Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-20644-20141110180435/@comment-20644-20141116000304

First, apologies for the comments that I've missed. I've gone through some of the biggest ones right now to respond to some key points.

452 wrote: I'm no marketing guru, but it seems to me that attempting to use the same name for both the brand and the product usually ends in tears. "Check out my Facebook"

"Check out my Twitter"

"Check out my Instagram"

"Check out my Tumblr"

This idea may be new-ish to Wikia, but it's not unique to websites and tech companies.

Search this wikia, it says. Does that mean I can create another wiki farm named or using the name Wikia on my own? No, it means that I can only create a new wiki on the Wikia farm.

We’re pretty confident in the intelligence of people to know that they are not creating their own wiki farm or their own Wikia company. If someone says “This is my Twitter,” it stands to reason people don't think that they own Twitter.

JMAS wrote: I've always thought of it as each individual site is a wiki (singlular) as part of the wikia (plural) community. I don't see a reason that needs to change. Wookieepedia is the Star Wars Wiki and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. wiki is another individual wiki that is part of the Wikia community as a whole. I actually think saying Wookieepedia, the Star Wars Wikia sounds rather rediculous. Wikia is a community comprised of thousands of Wikis. .

Wookieepedia and Agents of SHIELD can continue to call themselves what they like. We may call them wikias, but that doesn’t mean they have to add it to their name or call themselves “the Star Wars wikia.” Like I said in my first post here, it’s the balance between branding decisions and community decisions.

Virago a-go-go wrote: You know what you all need to do? Sit around the same table where you discussed this change in branding and talk about updating ALL the help and cross-reference help pages in Wikia. Tell the techies to stop re-inventing the wheel and fix the problems they keep ignoring.

If you absolutely must invent something new, invent an index -- a table of contents -- for what help topics exist in Wikia. Because right now, having users rely on a web search engine to find what should be easily found within Wikia itself is a major fail.

Try this exercise: go to Help:Contents and search for "Video". When you see Help:Galleries, Slideshows, and Sliders > go to it. Notice the one sentence that mentions Videos. Click on the wikitext link at the end of the sentence. Now … find the example/results for Videos in that page.

Try this other exercise: search for templates in Help:Contents > in the results, go to Wikia Templates. Search for "Video". Do you see anything in the results that informs the user there is no template for adding videos to a page and refers them to Help:Galleries, Slideshows, and Sliders/wikitext?

Continue to push the overhaul of Wikia's help pages to the backburner while you tinker with new "ideas" all you want -- but when push comes to shove, rebranding isn't going to add a band-aid on the deep potholes that have been waiting to be repaired.

Not all of Wikia is made of engineers and technical support members. Improving or changing one aspect of the site doesn't mean that all aspects have to stop. And engineers, techs, product managers, marketing, and community teams are always working to continuously make Wikia the best place it can be.

I do like your idea about improving the searchability of help pages. Either this weekend or on Monday, I'll post on your wall so we can talk about the subject of help pages more.