User blog comment:Craiglpalmer/Wikia is now Fandom powered by Wikia/@comment-26903323-20161012023444

I'm sympathetic to the struggle that Wikia was facing here. Their brand was indistinct from Wikipedia's due to general audiences not understanding that a wiki is a content format that exists beyond the infamous online encyclopedia. I suspect that Wikia as an organization hopes to reach a broader and more monetizable audience. Obviously they need to try new things, and they should have the freedom to do so.

I can also understand the desire that some observers or those at Wikia might be to write off these kinds of concerns as the type of pointless bellyaching that occurs whenever a major software vendor makes a minor UI change.

But Wikia is in a unique position in that 1) the members of its community are its sole creators of value and 2) the pivot they are attempting is truly strange and dissonant from what Wikia is.

There is absolutely no way you would understand from fandom.wikia.com that there is actually a huge world of fan-created wikis waiting behind some invisible door. Sure, "Wikis" is in the top nav, dead at the end, as if it was some miscellaneous menu for all the inconsequential stuff.

One thing I am absolutely certain of: starting a successful online media brand is hard, and the content on the main Fandom site right now is extremely low quality, lowest-common-denominator filler. Certainly of lesser value than the content on most of the wikis here. There is absolutely no way that Wikia will make money or gain notoriety this way.

Worse, it's hard not to imagine that Fandom could siphon off potential contributors to (or creators of!) Wikis here with their Fan Contributor program. Of course, unlike contributing to a wiki, contributing to Fandom's editorial ambitions doesn't benefit a broader community. It just benefits Fandom.

Our community recently made the decision to give up on our own self-hosted wiki after we formed a partnership with the admin of a large and established wiki here on Wikia. Our solution had been difficult to maintain and we figured not having to host it ourselves, combined with the huge SEO benefits of the existing wiki, were worth the tradeoff. Some of our users felt we were making a big mistake, but we did our best to reassure the that it was for the best.

For the first time, I am not so sure. Certainly I still think Wikia is a valuable tool, but none of these decisions could inspire confidence in anyone to its continued to development and support. The comments here make that clear.

I don't know if anyone from Wikia will read this or take it seriously, but if you do: I'm not baiting you here nor trying to be antagonistic. I would love to talk to you about the changes you're making for Wikia and why, just out of a personal interest. I have worked in online community management and digital content marketing for seven years, (Proof ) so I am not just messing around with you. Let me know!