Board Thread:Wiki Discussions/@comment-25075055-20140331114355/@comment-25075055-20140402180441

At one point our forums were open, we allowed plenty of discussions not related to improving the wiki, and it was active. However after awhile we discovered that the forum's activity was filled primarily by users who had never even made a single edit improving he content of the wiki. Worse, these users were actively hostile towards the users who did edit the wiki. We had a situation where continued openness of the forum seriously risked driving the actual editors of the wiki and killing the encyclopedia dead. So after a community discussion, by consensus, we closed off the forum. That was true, when anonymous editing was permitted. However, as you are probably aware, the only people who can edit on this wiki now are registered users. The "hostile users" you speak of were probably all anon IP's that could easily hide under different IP addresses. As a result of last year's decision by Wikia, this is no longer an issue and there has been an almost 100% drop in vandalism to the wiki.

Plus, back when this was a problem, there was probably very few active editors. Today, there are many regular editors, so I doubt the problem would be as bad if people only contribute to the forums and not the wiki articles. You can't force people to contribute to articles: if they only want to post on the forums, they should be allowed, instead of shooed away :/ it would have been created whether our forum was open or not True, but one of the factors that resulted in UltimateSupreme adopting that wiki and having it plastered everywhere is because of the rule where the forums are only for wiki discussions. As I've pointed out, the talkpages are for that purpose, the whole forum doesn't really need to be for the same purpose. How does this activity help the wiki? See previous point, re: anon IP's not being allowed to edit unless having an account. The wiki probably still gets the same number of views, but there's less editing in general. Why is a community that just collaborates on a wiki not a community? It's a community, but a very anti-social one. If you search around all the other large wikia's that there is, you'll find that all of them allow discussion on their forums about the topic they're documenting: they are not telling people "The forums are only for improving the wiki, any questions or discussion about this series should be taken to another website". Like I said previously: this is probably the only wiki on Wikia which does this.