User blog comment:Dopp/Communicate Easily with Message Wall/@comment-737801-20110927202532/@comment-8-20110928215523

Thank you Lancer for such a detailed and well thought out post.

I'm not going to reply to all of your points, or my post will be as long as yours and I'll miss reading and replying to others :) I've had trouble choosing the parts to reply to, because there is just so much here, but I've tried to pick out the key parts.  Although the quotes are from early in your message, I did read all of it.

"Wikia used to be about content and being the best wiki hosting site on the internet, and it is becoming obvious that Wikia and the Staff no longer believe this." - We definitely still believe in this. Although I acknowledge that there are times when we may disagree on the best ways to achieve that. We believe that building trust and (despite the dirty word ;) relationships is a key element of wiki building. I know for me, the biggest encouragement to stick with Wikipedia in the early years, and do my 16,000 or so edits there, was finding people on IRC to discuss and work with on that project.

"We need people to contribute, and making user talk pages specially will distract from that purpose" - To me, and I think to many of you, a space to talk is vital to encouraging contribution. I think one of the issues here is that some are seeing the similarities to Facebook's systems and conversations, and thinking that this means similarities to Facebook's content of conversations. What we want to do is to make it easier to have the kind of conversations you are already having. The system we are looking at here takes ideas from systems where it's easy to know where your conversations are, what is being said, and who is saying it, But that certainly doesn't mean that the content of Wikia conversations will be at all similar to those other sites.

" Any feature that distracts from the content will eventually cause articles to erode in quality as more and more people focus on socializing rather than building content." - Or, they will be tools that will help both discussion of content and collaboration on articles and help encourage people to come back participate in that heart of the wiki. I know there will always be some who just come to chat, and I would say we have a long way to go as communities to work out how we want to use that tool, but if chat makes someone stay and talk about article categories and how to arrange them... or just makes them come back to talk, and stay to fix up that page they meant to get to sometimes... then it's a useful tool for the wiki.

"Regarding feedback": we are doing exactly those types of analysis. Including a list of specific points, and how many people make them, and overall measures of the general sentiment. We also often look at figures ranging from article edits to pageviews. And we do all we can to talk to those who use the site but don't comment or read this blog (which, sadly is many many more than we hear from directly here - last count I heard was about 200 people commenting when we reached 700 comments).

We'll keep saying it, and I hope you will all hear it: we are reading this feedback, and recording it, and sharing it, and are also very aware that we also need to hear those not talking here, and the future users of the site.

"Give honest, calm, and specific feedback and the staff will hopefully read your feedback rather than just ignoring it." ^ This. We aren't ignoring even the abusive comments, but it most definitely helps to have specific feedback rather than "you suck".

"If you implement this feature, then you will rob users of a way to personalize their user space" From what I've seen so far (and remember, this first version is not the final one) it will still be possible to personalize and individualize.

"Using a wiki has a learning curve, and this is something that you can NEVER erase." For this point, I have to bring in my sister. She is an intelligent woman with a knowledge of biking, triathlons and many other topics that she could write about. She has real content and real interest to share – which she currently does via a forum. What she doesn't have, is the time and knowledge to work out the intricacies of wikis. I want you technical, intelligent, knowledgeable people here to be able to continue to do what you do, but I don't want my sister excluded because she doesn't want to sit down and learn wikimarkup or how to sign with tildes. I don't see this as dumbing down.

I think one of the best parts of your post was the stuff about wiki and Wikia philosophy. I'd say that everyone in the office agrees that Wikia is unique, and wants it to stay that way. That doesn't mean that every aspect of the site will be unique: some will be the same as other wikis, some will be the same as other sites. But that doesn't change that Wikia is a site to build a wiki about what you love, and that our goal is to make that work for you and everyone who visits. I will definitely be making sure all your comments on what that means for you are shared with others here in the office.

(And Dopp just read this and told me I need to revise the bit about this not being as long as your post -oops!)