Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-20644-20141110180435/@comment-11733175-20141112012304

I've commented on this many times in several different threads and I'm still unconvinced why this was ever a necessary change. It's akin to forcing wikis to use a wikia.com URL which didn't go down so well on uncyclopedia and was actively resisted before implementation on other wikis that might have been affected. Another example of poor wikia decisions was to force message walls on everyone. Let's be thankful that was reversed given the current state of the wall code base let alone the multitude of problems it's caused as it's been expanded and reused.

There have been examples of this branding leaking into a wiki's right to name itself. There was a case of cod wiki being rebranded in an advert. Then there was the time someone tried to rebrand every wiki on VSTF. Either this change has been communicated to staff extraordinarily poorly or this aggressive change has signed off by those in charge without a with very little thought to how it might affect communities.

Now we have this new global navigation, unsurprisingly this is unavailable for altering, that aggressively forces the wikia brand into a wiki's individuality. "Search this wikia". "Start a wikia". Whilst the intention is to enforce Wikia's position as the largest wiki farm around it's drowning out community voices in the process. It doesn't take a genius to realise why other wiki farms list "not being wikia" as one of their pros when this kind of stunt is somehow thought to be a good idea.

To add a more logical point, take a look at homepage:Special:CreateNewWiki. You'll notice almost everything about that page describes the site you're about to make as a wiki, even down to the page name. "Name your wiki", " Wiki", "Give your wiki an address" "Your wiki will be in english". This is the first point of a wiki's journey and it's clearly a wiki.

And interestingly, I haven't actually seen any staff member say they personally think it's good with a reason explaining their viewpoint. I've seen regurgitated statements but very little originality. Even this forum post is obviously lifted from a 7 month old post on community council with minimal changes, most oddly of which is the reduction from 400,000 communities on wikia to 300,000. Have 100,000 wikis got up and left in 7 months?