User blog:Gsimenas/Update on "Fandom" videos

"Update, 1 November: We received a response from Wikia/Fandom earlier today. They told us that their team will be reviewing our videos and get back to us with a more in-depth feedback next week, thus we will postpone the release of new videos for awhile. We hope that this will result in a productive discussion and we will keep you updated on how this conversation goes."

As some have you may have noticed, certain articles on the Wiki have been getting videos at the topmost part of the articles. For those unaware of what these are, these are videos made by Wikia/Fandom, the company who hosts our wiki, as part of their global wiki modernisation effort. This practice has been spreading throughout various wikis hosted by Wikia for the past year or two, until it finally reached our own doorsteps this summer. While the idea is nice, there is just one little problem with them - the wiki's community itself has absolutely no control over them. This means that: 1) We have not been consulted on the content of the videos and thus we cannot guarantee the quality of the content; 2) We have no control of where these videos appear; 3) We cannot stop the videos from autoplaying (and even if you do disable the autoplaying for yourself, the setting will be forcefully reset 2 weeks later; if that's not bad enough, even if you do disable the autoplay, the video still apparently downloads automatically in the background). Worst of all, we were not even properly informed that the videos were being implemented - we had to discover their presence ourselves.

Now, as those who have been following this issue may know, we have tried contacting Fandom about these videos to fix these aforementioned issues. Eventually, we even managed to get in contact with a member of the staff who promised to cooperate with us on these videos and halt the production of new videos for the time being until we "hammer out the details of what a positive relationship would [look] like between the two sides". However, we were also notified that the member of the staff would be taking a medical leave for several weeks, so while we did respond to their message, we were not expecting a quick response.

Two months without a response later, we began finding new videos on the wiki, despite the claims that the production of new videos would be put on hold until our communication with the staff continued. We don't have any guarantees that these are indeed new videos and not just a couple that we overlooked during the initial phase of the video release, so we cannot be sure whether or not our agreement was actually broken. Nevertheless, we decided to take the initiative into our own hands.

As such, we decided to try our hands at making videos ourselves. This way, we would still fulfil Wikia/Fandom's modernisation goals, while taking control of the videos and their content into our own hands. We have created four character introduction videos (for Alice, Asuna, Eugeo, and Kirito) - for popular articles that did not yet have any Wikia/Fandom-made videos on the wiki - as examples of our new initiative. We would thus like to hear your feedback on the videos so that we can further improve them, and any future videos we make. We have also sent a followup email to the aforementioned staff member in the hopes of restoring communication with them. We will be sure to post updates on our official Twitter account, as well as the Wiki itself, whenever we have news on the matter.

We hope you enjoy this new initiative of ours and hope you continue supporting us!