Forum:Videos are Here

As many of you have noticed, there seems to be a new sidebar that main wikia has added of Videos. The very same videos we've voted time and time again to remove from the wiki, but have never been truly deleted. I've heard of some users attempting to contact staff regarding them, but I haven't heard the results of any of those. Plus, I think we need to discuss this issue as a community. So here's a forum and a space to do just that. 20:27, June 13, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion
Personally, I believe in only two options:

1) Talk with staff to have all videos removed, along with any template, special pages, or any other feature involved with them from this wiki for good.

2) If removal is not possible, and wikia chooses to leave the videos and all the assorted features on, we need to suck it up, and put the videos to good use. Put them to use on articles. Because if we have this giant video sidebar, and none of the videos are connected in any way to our own articles, we're just hosting content we aren't even informing people about. To be clear, I don't want to open the floodgates for user-added videos, merely use the ones that staff chooses to add.

Option 2 sounds bad, but honestly, I think begrudgingly adding them to articles is much better than leaving them as a large, completely "unsupported" feature. 20:27, June 13, 2014 (UTC)

I messaged the staff. Here is their response on the chat. I emailed them two times since then, but their responses were essentially the same. The guy I talked to in the chat told me if there is enough opposition against the videos, they will probably change it back.

TL;DR: TELL THEM HOW MUCH YOU HATE THE VIDEOS 20:31, June 13, 2014 (UTC)

Dude, what are you expecting to get by discussing it? Nobody wants videos here, that's a fact, but you can't do anything about it so live with that. 20:55, June 13, 2014 (UTC)

Staw, since they were forced on us I haven't heard a single person say that videos are a good idea on this wiki. Keep protesting and it will eventually get the staff's attention. Learn for Enrik's example - even though his protests look pointless, he doesn't stop. (runs away before the revolutionary kills me)

21:16, June 13, 2014 (UTC)

Remove them. There's also no point in using them any articles even if they won't remove them. That would just pointlessly clutter articles. SeaTerror (talk) 01:39, June 14, 2014 (UTC)


 * You can remove 'em with css :/
 * I actually like 'em(I'm not against every change staff brings),we can make a good use of it.--

"Keep protesting and it will eventually get the staff's attention." "Remove them. There's also no point in using them any articles even if they won't remove them. That would just pointlessly clutter articles. "

You guys are misunderstanding something: It's not up to us. You think you can have a say on a feature that is active on 400.000 wikis? It's beta so in the future it will be possible to not have it on our wiki, but till then there's nothing we can do about it. Staff say that removing it with CSS site-wide is not allowed, as I expected so we can only live with it. You guys can always tell staff that you don't like it using Special:Contact/feedback, but that's all. 11:52, June 14, 2014 (UTC)

While we're on the topic of annoying and unwanted changes, we should also contact staff about the new visual editor that adds a bunch of spaces to the references every time someone uses it. I contacted them a few weeks ago but nothing happened. They might listen more if a bunch of us complain to them. 14:19, June 14, 2014 (UTC)

I talked to them about that, they have found the cause of the problem and they are trying to fix it. Here's the link: http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Kirkburn/VisualEditor_-_the_past,_present_and_future?page=2#comm-685085 Hopefully, it will be fixed soon. 14:31, June 14, 2014 (UTC)

Good, because allowing videos in a wiki brings bad quality videos and fan made stuff that are not useful to our cause (Zeldapedia being the sole known exception). 15:34, June 14, 2014 (UTC)

I guess all we can do now is send more feedback about the videos and fix the template changes in every anon edit. 20:28, June 14, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion 2 - Full Episodes
So obviously, if anyone sent anything to staff, nothing was ever done about this. Now I see that the sidebar shows some very interesting videos: Full Episodes.

I think it's important to note that these videos are NOT hosted on our wiki, rather on Wikia Video.

Personally, I know they're probably region locked, and we don't really know which ones will be online when, but I think it could be useful to us to put the full episodes we do have into our articles. I bet most of you are against straight-up embedding them, so my preemptive compromise offer is that we just use external links to the Wikia Video.

Does everyone hate me now, or do some people actually want to start using these? 00:42, September 6, 2014 (UTC)

We want to get rid of them. Wikia is not supposed to be a video viewing site anyway so full episodes shouldn't be on here and I doubt they even have the legal rights to fully host them. SeaTerror (talk) 00:44, September 6, 2014 (UTC)

Those are not hosted by Wikia. Those are embedded versions of the Crunchyroll stream, which is therefore legal.

It's region restricted though, so keep it off the articles. Mr. Whatever (talk) 00:54, September 6, 2014 (UTC)

As already said, the video are not hosted anywhere on Wikia, they are hosted on third party websites Wikia has a partnership with, so they are also totally legit. The files can be added because the videos on Wikia Video are shared, and when you add one the file page will be created on this wiki too for maintenance purpose, that's all. You can think of the video module as the same as the spotlights, so it's not really something "on the wiki", but rather part of the interface. If you think it's annoying it's another matter, but I don't think that's so bad... I mean it stays in the right sidebar and that's all, if someone want to see a video, he will go on Wikia Video. What's annoying are the advertisements (which I don't care about since I use AdBlock), so I don't think the module is so intrusive.

On the matter of embedding the videos here, I'd actually like that if the videos weren't region-locked, but since they are, it's kinda pointless, although this is the English wiki and not the "international wiki" after all, hence it would still make sense. I wouldn't add any promotional, fan-made or random clip though, just the videos about the full episodes or other materials (episodes, movies, songs, ecc.). If you think about it, if we have a page about an episode, it would have perfect sense to have the actual episode on it since it's the actual subject of the article. To use another example, if shueisha would grant us the possibility to host the complete chapters, why wouldn't we do that? It's like having a library with only descriptions of the books and not the books themselves.

I'm in total agreement with Levi. I would like to clarify two things:


 * The videos should be added in a way that does not lessen the quality of the articles for those who can't watch the videos. They are bonus/additional content for articles, not content that can replace any information already on (or missing from) articles.


 * No user should be allowed to upload videos. We must only use the videos Wikia provides for us.

If we keep those two rules, I think that should cover most problems people have with videos in the first place. 14:56, September 6, 2014 (UTC)

Embedding videos to articles would lessen them since it would make the articles take longer to load than they already do. External links or nothing is the way to go. Besides why should we even have to do this in the first place? It's obvious nobody even contacted Wikia staff about videos since a staff member would have posted in here. SeaTerror (talk) 16:51, September 6, 2014 (UTC)

Embedding would not slow down anything. You seem to be the only one with problems loading pages.

What they'll actually do is make the articles uglier though, since those that are region-locked from the videos will be unable to view them. Mr. Whatever (talk) 19:59, September 6, 2014 (UTC)