User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Global Navigation Update/@comment-4403232-20141203202854/@comment-452-20141203223631

I agree, and that kind of tracking makes me want to use Wikia less, so I don't accidentally skew their results.

I also would appreciate honesty instead of disguising their goals.

They still haven't released any real results regarding the videos sidebar either. With that, the goal was never to get more editors, it was to get more people to view ads, which has probably been a success, so there is no reason for them to release any results regarding the relationship between video views and edits, if they ever tracked it at all.

A more prominent search bar may result in more page views, which may result in more edits, and they have the power to count exactly how many people edit after using the search bar or viewing videos. But since they wouldn't confirm that they were even measuring that, that gives me the impression that all they really care about is measuring views and not edits.