User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/Profile and Message Wall on the Unified Community Platform/@comment-3403151-20200305213842

"This was a very difficult decision for us to make, but in the end, we saw that a very small percentage of messages were making use of the old Message Wall’s source editor"

I hope everyone is paying attention to this dangerous wording.

They will ultimately use similar wording when they justify fully implementing Lucy.

The Lucy experiment shows us exactly what they WANT: to completely remove wikitext. Saying "This was a very difficult decision" is disingenuous, as that is their goal.

"the aim is not to remove wikitext, but to look at whether wikitext is a necessary part of wiki life, and whether a different style of editing can allow you to do other, more interesting stuff without it."

- Wikia Staff, defending the Lucy "experiment".

"Oh, we just want to see if it's necessary" sounds strikingly similar to "Our research found that it was not a critical need. [...] but wikitext as a prescriptive solution is not seen as a smart choice." (Loving the persuasive language there, someone has a future as a politician.)

"Discussions" replacing Forums was a step towards desensitising editors to something other that "Wiki" editing. Removing anon access to file pages was another. This new Message Wall is yet another. What's next? Where will it end? How long is it going to take for them to slowly walk to what they ultimately want?

Surely everyone remembers the Venus experiment and the vocal complains against it, which they then implemented step-by-step so that the majority of that experiment became reality. Including ADS INSIDE THE CONTENT AREA, which I predicted would happen because so much of the Venus skin was centered around weak justifications for doing exactly that. And now Discussions and New Wall weakly justify removing wikitext, due to them being too lazy to implement a limited wikitext parser. Acting as if Wikitext parsing isn't a solved problem, and positioning their reaction to the question as if we want "the entirety of mediawiki" to be re-implemented in discussions. I've written a limited wikitext parser myself, and I'm not a multimillion dollar corporation with hundreds of employees and billions of pageviews.

"Wikitext as a prescriptive solution is not seen as a smart choice."

- Wikia Staff, present day, painting Wikitext as "dumb".

Wikitext is a fundamental part of Wikis - their casual "oh, it's not used much" is insulting to all wiki editors. But perhaps that's exactly why there is no more "Wikia", and why the word "wiki" has been replaced on many help pages with "Community" instead. Sooner or later, the "/wiki/" will probably disappear from the URL entirely, and once they aren't using the word "wiki" any more, they can just say "we're not about wikis, we're about fAnDoMs! Use the FaNdom Editor to edit your fanDOM Community!" (I'm not sure which version of the capitalisation they are on right now, since they change it so frequently.)

"This was a very difficult decision for us to make, but in the end, we saw that a very small percentage of edits were making use of the source editor"

- Wikia Staff, at some point in the future.

(They will likely reply to this comment with some flavour of "we have no plans to remove wikitext". We all know how well their past statements about "no plans", "no plans", "no plans", "no plans" and "not going to" have turned out)

Aside: I can't wait to find out how the UCP Editor is going to mangle wikitext in new and exciting ways, just like the Visual Editor and the one before it did on launch and still do to this day.