User blog comment:KyleH/Announcing: Blog articles/@comment-1025281-20090702141907

This is an excerpt of a comment I wrote on my talk page on Avatar Wiki regarding how blogs have helped the community.

''"Blogs are a feature that the community wasn't too confident about when I pushed for its introduction, but now I can tell that the community is finding it quite useful. The best way to go about with the blogs is to allow a lot of flexibility - allow users to write about whatever they want, to a reasonable limit. (To that end, I don't advise deleting blogs unless they are totally off-topic, or are spam/vandalism.) So here, we have a wide variety of uses for blogs - fanon advertisement, opinions on the wiki and the topic, a way for asking for feedback etc. I've also found the embedding feature to be particularly useful on main pages, because I think it is an efficient (the best) way for well-developed wikis to deliver their main site news, because you can get the announcements out, but also provide more detail very easily. This is in contrast to a lot of wikis that have to make the decision between having a cumbersome site news section or keeping a site news system that doesn't really inform users well. However, in general, I consider community blogging to be a great success and I'm very happy that it is now Wikia-wide."''

There, I described quite a few things blogs are useful for. I don't think many people have really thought about it, especially Star Wars, who took "all of five minutes". Well, really, five minutes? Think about it more for a little more than that! :) Basically, I think there are a lot of users who simply reject new features on Wikia because they simply say that wikis will never be the same again. It's become quite a culture, and I think we should be more open about new features on Wikia.

I like this feature, much more than quite a few others - especially because it has very few bugs - and I think it is genuinely useful. Like on Avatar Wiki, if you can open your mind and at least give the blogs a chance for a month or two, you will start liking it.