should have involved the community in skin design, but that would have driven up (initial) costs and delayed the schedule
 * their beta period was short for what turned out to need fixing
 * my personal assumption is that they didn't want to beta the whole skin, but really only make sure the ad code works right (and generates impressions), and get that live ASAP
 * so the "community feedback" idea was mainly to get people to feel what they do is important (I knew that and didn't participate in the beta)

Wikia do care for user opinions. (e.g. sannse making a "meeting place" blog to channel the hate spam ). However, Wikia's interests are clearly distinct for those of their users, and their rhetoric (click-through studies etc.) notwithstanding, they're not out to look out for ours. In fact, the abysmal state of answers: suggests they fail at building wiki communities, so they can't actually do it.

What they can do is run servers - the long page loads are because one of the many pieces of crap that are fetched externally (i.e. not from Wikia) fail to load (facebook, ads, ..). Also, any initial page load weighs in at over half a megabyte and two dozen files even without images on the page. (Sprinkling avatar minis everywhere doesn't exactly help.)

they're probably shrugging it off as the "vocal minority" -- no, they're shrugging it off as a bunch of people who complain a lot and keep editing at Wikia because they're lazy and Wikia is awesome. Looking at http://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com, the numbers have not yet dropped - but enter fallout.wikia.com in the "compare" box there (Fallout New Vegas came out October 20th), and it becomes obvious that the overall pageviews would in fact be dropping if fallout didn't offset this temporarily. "Visits per person" has been dropping sharply since last summer, when they added blogs and made other skin changes (but it might also have been a new browser that can't be tracked as easily?).

Thanks for not making this a blog, Warwick. -- ◄mendel► 10:52, November 9, 2010 (UTC)
 * A blog? You can make blogs on this wiki now? The fuck? &mdash;[[Image:MaySig.png]] Warw/Wick 20:15, November 9, 2010 (UTC)
 * for the irony. -User:PanSola (talk to the [[Image:follower of Lyssa.png|link=User talk:PanSola]]) 21:41, November 9, 2010 (UTC)
 * Remember that multiple people may use Warwick's account. It's never been authentically confirmed. [[Image:Felix_Omni_Signature.png]] 22:46, November 9, 2010 (UTC)
 * That you can do it doesn't mean you should. Before the fork, anyway. Thereafter, blog away! -- ◄mendel► 23:02, November 9, 2010 (UTC)


 * Go ahead and blog if you want. The Blog:/User blog: namespaces are ignored by the dump scripts.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 23:22, November 9, 2010 (UTC)
 * I have no real issues with blogs, I mean it's a new feature which I suppose isn't really necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely a pointless thing. Pan is quite right, tho. I'd forgotten about the blog feature, but I do remember writing that. &mdash;[[Image:MaySig.png]] Warw/Wick 07:06, November 10, 2010 (UTC)
 * Wikia blogs don't mesh well with a community that keeps track of discussions via Watchlists or RC (excepting those people who don't use enhanced RC), that at times moves sections of a discussion to where they fit better, that is used to threaded indented convos, and where users routinely revert vandalism (blog comments are protected). There's no preview on the comments, either. They definitely require a different style of communication in the community that GuildWiki is used to, and thus I do think they're a bad thing for GuildWiki. Other wikis use them more, and it will be interesting to see what happens with them on guildwars@wikia, because the New Look definitely favors blogs over userspace subpages. -- ◄mendel► 13:19, November 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * That's what I liked about how stuff goes aroun here. Even when we got blogs, hardly anyone used them. You wanted to talk about something or start a discussion? Just start a page in namespace, exactly like has been done here. Blogs clutter up RC with "new pages", and are hard to navigate in. Long live traditional communications! :P --[[Image:El Nazgir sig.png|Talkpage]]El_Nazgir 23:21, November 10, 2010 (UTC)