User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Beyond the Encyclopedia - A Wiki for Everyone/@comment-761251-20100830234511

Wikis have ways to enhance community. Most of them are free-form: barn stars, talkpage exchanges, intra-wiki contests, user boxes etc. A big part has been Special:RecentChanges.

In my opinion, Wikia have been notoriously bad at building community spirit on their "company" wikis such as wikianswers or community central. I do not respect the ability of the Wikia people to decide what helps me build my community -- it seems limited to copying ideas from elsewhere anyway. I do not believe they know how existing wikis leverage the MediaWiki tools to build their communities, they stack new tools upon them, which creates greater diversity, breaks some old ways, impacts performance (loading a blog with all comments shown = 1000 avatar images transferred; compare that with a talkpage!), and more. Please run our servers, grab your money, and leave the community-building to us.

It's fine to offer new tools to us - as long as it's an offer we can refuse.