Board Thread:New on Doctor Who Fanon/@comment-4189499-20140119130637/@comment-188432-20140120175638

Pinguinus wrote: If by "working", you mean "attract new users", then yes, this is a terrible idea. Then there is absolutely no point to this proposal, nor am I sure that the majority of participants to this thread agree with you. The original proposal states: The prime aim of this network is to encourage Whovian editors to explore all Wikia has to offer in the way of Doctor Who and to help encourage editing participation on some of the smaller Doctor Who wikis. Clearly the expectation is that it will have some sort of positive effect on the growth of wikis. Imamadmad firmly believes that it will help attract actual editors to DWA. I think JPhil2.0 thinks it will work that way for DWF, too.

But, in my experience, it won't.

I also don't think it's clear what the proposal actually is. Some people are proposing footer advertisement; others are clearly preferring a navbar solution. It matters that this be defined before anyone actually joins. And if it's a footer template, what is the art there? Will individual wikis have the power — and therefore the responsibility — of making their own footers? Will they be obliged to use a "common" template that may or may not actually fit in with the design of their home pages? (This is the current case with Disney Channel wikis, for instance. They all use the same template, irrespective of how it flows with their own main pages.)

Another thing that no one is talking about are the boundaries for inclusion. Who can be involved? Would the SJA wiki be theoretically allowed in? We'd have a problem with that at Tardis. If one of your users here — maybe one that you had banned — created, I dunno, doctorwhofanfic.wikia.com, would they be allowed in the network? If someone creates a wiki tomorrow and it has only one page on it, would they be an acceptable partner?

What are the practical limits of the network? Nobody's really talked about that yet. They're just saying, "Wouldn't it be nice if DW, DWF, DWC, DWA, and maybe DWE joined together?"

The devil is in the details — and we've had precious few of those.