User blog comment:Meighan/Thoughts, Feedback & Fixes Around the Admin Dashboard Rollout/@comment-168424-20110809061535

Something that should have been mentioned in this blog. Wikia needs to re-evaluate its testing process and ask why it did not anticipate the largely negative reaction to rolling the Admin Dashboard into existing wikis. It seems hard to believe that everyone in Wikia who looked at this before it rolled out said to themselves, "Yeah, I think admins of established wikis will like having all their Special pages reformatted and ignore the theme settings. They only picked the theme settings for other users and they really will like the new stats sidebar even though they didn't really ask for it ever before."

This blog at least puts Wikia's process of reflection more out in the open, but "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," as they say. The other problem with all this fixing what wasn't broken is that the actual genuinely useful suggestions for improvement of the Admin Dashboard will have to be back-burnered until all the fallout from this release has been dealt with. Lastly, the argument about an inconsistent experience between wikis seems to be a weak one considering many features are switchable via WIkiaLabs and the Admin Dashboard currently has almost no features an experienced admin would ever use.