User blog comment:Nathan Pirate/Public Service Announcment Regarding The UCP./@comment-25014407-20200609230507

I will reply to this blog as a user who works with a lot of technical coding on wikis daily, and as a person who is indifferent about the change. I am not necessarily here to change your opinion, but I can try to clear things up where there seem to be some misconceptions or insufficient information.

The design of the new format is still unknown, and will be revealed later. There is a current design, but there is a big chance that it will not be 100% used in the new format. It might also be good to know that Fandom has had a lot of design changes in the almost 15 years of its existence, including Monobook and Vector, both of which are very different from what is used now. Usually, an online company changes its website's design every few years, not only to keep up with time, but also to focus on other company values, and many other reasons.

Since MediaWiki was already mentioned, MediaWiki is the foundation of wiki platforms such as Wikipedia and Fandom, and has been the foundation for almost 20 years. There is more information about it in this blog. The blog also says that Fandom decided to stay with a single version in 2013, which meant that there have been very few additional features since then. It is like keeping Windows Vista instead of upgrading to Windows 10. Fandom is now trying to upgrade to Windows 10, but the step from Vista to Windows 10 is very big, and this upgrade would have been easier and smaller if the platform followed with the updates.

Gamepedia was only founded in 2012, but has grown to become a big encyclopedia for games, and was one of the main competitors of Fandom in that field. Even since they were bought by Fandom, it seems like they are still competitors, mainly for search engines. Multiple wikis about the same topic, or even worse, duplicate wikis, hurts the chances of the wiki appearing on Google, with one of the two wikis being removed or suppressed from the search results. That is also one of the reasons why they are merging, to avoid that from happening.

I personally can understand why this update is needed (not saying I like nor hate it), and the new platform in the current form is just insufficient on both functionality and design to make an opinion out of it. There are new features and updates almost every week on the technical updates board, and this help page has some of the features that are still planned to be added soon. Forums have been deprecated for a long time, mainly because of the unmaintained coding, and now they are looking into making some sort of combination of Forums and Discussions. This is all also on the help page.