Thread:Drew1200/@comment-25285546-20150107200209/@comment-1693968-20150108131853

FortressOfNight wrote: there is literally no good reason to move. this has been discussed to death already, i'd suggest you go look at some of the older discussions from TWO FREAKING YEARS AGO if you want some of that drama.

basically moving would involve getting the very large majority of the community to agree to move, drop their accounts and everything they've done here, make a new one for brickimedia, then get used to that entire site. lol, not gonna happen.

in addition to that there's the challenge of moving almost 3,800 articles over. that would take weeks or months and what's the point? they already exist here, obviously, the editors know how to make them, format them, etc etc, and it's a good, efficient system. on brickimedia they're going to get less exposure, the editors will have to adjust to that system, etc etc and why? is there any huge benefits that make all this effort worth it? is the brickimedia system better or faster or what? and there's no way to avoid the fact that there's going to be a hell of a lot less traffic coming the way of brickimedia lmbw and a hell of a lot more coming the way of wikia lmbw. so basically we'll be catering to a smaller audience, with little chance of expanding that until brickimedia becomes really established, which will take years, if it even happens.

that's not to mention the fact that the lmbw is 95% community-based. most of us here (~75%) aren't editors, probably at least half don't browse the mbs anymore, and a small amount don't even have accounts. some didn't even know about the mbs before joining. so the way chat and talking to each other works is vitally important. is the chat better than wikia's? are there message walls or talk pages, and are they better than wikia's? are there blogs, and are they better than wikia's? is navigating through these kind of things easier than on wikia?

from what i've seen of brickimedia it's wikia with a smaller community, a much smaller and less adept staff, worse looking css, a much more bland chat, harder to navigate pages...

so basically the only advantages i can see is that the entire thing is controlled by the community (a very small part, but still, the community.) so they can adjust everything. who knows, maybe eventually brickimedia might be really good and popular and whatever. but right now there's no way it's "superior" enough to wikia to go the effort of moving.

I'm sorry, I wasn't planning to get involved, but I think I have to respond to this.

You are correct in saying that moving would entail users being willing to adjust to change. However, we wouldn't have to give up everything we've done here, as that all transfers easily to the new site.

And moving everything is actually a much larger process than you described. You forgot to mention that we have over 26,000 images that would also be moved. But you also have to remember that Brickipedia already made this move, who happens to have 28,000 pages and over 90,000 images. This was all transferred relatively quickly. I forget how long it took, but it was all done automatically, so any amount of time it took was just waiting for the internet to load.

Arguing against Brickimedia because of the mainspace is pretty difficult. The mainspace is probably Brickimedia's greatest strength, and Wikia's biggest weakness. If we were more content focused like Brickipedia, then we'd be a lot more likely to move.

Personally, I do like Wikia's chat a lot better, but I'd be willing to move to a different chat in light of all the other benefits of Brickimedia. But the chat is really the only thing I like better. Their blog system is every bit as nice, and it even has several extra features that we don't have on our blogs here. There are, of course, talk pages, since that's a default MediaWiki feature. We could also have more advanced features enabled if we wanted as well, such as private messages that are not on chat.

Lastly, I could not disagree with your comment on the staff anymore than I do. Wikia's staff may very well be more capable, since Wikia can afford to higher expensive developers. But that doesn't make Brickimedia's staff any less capable. In fact, I argue that they are more capable, since they have the freedom to do as they'd like. Wikia staff have hundreds of thousands of wikis to keep in mind, so when they develop things, it has to be something that works for a large portion of those wikis. At Brickimedia, there's a very small number of wikis, of which we would be the second largest. As has already been mentioned, there was a skin developed exclusively for the LMBW. We certainly don't get that kind of attention on Wikia. The smaller environment also means that we can push for certain features, and they're far more likely to be developed. Overall, the technical aspects of Brickimedia like this one should be another incentive to move, rather than holding us back.

(and just to note, I am among the staff at Brickimedia, and I was formerly active in helping development, but I didn't feel like mentioning it until now )

I'm not trying to push us to move towards Brickimedia, but at the same time I don't want false information about the site to be spreading. Part of your post was correct, though. You said that moving would involve getting the community to be willing to adapt to change, and the majority of the community is simply not willing. Most everything is as simple as that.