User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: September 06, 2011/@comment-1997905-20110907202801/@comment--20110907213415

Monchoman, we have different teams handling different things at Wikia. Everyone works very hard at improving their own projects. Kirkburn (the product manager for the visual editor) will tell you he's just as eager as anyone to keep bumping up the quality of that tool.

The specific emoticons was a result of our latest Hack-a-thon, where engineers are encouraged to spend a day or two on creative, low-investment projects. It was something our team thought up would be fun to try, spend an hour or two tweaking, and got it to work great.