Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-13301-20170502181922/@comment-168424-20170509232932

Gray Catbird wrote: Fandyllic wrote: Unfortunately, your argument sounds similar to the bogus one Microsoft used for IE for years. Sorry to ask, but could you elaborate? I'm not familiar with what Microsoft may have said about IE.

Microsoft used to say, if you use Windows, you had to get IE because it was integrated as part of the OS. This wasn't true and eventually they got busted.

While I like PIs (I hate IE), they are definitely not required for a wiki to work, they are just preferred. The argument is not about what is content or integrate wiki design, as PIs clearly are not. The argument s about whether Fandom wants to negotiate with a community or it's just a PR cover.

Gray Catbird wrote:

For the record, I couldn't care less about portable infoboxes implementation or non-implementation, since my wiki doesn't use complicated infoboxes anyways. However I find it very unfair that Fandom would have enforced something I see as an optional change in the absence of or against a community consensus.

At the same time, I've long known that Wikia sometimes makes changes that are simply not optional, but I thought these changes limited themselves to the website design, how the content is framed. Which, brings me back to my first argument: Fandom's control may or may not extent to infoboxes, depending of whether you think they're part of the Fandom-controlled design or part of the user-controlled content. It seems clear that for Fandom, it's the former.

It's Fandom's choice whether to make things non-optional, but they have to weigh the reaction of the community. For WikiDex, they did a poor job coordinating and most of the public communications shows they did not respect the admins of the wiki. Although I think PIs are almost always a benefit, they aren't a benefit replacing all infoboxes. We went through this on WoWWiki and while Vanguard did a pretty good job, they really weren't that great in following up with problems found later. Fortunately, I'm very comfortable with PIs, so I just fixed most of the problems myself.

From what I can tell, if a wiki's admins are cooperative and ask questions and hold Fandom accountable for making sure the infoboxes match look and functionality, things will go fine. On the other hand, immediate resistance just makes Fandom staff go kind of bonkers and they become @ssholes. Worse, they think they are being reasonable. When the situation calls for pull back and de-escalation, they just entrench and become dictatorial.

I've told most of this stuff to at least one Fandom staff member directly, but I'm not sure they quite get the problem.