Board Thread:Wiki Discussions/@comment-25075055-20140331114355/@comment-34115-20140403212040

Speysider wrote: 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. Plenty of the hostile users were logged in users who were regulars in the forums and never contributed to the wiki, while there was one hostile post from an IP the primary forum traffic wasn't IPs.

Speysider wrote: 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 :/ 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. You're right about the views, Wikia has made checking traffic a little more tricky by disabling the per-subdomain public Quantcast data they had, but when I last managed to check sometime recently the Narutopedia was still within Wikia's top 10 highest traffic wikis.

But the logic here sounds a little contradictory.
 * "The wiki probably had fewer editors when this was an issue and we have more now so it shouldn't be a problem."
 * "Because of Wikia not allowing anon edits our wiki, editing to the wiki has decreased."