User blog comment:Dopp/Community Central content and policies: discuss/@comment-1656630-20110526163224/@comment-1997905-20110526194249

Not to bring out the old family skeleton so to speak, but I think it's because Wikia underwent a major turnaround in thinking just prior to when you started. Since this is touchy, I'll try to keep it factual. Monaco, the skin before Oasis, was seen as more content based than Oasis; that is, Monaco had a flexible width as opposed to a fixed one, it had much better access to useful tools, licensing was more apparent, etc. Oasis is a more community focused skin; instead of filling the page with content, the page is filled with usernames in the side rail, in the history dropdown (before it was removed), in picture attribution, etc. This shift brought with it a larger focus on new users and catering to them, at the cost of power and accessibility; eg. WikiActivity, the RTE, blogs, and the absence of what are considered to be by the staff the more complicated tools.

All of this is widely disputed - you have people who want the focus on the content, and people who want the focus on the community. As I understand, Community Central used to be a place for tech support and Wikia-related news, not a place for getting to know each other better. The push for a more literal definition of "Community" Central falls in line with focusing on the wiki community as opposed to the wiki content - which doesn't fly by a lot of people.

Hence your dilemma - as I recall, you started in January, which was after that change in mindset. The older members that walked to school barefoot in the snow so to speak believe that wikis should be focused on content, as is the point of the Wikimedia projects. Newer users tend to focus on the community - hence, dueling philosophies. These have manifested themselves in the debate over what to do with off topic blogs. Content-oriented users prefer deletion of the blogs, because the content of the blog doesn't match with the wiki. Community-oriented users prefer that the blogs are kept, because they're the user's expression and the user's content.

That's basically where we are right now - caught between two ideas. It's also the source of all that "Oasis sucks" that you probably saw when you first got here.

Now as Jazzi would say, may the dead rest in peace.