User blog comment:Dopp/Communicate Easily with Message Wall/@comment-1724320-20110927181030

I’m not going to savage the Message Wall. I won’t pack up and leave. In fact, I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that Wikia is becoming a social network, and that we’re doomed to all end up looking like iCarly Wiki. Not yet.

What I need to know, before I defend or decry this wall, is the reason for its implementation. The blog has been rather sparse on that subject: all I saw was something about making communication less confusing for inexperienced users. To me that’s not a good enough reason, especially when you’ve been planning to implement this for at least three months.

It’s undeniable that in the last couple of years, Wikia has adopted certain elements of social networking. Whether it’s the avatars, mastheads, article comments, blogs or chat, there has been a clear shift away solely from content creation and towards user interaction. Technical things like the editing interface have been reduced (dare I say dumbed down?) and the focus these days seems to be on ease-of-access. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, but I think that it’s something you might as well just say.

My big question in all of this is whether this dumbing down and social networking is the means to an end, or an end in and of itself. There is a very large difference between the two, and it decides whether the Message Wall is a failure or if it’s something worth further consideration.

Like it or not, a wiki’s main purpose is to provide content. That doesn’t mean we all have to make professional encyclopedias, but information should come before chatting every time. What I very much hope is that all of this accessibility stuff that Wikia has been building is part of a master plan to:
 * 1) Make tools easier
 * 2) Get community involvement
 * 3) Bring more editors to wikis
 * 4) Build content

If this is the case, then I am willing to give it a try for the sake of bringing more high-quality information to wikis in the long run, even if it is a fairly convoluted plan. I would like to see some data about user registration, editing habits and community involvement, as it relates to some of the previous social-networking features that I mentioned earlier. If there is data showing that these tools have brought more, useful people to wikis, then this might be a good idea.

A few weeks ago I did some analysis of user talk pages and found that the more times someone got new messages, the more often they edited and came back, although there’s probably a bit of the converse as well (people get more talk messages the more they edit). I think that just talking to people could be a powerful user-retention strategy, and that making messages easier (at least for idiots) might be a good thing in the long run for content-oriented wikis. It’s a longshot, but maybe that’s what Wikia’s thinking is.

The other less savory possibility is that Wikia has decided that communication is more important than content for wikis. If this is the case, it is a dangerous idea, and one that I think will greatly harm Wikia. From a purely monetary standpoint, there is a lot more ad revenue the more people get involved and add to the site, even if it’s useless chatting. I am sure that Wikia Inc. could make a lot more money by having the interaction be first and the content be secondary, but is that really what you want? Is that really what any sane person wants? Wikis on Wikia are turning into an amorphous blob that’s appealing to the lowest rung. Maybe you know what you’re doing, but maybe you don’t.

On to specifics about Message Wall (this is mostly a rehash of my feedback from earlier): In the blog posted in June, the single greatest request in the comments was to not enable an article comments – style talk page remake. How did that get missed?
 * User talk protection – Talk pages need to be edited all the time for maintenance. It will never, ever work for you to lock such an integral part of wikis down. WantedPages will get clogged up for eternity, and you will be getting loads of Special:Contacts asking for elementary fixes to pages. There has to be a balance between protecting the user talk pages from being used in the future, and with empowering local editors to take care of their wiki. In fact, after Message Wall gets rolled out, there will longer be notifications for edits to user talk pages. At that point they will be functionally equivalent to user subpages; people will assuredly concoct some JavaScript to make user subpages work the same way as user talk used to, and at that point protecting the User talk pages becomes utterly useless and detrimental.
 * Comment page names – If this is structured any way similar to article comments or blogs, the page names will look terrible, like User wall:Cook Me Plox/@comment-Cook Me Plox-20110912222213/@comment-Cook Me Plox-20110913181047 or something. It’s a teeny bit messier than having sections and indents on talk pages, especially when the pages are moved or deleted (every single comment counts as one page). It’s really just a poorly designed system that should not be adapted to user talk pages as well.
 * Anon notifications – I simply can’t believe that no one thought about this prior to launch. Anons need to be able to see when they have new messages, or else they will not know when they have been warned for vandalism. Warning is a major deterrent to any vandal (especially on large wikis), so taking this away is just a bad idea.
 * Seeing full conversations – My beef with user talk pages has always been that you only see half of a user’s conversations by spying on their talk pages. This happened whether you had the entire conversation on one page or if you traded comments back and forth. Message Wall does not fix this; in fact it makes it worse with the automatic pagination. A useful feature would be a way to see all of the messages someone has left on peoples’ walls, without having to use Special:Contributions and looking at their diffs.
 * Pagination – 20 is just too few. If you’re not going to raise that number, at the very least give us an option to view all of the comments on someone’s wall.

What I am a bit surprised about is who this (and the other features) appeals to. The “average user” on a wiki, according to Quantcast, is someone who makes one visit and never comes back. All of these social networking features don’t appeal to normal readers, because they don’t use talk pages (and probably don’t know they exist). It doesn’t appeal to very basic users with accounts, because more than half of them have never made an edit. It doesn’t appeal to the experienced editors on Wikia (most of whom have chimed in here) because they already know how to use talk pages.

What I have found is that Wikia is targeting the sort of lower-competence users on wikis. You all know the kind of people I’m talking about. The ones who leave RTE mistakes littering the source of pages, who spam article comments on Glee Wiki with unintelligible blather, and the ones who invariably are more comfortable with dumbed down features. Is this really who you guys want to appeal to?

Message Wall has too many problems at this point to even be considered useful, regardless of the social networking implications. If all of these problems get ironed out, there is a small chance that this could actually be beneficial to wikis, getting editors and more content. I kind of doubt it, but that’s what I’m hoping the goal is here.