User blog:Kangaroopower/The problem with Wikia

In this blog I'll (hopefully) try to examine why the products are wrong with wikia. Firstly I'd like to cross off two misconceptions. The techies know how to program and the designers are doing a good job. The techies themselves aren't the problem- its the products. So what's wrong with the products- two things, going halfway and misinterpretation.

Going halfway
Wikia seems to think that with every new product they need to completely redo it but they end up carrying parts from the old system that just don't work with he new system. Eg: Blogs are basically fancier essays, but the whole blog delete process is messed up. Wikia decided to piggyback off of default mediawiki deletion which is bad because then there has to be a page for every comment. Instead, the deletion should occur in the comment itself, and when a comment is deleted, admins would see a message wallish like notice when scrolling over the spot the comment use to be. The notice would say this comment has been deleted and include ajax view and restore links. Another example: Full screen source in the new editor is messed up because wikia decided not to put in that extra effort and move all controls, (Publish, show changes, preview, edit summary) to the bottom of the window and give the advanced users for once the option to use non-ajax previews. This would be a wonderful compromise.

Misinterperation
Let's face it. Most wikia staff aren't actually that good at editing. These are some figure that I have come up with based on my experiences- I think they're fairly true.
 * 60% of wikia staff would struggle in source mode
 * 70% of wikia staff didn't/barely edited a wiki (not including internal ones like community council's and wikia's internal wiki) before wikia day
 * 10% of wikia staff have still not edited a non-internal wiki
 * 97% of wikia staff have not spent enough time on a wiki to earn the position of admin or even chat mod/rollback
 * 90% of wikia staff could not answer 80% of questions on the forum with out bugging a walrus. (or TOR =P)

This obviously leads to the fact that staff think wikia needs to become "easier" to use, what with blue, non existent categories, instead of just putting a nice mediawiki message that says- This category is considered uncreated because there is no explanation for it. This may be because there was a misspelling. If not, then edit this page and explain what this category's about.

What do you guys think?