User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Beyond the Encyclopedia - A Wiki for Everyone/@comment-761251-20100830233124

Sarah writes :''The key element is not "encyclopedia" but "community created". In the new look, our focus has been to emphasize and highlight that the community is at the center of each and every wiki, whether it's encyclopedic or not.''

The second sentence contains a fallacy. Wikis are not about communities that decide to create something. Wikis are something that form a community of creators around them. The center of the wiki is not its community, but its content.

A social network like facebook doesn'thave "content". It has communities: it leverages the communities you're in and allows you to join new ones.

A wiki has content. You join because you wish to edit the content, and that's paramount. People who posted pictures of their kids here on "Wikia Community Central" got them deleted because that's just not within this wiki's mission statement.

Yes, wikis are community created. No, that doesn't mean the community is the center: the content is.

Yes, I've said "a wiki is people". But the thing that brought them together is the content, be it encyclopedic, humorous or whatever. Our hobby is not "being social", it is "creating content", and it is those people we want to be social with. If you're going to invite everyone who can't even write a straight sentence to my wiki, you're destroying my community. You're destroying my wiki.

Your focus should be to emphasize and highlight that the content is at the center of each and every wiki, and that a good wiki is supported by a cohesive and effective community.

Please listen to your communities telling you that your skin redesign is bad for them, or your being committed to continuing to support wikis of all types is going to sound hollow.