User blog comment:Kirkburn/Technical Update: August 17, 2016/@comment-26009167-20160818200127/@comment-24473195-20160819144956

> Do note this is a time-limited 'prototype' feature, to help us get a sense of how helpful this concept would be on Wikia - e.g. how often it gets used, what users think of it, and whether it actually helps encourage editing.

That might be true. But most of this research could be carried out by simply evaluating / researching its uses in Wikimedia. As far as I can tell they do temporarily keep publicly accessible dumps of logs, and probably have this information in their publicly accessible and anonymized datasets. Given that Wikimedia probably has far more users than wikia, and has used an similar (or identical feature) for at least 2 or 3 years that looks like a more reliable way to evaluate the usefulness of the feature, instead of a limited 4 week test.

While I know wikia is somewhat different from Wikimedia projects, chances are that the results will be roughly the same, or possibly the deciding factor might be due to nuisances already detected and eliminated by WMF developers.

Carrying it out on Wikia is still valuable although it would be more cost effective and more reliable to also use prior research and findings (or datasets).