User blog comment:Sannse/Your First Look at the New Wikia/@comment-436956-20100901202431/@comment-473563-20100904010459

You can't harvest what you don't sow
Sannse, wiki admins were never given the capability to specify a widget (such as the shoutbox) as a default sidebar element.
 * If the engineering support had been there to enable any of the standard and/or custom widgets to be specified as wiki site defaults then the wiki admins could have promoted these tools much better than Wikia staff ever did.
 * Can you point to a Wikia staff blog that promoted Widgets?
 * Can you point to a Wikia staff blog that promoted Gadgets?
 * Can you point to a Wikia staff blog that promoted Semantic MediaWiki extension?

Therefore, when I read remarks from you (as well as other staff members) about the relatively low usage of widgets I can't help but find that extremely frustrating.

Either you are aware of the relationship between lackluster promotion and low usage and choose to ignore it or you are not aware of that relationship.
 * Neither scenario is a very flattering sign of Wikia staff being in tune with or responsive to requests from the user base.

A fork in the road for Wikia culture
It's hard for me to express diplomatically so please forgive me if I offend when I write that:
 * it seems as though Wikia staff have acquired a "culture" to actively impose great applications of the various tools available here rather than passively allowing the community of users to voluntarily adopt those same great applications ... and possibly even develop some better applications using these various tools.

The former tends to happen quicker than the latter and I can appreciate why this might be favored in a corporate environment where such periodic evidence of cause and effect is expected to help fuel (i) annual performance reviews, (ii) quarterly goals/objectives and (iii) weekly status reports.

For what it's worth I reckon there is merit in allowing more of these applications to evolve "organically" rather than being released prescriptively. Your Monaco skin and especially the Widgets were an extremely promising sign of this but now that good work is being discontinued. It is regrettable.

Users helping users ... Wikia staff are users too
One of the most satisfying experiences during my relatively short time here at Wikia has been the process of "proudly plagiarizing" another user's solution to some problem, need or desire.

Some of those solutions were easy to stumble upon while others were much harder to discover and/or copy.

Further evidence of the apparent "culture" mentioned earlier is the very low participation from Wikia staff in the central forum where "users help users". Wikia staff may be staff but just as you have described in your blog, most staff were wiki users before becoming staff and it seems like such a shame that your expertise is being spoon fed in a 1-on-1 style of communication via Special:Contact emails and talk page dialogs rather than a 1-to-many style communication at the central forum.

Granted, Wikia staff blogs are a 1-to-many style of communication but just as you are seeing from the considerable feedback, these staff blogs smack of PR "spin doctoring" and IMHO these staff blogs come across as arrogant and dismissive rather than helpful and collaborative.

If Wikia staff were to invest time at the central forum to highlight/promote those forum threads that have solved problems and even use some of that material to improve help pages or perhaps even create new articles in the main namespace of that "central" community.wikia.com then that would be a truly productive use of staff resources.


 * It beggars belief that approximately two years of central forum help revolving around the Monaco skin is about to be made redundant.

That is an unforgivable waste of Wikia's effort and the community's effort. It gives me cause to have serious misgivings about contributing over the next two years for fear that content pertaining to the Oasis skin will be discarded in a similar fashion.

Blogs need to be closed before they grow this big
It's proving to be a real pain in the you know where to find information in these blog comments and yet Wikia staff have made it abundantly clear that these blogs are where you want feedback to appear.
 * The trouble with blogs is that several days can pass before one is even aware that a response from staff has been posted to some comment left on earlier pages of comments.

Those page numbers are in ascending order rather than descending order. When combined with your prescribed default "most-recent-at-top" sort order this creates the conundrum whereby the page number for any given comment is constantly changing as the number of comment threads grow and as the number of responses within each thread increases. That was not an issue while the "Show all comments" link existed but once that is removed this problem is only exacerbated.

Might I suggest that:
 * once the criteria for removing the "Show all comments" link has been satisfied, then the blog ought to be closed to further comment and that further comment and discussion be directed to a specific forum post instead.

Forums lend themselves to better organization of a discussion - via headings and sub headings. It is also much easier to identify new material added to a forum discussion than it is for the various discussions taking place in these threaded blog comments.