User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Wiki Video Types and How You Can Create Them/@comment-4568327-20170418235248/@comment-4457974-20170419143734

I just want to add my two cents, that while I think videos have their place on Wikia and CAN be a good thing, overall, text is usually a much more efficient way to consume information. Just on the internet in general, if I'm looking to be entertained, I might watch a video, but if I'm looking for information, I'd rather have text in the vast majority of cases. The easiest way to annoy me is for an informational webpage (such as a news article) to insist on conveying most of their content in a video format when it would be much quicker and more convenient to just have it in text form. And even though I know you're pushing the entertainment and community facets of Wikia (which isn't completely wrong), at the end of the day, the main point of most Wikis is to give reference information, and if you get in the way of that with other features, it's going to be annoying and off-putting.

Now, from what I can tell, you aren't going to reduce the informativeness of pages in any way to accomodate videos - the videos will just be a supplement. So far, so good. But it does look like you're emphasizing the videos pretty heavily and I feel like this has the potential to get in the way of what's more important on the page, the actual informative Wiki content, particularly if you're handling the videos like you seem to be now - pushing them to the top of pages, making them very big, and having them autoplay. All of these features are inconvenient, intrusive, and just plain not-good from a user experience perspective. People go to Wiki pages to read, not watch videos. Even if you insist on having the video be big and on top, please, PLEASE no Autoplay. At that point it's really barely any better than just an Autoplay video ad, which are TERRIBLE.

Again, let me be clear, I think videos CAN be a good thing for both Wikia and Wiki users, but please be a bit more considerate. I know the ultimate purpose of videos is more ad revenue, and I accept that - I mean, you are a commercial company. And I know advertisements have to be really visible to keep the advertisers happy. But still...I hope you can dial it back at least a bit. At a minimum, at least no Autoplay, and maybe make the videos a little smaller. I don't think that's too much to ask, but then again, I'm not your advertisers...