Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-3335785-20130314201106/@comment-3335785-20130318165934

Wikia have had Community Council running for some time. No one seems to care about how it essentially a group of users who Wikia are using as lab rats for their new features and using their opinions to shape said features.

I can see how singling out certain wikis could be construed as a bad idea, but consider the opposite. I could make a wiki purely for the purpose of getting myself on this list of top wiki admins (which is a little poorly named) just so I could rant about something. It's far too open to abuse, so Wikia have made the sensible move to limit it to a certain number of wikis.

Seeing as it's page views that we really aim for with a wiki, they've chosen those. What's the point of a wiki that no one reads? It's there as an information resource. When a wiki forks, they try their best to out do the older wiki in terms of page views which is represented by higher search results.

Then we have to consider the users that are going to give the best feedback. Do we include every user? No, it opens the system up for abuse as outlined above. I'm sure every admin has dealt with some level of trolling or vandalism, this is an extension of that. Admins are going to be dedicated to their wiki, will know what's happening and are usually users who have been around for a while so will have noticed a trend of something (not) working, assuming they aren't inactive.

Whilst I prefer a more open approach, this is about an effective tool for gathering data as Wikia is going to get. There are optional events such as webinars for help with your wiki, events hosted in Special:Chat once a week for interactive discussion and a thread for help afterwards if you couldn't make it. There's also been discussions on features that will affect every wiki, and such it's been open to everyone such as The Future of Tabbing Extensions on Wikia.

I very much doubt these emails will be used as a veto for features we don't like, it's probably going to be used to alter certain parts of features to suit a wiki's needs better. Streamlining contact requests seems a little pointless to me, as most of my emails are concerning bugs or something personal I'm doing. Occasionally that might extend to caching issues across a wiki, or something we need staff to step in on, such as reassigning a checkuser or deleterevision to a different user on the wiki (note: those tools are very rarely given out to any wiki on a local level).

Perhaps on a larger wiki streamlining checkuser requests is something that could be useful where they can't be accessed through any other means. Flagging bots a little faster might be handy too, but overall these things aren't particularly long and are often completed on the same day assuming there is someone to handle it.

So, I can see why Wikia are segregating users, and agree with it to an extent. Using this as a true segregation and saying one user is more important than another is not something I agree with, but I don't think that's what's being done here. When I received the email I informally asked non-admins for ideas for certain questions, such as feature requests, as I didn't have anything I wanted to add in and used it as an opportunity to get another perspective.