User blog comment:Ducksoup/Why Wikia Evolves/@comment-24473195-20150619235105

Software gets stale

It is interesting that this blog was created just a few weeks after mediawiki version 1.19 just reached its end-of-life. It would be interesting to know if wikia will simply keep supporting this version ad-infinitum.

Feature overlap

One of the feature overlaps that I just can't stand in mediawiki in general is parser functions. Scribunto is really a wonderful extension that caters to 99% of these problems. Before its introduction I never really wasted too much time with franken-templates.

Innovate or die

Agreed. Wikia could really push to improve documentation (esp. Lua/module), as it is particularly important for innovation purposes, and global module transclusion (hint).

Community interaction

Theorycrafting and discussing features with users is all well and good, but it can also distract from developing real solutions (Argumentum_ad_populum). Quick mock-ups, focus groups and prototypes that can be tested are better than spending 6 months discussing about  abstract vaporware with 100 000 people.

Finally, I think wikia's interaction with the community (e.g. github/technical reports), the user service, and its allowance of customization makes it really nice to edit in. However, there will always be three camps  with a provider of any free service, wanters , accomodators, and detractors.