Board Thread:New Features/@comment-168424-20181030233322/@comment-20644-20190124222310

Hey, just wanted to chime in here with a few quick points of clarification.

Community Builder isn't a beta, but an experimental community building prototype. It’s meant to test out a question/hypothesis: given the complexities involved for the average web user to create a community with MediaWiki software, can a different technology lead to an increase in meaningful community creations and user contributions?

So far, there is not enough data to validate this hypothesis. So if you’re concerned about the Community Builder being the future of the Fandom platform, you can rest easy. We have absolutely no idea if it will be, but we think the hypothesis is worth exploring so we can know one way or another.

That’s part of why the toolset is pretty limited right now. There’s no sense building out a robust product like Community Builder if the basic premise hasn’t been validated yet. That’s also part of why we’re not making any big strides toward migrating communities to the Community Builder anymore. It’s not ready for that in any meaningful way, so we’re more focused on new wiki creations now.

But, the point about how the domain is taken and prevents someone from building a MediaWiki community at that address is a point well taken. Our Product Manager for contribution, including Community Builder, thought that was interesting too. I don’t have a solution for you at this point but that feedback has opened up a conversation about how we can support people who want to create a Community Builder experiment around that subject while also making sure that we support people who want to build a MediaWiki community on that subject too.

Good feedback - thank you.