User blog:KatieTheAndreaFan/An Open Letter to Wikia

Dear Wikia

I am writing this on behalf of many users. About twenty or so are my good friends, the rest are simply the other thousands of users who dislike the direction you are taking with this site. I beseech you to break your track record and actually listen to me, and by extension, everyone who I seem to be speaking for.

Your latest two changes, the new navigation bar and the new article prototype, have caused outrage in the editing community. Absolute outrage. Your intent is clear, you want advertisements and Wikia content to be prominent inside articles, as people no longer look at the sidebar. You also want to appeal to the growing audience of mobile and tablet users, which is understandable. But in doing so, you are pushing away the editing community.

Now, I hear you say, "editors are only a small portion of our community", and that is true. But you see, editors make content. Wikia Staff can sit around making innovations and personality quizzes and Fan vs Critic videos all day; but there'd be no traffic if it wasn't for the articles. If you drive away your editors, Wikia, you drive away your workforce. We are the people who create Wikia's content, our work draws traffic to the site, and you can't marginalise us by saying that we aren't the majority userbase. If it wasn't for your dedicated editing community, you wouldn't even have a userbase at all. By making articles more optimised for reading and ignoring how your changes impact editing, you alienate your most loyal members: the editing community.

I can understand why you want all these new skins and userbars and whatever, but I beg you, please make them optional. Some of us loved Wikia just the way it was, and you're driving us away with all this unnecessary change. If you keep doing this, the site being easy to read won't matter, because your content will just flop. How easy will it be to get traffic if no one updates the articles?

I'm gonna put this in simple terms: Karl Marx once said that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce". Let me ask you, Wikia;

DO YOU WANT ANOTHER MONACO SITUATION?

I'll end it there, fairly short and only slightly sweet. Staff and normal users alike, if you want to comment on this, please do so. If you agree with what I'm saying here, please leave your signature as a comment.

Thanks for reading.

Monsieur Thenardier (talk) 16:11, December 12, 2014 (UTC)