Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-13301-20170502181922/@comment-1824272-20170508214247

Ciencia, despite what you may believe, I'm not speaking for anyone from Fandom nor have I spoken to anyone more than FishTank, who I'm not speaking for either. I am my own person. (Believe me, I'd love to have a paid job at Fandom. Better than having no job at all, not until I'm done with college.)

I didn't involve myself in here because I'm Council or because I spoke to anyone. I simply saw your posts crop up on Community Central over the past week, and I've been just sitting here trying to avoid all of it because your attitude is disgusting and I hate dealing with people like you who sit here and throw spitballs at Fandom instead of collaborating with them to try to improve things.

I'm a council member for one reason only: I'm dedicated to my particular community, and Fandom has given us tools and exposure to manage an encyclopedia, so I want to help provide early feedback on said tools in proper, mature, responsible discussions where both my community and Fandom can help each other, as every community should strive to do.

In any case...


 * However, our community already has infoboxes in place, so making infoboxes easier is a moot point here.

Wikis grow and evolve, and there will always be change to be made. Just because adding new tools to improve your experience doesn't retroactively apply doesn't mean it shouldn't be done in the first place. You have no idea where WikiDex, or any wiki, will be in five years, so why not make the next editor's experience easier for creating that next infobox you don't know you'll need today?


 * PI has limitations, and are subject to eventual bugs and errors caused by Wikia changing their code, since it's not standard and nobody knows how may evolve.

It's no one's fault but your own if you don't keep up with the Technical Updates on Community Central or pay attention to Fandom's updates in the bottom-right corner that apply globally when major features are implemented or changed. "Eventual bugs and errors" is a moot point because you're talking about software which always has bugs and errors, but if a problem ever showed up, then you could simply contact Fandom and they'd help you fix it. They're not out to leave a wiki in a broken mess.


 * PI changed the look of our templates, in some situations (the simple ones) they looked better, in some others there was a clear downgrade in design and functionality.

That's your own personal opinion. I've browsed through the WikiDex pages and haven't seen any out-of-place infoboxes. This isn't a point worth pursuing, every user will see them differently.


 * The mobile skin is a crap. If you need to reinvent the way infoboxes are coded, there's a clear design problem here.

Indeed, the mobile skin is crap. Fandom said at Community Connect last year that the mobile skin and mobile apps were going to be worked on, but that's completely unrelated to infoboxes. One of the reasons Portable Infoboxes exists is to provide that standard that can conform easily to mobile. You can easily make the exact same infobox in wikitext as you can with PI format, and that format is used in the backend for special display on mobile. Wikitext infoboxes, by virtue of being wikitext, means Fandom can't put anything in the backend on the mobile skin to display them properly.

Yes, there was a clear design problem: infoboxes looked like crap on mobile. Solution? Portable Infoboxes.


 * When the problem is not only infoboxes, but all templates, complex formatted code and tables, then the problem is not wiki code, but the mobile skin itself.

Agreed. The mobile skin needs more work. But infoboxes are the very top element with the most important information in articles. Being a Pokemon wiki, you should understand that more than anyone else. Ergo, infoboxes were the most important thing for them to get right. I'm still hoping we'll get a solution soon on the table situation, because tables are a necessary evil for us at my wiki, but infoboxes were the top priority, and that's what they tackled first.


 * ''Because of this, I suggested a way to do practically the same PI does, but as a more standard way: CSS classes. You can put them on every part of the wiki and fix pages as a whole, not just infoboxes.


 * However, Staff discarded this idea with no other reasoning than "PI should be implemented here. Period."

I honestly don't know how to respond to this in any simpler terms. That's exactly what Portable Infoboxes are! You have no less freedom with PIs than you did with wikitext infoboxes. All that's changed is the markup, which is easier and more helpful for you and your editors. The PIs' CSS classes on mobile are dictated by Fandom, and beyond wanting a dark theme on mobile web browsers, I see absolutely no problem with the mobile PI CSS. On the desktop side, you have an easy way to add themes to the PIs to add your own CSS in the same way that the wikitext infoboxes had.

You're literally suggesting that they add CSS classes to help, and that's literally what Portable Infoboxes are.


 * Remember also that you are editing on Wikia, that uses MediaWiki 1.19 as its base software, released on 2012-05-02 and becoming obsolete in May 2015, stuck with old api modules and without many improvements for admins and users introduced in later releases.

You do realize you're completely off the mark here? Yes, the base version of the software we're using is MediaWiki 1.19, but at this point, so much has been backported from MediaWiki 1.25 or even created independently of MediaWiki itself that there isn't any need to upgrade. It doesn't matter if the MediaWiki project maintains 1.19 or not anymore, because Fandom maintains it for us. It has nothing to do with any of this.