User blog comment:Kirkburn/Technical Update: June 4, 2013/@comment-4981281-20130611111048/@comment-3123266-20130618141727

Without embedded YouTube video, what is life? http://images.wikia.com/templates/images/f/fc/Icon_cry.gif

If page loading and tracking is THAT important to you, you could at least have something similar to Wikimedia Commons, where pages for all youtube video are created on (or moved to) a centralized domain, and Wikia staff members (and volunteers) get to clean up the pages. You don't even need to name the videos, just use the video id, e.g., File:Youtube-WWaLxFIVX1s