Forum:Ways that randomness helps this wiki

At the moment, there's a disagreement whether random comments are helping this wiki. One side seems to be saying, "it's a distraction and here's other, more appropriate places to put them in". The other seems to be saying, "it's just for fun and it's not hurting anything". Neither side is doing a good job of expressing their viewpoint.

Let's try to fix this issue.

In the past few months, Topher, Flash and myself have tried nudging blogs back on course when they drift too far away from its original subject. But sometimes we basically have to put our shoulder into it and shove it back on course, which nobody seems to like.

We have also tried to provide alternatives to using the blogs for miscellaneous unrelated conversations.
 * The Fanon Wiki has always been there for fan fiction stories.
 * You have the IRC chat channel if you want to chat with another person in real-time.
 * We even created a message board where those kinds of miscellaneous conversations are not only permitted, but there's an area specifically just for them.
 * Now we have a Twitter account where we can make quick announcements and follow some of the cast members.

Each of these things was done to avoid saying "that's verboten and that's final". The intent has always been to say "that would be better in a different place".

Everyone knows all of this. What I think people don't know is how many people around the world are looking at this wiki as a good source of information.


 * Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh have stopped by in the past and sometimes they'll answer questions from us.
 * If you do a search for Phineas and Ferb on Google, Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista or Lycos, this wiki is #4 in the results, behind only Disney, Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database.
 * Wikia is starting to feed blog comments onto their portal pages so that many people can see them.

All of this means we're not isolated any more. What we do here is seen by a lot of people. What I just listed are kind of nebulous examples of how important it is for us to have good information. Here's a concrete reason:

A quote from this wiki showed up on a toy sold by Disney.

Let me say that again: something that we did was good enough to get the attention of a person connected to Disney and they used it on a toy sold across the United States.

We don't know who it was that made this decision. That doesn't matter. What matters is that it's very cool and it shows why we need to have good information on this wiki. What we do here is having a world-wide effect.

So with that in mind, let's turn back to randomness. Since saying "that would be better somewhere else" isn't working, let's hear why it should stay on this wiki. How does randomness help this wiki more than it helps being on other sites? How does it make this wiki better?

Leave your responses below. — RRabbit42 ( leave a message ) 19:17, May 2, 2010 (UTC)