User blog:Gp75motorsports/Wikia Staff - Please STOP implementing changes without communities' consensus.

Should Wikia stop implementing changes without consensus? Yes No

Over the past few years - and especially the past few months - I've been noticing that Wikia has a habit of instituting changes without a community's consensus.  This has to stop.

Wikia claims to pride itself on openness and individuality, and in many cases, it lives up to these claims. The tools Wikia gives users to collaborate on a specific topic are the best out there, bar none, and the multitude of ways in which users can customize themselves and their wikis is also unrivaled. And yet, Wikia has this strange habit of periodically trespassing on that by introducing a new feature that many communities don't need or want - something that either breaks the experience of browsing the wiki, screws up its styling, or just doesn't sit right with the community.

A good example of this: the new, "improved" navigation bar that still nobody likes. Most wikis are built around providing the user with the most engaging experience possible, and this includes the color scheme. A good example of a theme designed around engagement is my own primary wiki, Gran Turismo Wiki. The theme is centered on kansei engineering - directly targeting a user's emotions in order to get them to feel something (in this case, excitement). Most of the wiki's color palette is centered around a very careful combination of black and red - a color scheme known to excite. And yet we have the ugly white "global navigation" bar that breaks the whole thing and makes it look an absolute shambles. This is not a change we wanted, it affected us in a negative way, and now we can't get rid of it.

Then there's the new visual editor, which, while ostensibly an improvement, was bugged beyond all belief when it was first rolled out. I've seen bugs ranging from being stuck in a loading loop, to page elements not displaying properly, to the editor box messing the rest of the page up. The bugs included in the new visual editor were, and to some still are, absolutely endless. Then there's the fact that many longtime editors had to go through the nasty surprise of suddenly waking up in the morning to an alien, new interface that they couldn't change to suit their needs in any way, shape or form. This is not a change we wanted, it affected us in a negative way, and now we can't get rid of it.

And now we arrive at the new sharing options feature. Cool, right? People now have an easier way to share pages on your wiki. All you have to do is click a button, and bam! You've shared the page, which brings in traffic. Except - hold on - it's pushed the edit button down into the content area. Why? Why push the content down pointlessly? Why move the edit button to somewhere nobody who's ever used Wikia before this update would expect it to be? I certainly wouldn't expect it to be there. I'd expect it to be under the title and above the line that's supposed to signal the start of the content. For many users, this just doesn't feel right. It makes the header look like it's missing something. And why did you remove the Google+ button and replace it with two social networking sites with a smaller userbase? Believe it or not, there are many people who actually do use G+, and in fact G+ has many pages dedicated to fandoms of various sorts. Not to mention the fact that certain wikis may, for whatever reason, not want this feature - say, new wikis who are looking to build a solid base of decent content before being discovered by the masses. While this change may be beneficial for some, this is a change that not many people wanted or needed, it affected them in a negative way, and now they can't get rid of it.

And there are many other instances of this too. While I firmly stand behind my opinion that Wikia is the best wiki farm in the world, there are a few things that need fixing, and this is absolutely one of them. While there is no doubt that every change Wikia makes benefits at least some community somewhere, for many others it's simply the completely wrong choice, and this is compounded by the fact that a) these decisions are completely irreversible, and b) they're made by people who have no direct connection with the communities negatively affected by the change.

'''On behalf of all Wikia, I beg the staff to please stop implementing changes without consensus. That way we can work together to make Wikia and the communities that constitute it the best they can be.'''