Thread:Sannse/@comment-5785681-20191218164348/@comment-8-20191220203715

Hi again,

It's later than I expected, but I'm here 🙂

There is so much to say here. I understand your concerns, and hope I can help answer some of your questions and points.

The first thing I need to say is that Wiki Managers are absolutely in no way "spies". They have mostly been recruited from the Fandom community, and their job is to support wiki communities in any way they can. Of course they talk to other staff about what's going on for the wikis they are involved with, but that's not something I would call spying, and it's exactly the same as we would do before WMs were a thing.

To answer your question about the assignment of WMs: the wikis that are assigned managers are generally larger, more active wikis, or ones that we anticipate might become large and active. For example, if there is a new series of a popular anime about to come out, then the wiki about that anime might be one that's assigned a WM.

We also assign Wiki Managers when requested by the community. For anime, people can contact the Anime Community Manager ZoeCatfu and let them know. You can also let us know if you feel you're having issues with your WM through the same channel - we're always trying to improve that process, and feedback is very welcome.

Finally, we may assign a WM to a wiki that's having community problems and needs some extra help for a while, or one that has forked. We've always done this to some extent, the change is that we have more people who can help more often. Not doing so is something that has caused unhappiness in the past - for example where there's an unfair admin and we won't intervene.

It's a balance though, we definitely don't want you to feel micromanaged, these are your (the community's) wikis, of course. And at the same time, we don't want others to feel abandoned and their problems not addressed. I think it will take some time and some feeling out to get the right balance here, something we will definitely work on.

I think one area of confusion that causes some concern is the name "Wiki Managers". We inherited that from Gamepedia when the companies merged and Fandom wanted to adopt the successful program that Gamepedia had developed. But it's important to say that the aim is to be a resource for the wikis and to give more direct access to staff. They aren't intended to be a "boss" of some sort.

I'm very interested to hear why you felt the Community Connect post was rude, what was it about it that offended you? Obviously that was very much not the intention!

I think you are using "users" to mean "readers"? We want to keep readers happy of course, but we know that the content that brings them to Fandom is created by editors. So it's essential we keep you in mind and try to make the site work for you are much as we can. There's quite a bit about that in this blog, including our key value of "Act Community First"

On the survey, I've checked with the person who ran it, and it was for desktop users/editors as well as mobile. Not everyone would have seen it, they usually take a sampling, but it was out there.

Let me know if I've missed something in all this, and please feel free to write any time, I won't ignore you!