Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-47075028-20201010224152/@comment-961279-20201012150051

What's happening with UCP happens with companies all over the world. Company A buys Company B. If the computer systems of the two companies have a similar function or overlap in some areas, an evaluation is made how to get everyone on a common system. During the evaluation, it can play out in a few ways:
 * 1) One company's system is better, so the other's system will be changed to the better one.
 * 2) The parent company's system is kept and useful features from the other company are incorporated into the design.
 * 3) Leave both as they are and have the ongoing expense of having two different groups of IT staff to maintain both system.

The last one means doing nothing after the purchase of Company B than Company A other than putting Company A's name on the building. That means keeping the two companies isolated so you get no benefit from the purchase other than the bragging rights of "we own Company B". That's a poor business decision.

As has been explained before, Fandom bought Gamepedia. They have the same foundation, the MediaWiki software. Fandom's version is older and heavily customized, diverging from what is standard. Rather than continuing to go their own way and move further away from the standard, Fandom is working to bring its system up to the newer version Gamepedia's running.

While doing so, they have to figure out what it takes to make their custom features run on the new version. Some are infrequently used, so they have to weigh if it's worth it to keep them. Others might be used more but they would take too much time or resources away from working on what is really needed.

No matter what the change is, there are always people who say, "We want everything to stay exactly the same" and as the changes are being made, they say, "We want the old things back". In most cases, the world doesn't come to an end after the changes are made and those same people learn to use the new changes. And in five or ten years' time when more changes have to be made, they'll be the same ones who say "Want everything to stay exactly the same".

At the place I work, we've been through huge changes in the last twenty years. They bought another company and it looked like everything from that other company was going to replace what we did. Computer systems, work processes, managers, payroll, etc. During a more recent change, they listed different functions and because they didn't explain things as well as they could and provide examples of before and after, I kept going, "Change A is going to cause problem B, change C is going to cause problems D, E and F."

My world didn't end after all those changes and I still work for them. It's different, but that's what life's about: things changing and learning to deal with those changes.