Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-20644-20141110180435/@comment-20644-20141113202956

Cqm wrote: There have been examples of this branding leaking into a wiki's right to name itself. There was a case of cod wiki being rebranded in an advert. Then there was the time someone tried to rebrand every wiki on VSTF. Either this change has been communicated to staff extraordinarily poorly or this aggressive change has signed off by those in charge without a with very little thought to how it might affect communities.

When we first started this, there were some kinks that needed to be worked out. Not everyone was on the same page. Now we are&mdash;you won't see changes like that anymore, and they haven't happened (to my knowledge) for quite awhile. If they do happen, they shouldn't happen and will be corrected.

Cqm wrote: To add a more logical point, take a look at homepage:Special:CreateNewWiki. You'll notice almost everything about that page describes the site you're about to make as a wiki, even down to the page name. "Name your wiki", " Wiki", "Give your wiki an address" "Your wiki will be in english". This is the first point of a wiki's journey and it's clearly a wiki.

That will also be updated, per a previous comment.

Cqm wrote: And interestingly, I haven't actually seen any staff member say they personally think it's good with a reason explaining their viewpoint. I've seen regurgitated statements but very little originality. Even this forum post is obviously lifted from a 7 month old post on community council with minimal changes, most oddly of which is the reduction from 400,000 communities on wikia to 300,000. Have 100,000 wikis got up and left in 7 months?

Just because this was also posted elsewhere doesn't change its meaning. And I would not post anything I did not 100% believe in, nor would I spend time in the comments here talking about it. So yes, you have seen a staff member personally say it's a good idea with reasons explaining their viewpoint: I'm doing so right now!

Hedgeg wrote: I do not deny the importance of other ways of presenting information (although they were all known and used before). All these additions did not change the core of the wiki: (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wiki#Noun) Verb: 4. (transitive) To participate in the wiki-based production of.
 * 1) A collaborative website which can be directly edited merely by using a web browser, often by anyone with access to it.

Yes, it is no longer a simple collection of facts and descriptions. But still fits the definition.

Well, let's avoid parsing words. We’re not talking about dictionary definitions here. This is all comparative. Wikia communities are by far better than wikis on other services (a testament to all Wikia users), and Wikia offers much more in order to build communities, encyclopedic content, social spaces, and more.

Think about the things we offer, core functions of many communities, that are not offered elsewhere:

Features (which are optional):


 * Blogs
 * Chat
 * Message Wall
 * Article comments
 * Achievements
 * Top 10
 * Maps
 * Category exhibition
 * Category galleries
 * Forum
 * New galleries
 * WikiFeatures, where you can find most of those
 * Licensed video swap

Admin tools:


 * Admin dashboard
 * Theme designer
 * Quick Stats
 * Special:CSS
 * Community corner

Various new ways to consume and contribute content:


 * Community apps
 * Game Guides
 * Video Library
 * Video tools
 * Hubs
 * VisualEditor
 * Wiki Activity

And more:


 * Global profile
 * Revamped ListUsers
 * User renames
 * User avatars
 * MyTools
 * Facebook Connect
 * WAM
 * HTML/pretty emails
 * Special:Contact with speedy support

Do you have to use all of those? Nope. But for those who want to, they are there in order to help them build a community, present content, interact on the site, and more in a way that wiki farms can't. And as I've said before, communities that don't use them are still better than those on wiki farms, considering that those communities are the home of the fan authorities on the subject and whose writing and drive to create content has no comparison elsewhere.

Unok wrote: Brandon Rhea wrote: The text on the wikia creation page is currently out of date (where it says you are creating a wiki). To preemptively answer the next logical question: I don't know whether or not the part where you choose your wikia's name will be updated to say "Wikia" or "Wiki." We should be given a choice, being named Wikia or Wiki. If right now you give us the choice to keep Wiki and not move to Wikia, then when we create wikis/wikias we should be able to choose how to call it. If not, then you will be stripping us from a choice you said we have.

Even if we update the creation page to say Wikia, it doesn't take away your choice. Then, as with now, you would be able to send a message to Special:Contact asking for whatever name you want.

Wedkarski wrote: It’s a pity that now Wikia ceases to be wiki hosting service and becomes (quote Cook Me Plox) mumbo-jumbo social-universe-fan-passionate-community.

VisualEditor? VideosModule? New Image Galleries? Updated Global Navigation? Finally, this thread… What’s wrong, Wikia? Stop to deal with that nonsense. You’ve more important cases. At the beginning you should fix bugs, there are a lot of them.

We do fix bugs. We have an entire team dedicated to that. Some take longer than others due to prioritization and other factors, but we of course fix bugs. And that actually goes to part of the point of this: I don't know of any vanilla wiki hosting service that has a technical department that is as large, as responsive, and as good as Wikia's.