User blog comment:VickyC/Intro to Wikia’s Development Process/@comment-655-20111014093307/@comment-655-20111015113952

Color me confused, then... after people reasoned why they didn't want a change from talk pages to message walls, we were told that "just 300 naysayers" weren't enough to offset the "millions of Wikia users" that will potentially adore this feature (if they ever become aware of it) - and now we learn that it is not 300 vs. millions, but actually 2 vs. 300?

There haven't been any surveys. There haven't been any limited changes to some new wikis (like, for example, simply offering a text box at the top that adds its content to the bottom of the page when hitting a "Comment" button) to observe what happens. There hasn't been any number crunching to see whether being able to use a talk page is in some way correlated with being able to use a wiki at all. All there has been is two people with some wiki experience that thought that talk pages suck - and the outcome of that is not something that will be used in further tests (A/B; opt-in for existing wikis; opt-out for new wikis) to see how and if at all the feature works, but something that is simply meant to outright replace some core functionality across all Wikia?

I definitely think that part of your "development process" needs work!