User blog comment:LostInRiverview/The future of The Sims Wiki/@comment-4568327-20160915152806

As someone who has regularly accessed The Sims Wiki over his mobile phone, and someone who is fairly experienced with editing, I can say that the biggest factor that likely drives mobile readers away is the mobile version of the site Wikia develops. The mobile skin used to be fine, albeit a bit clumsy, but recently I've been finding it less and less usable. The mobile editor is a laughable joke; edit summaries can't be left and there is no preview button. Even the mobile view is clumsy at best; it doesn't support the User and Special namespaces, so when attempting to view said pages, it reverts to the Oasis skin. As such, I have almost always used the desktop version of Wikia on my mobile phone, and I have been extremely frustrated by this. There is no easy way to use Wikia on mobile, and I refuse to download yet another app just to read a wiki.

That being said it should also be noted that Wikia has recently been trending towards "fans" more than editors, as evident by their new Discussions extension. People have commented about how people who used Discussions tended not to edit the wiki, and editors tended to avoid using Discussions. A number of users have also lashed out at Wikia's "Fandom" spiel and how it promotes users that simply read and partake in non-wiki related discussions rather than the actual editing and development of the wiki itself. As such I am not willing to say that the decline in activity is our fault, as a number of other communities I am on have experienced a sharp decline in editing activity as well. I am also willing to pit the blame on The Sims 4; as much as we like to joke about it, the game has disinterested many long-time players and isn't garnering enough attention and engagement that The Sims Wiki needs to sustain itself. Our articles on TS4 are largely underdeveloped and of low quality, and few experienced editors and few long-time players of the series are willing or interested to change that.

One thing I can recommend is that, even if we don't use the new infobox markup, we should set out to simplify our complex templates. Right now, any page that uses Sim or Object quickly take much longer to load due to the absurd complexity of the templates. Articles about Sims take a very long time to save an edit or to purge the cache of, and long load times are also detrimental to mobile users. It shouldn't take half a minute to save an edit, no matter what. This template complexity also has a lot of other technical issues, such as increased load on the servers and parser limits set by the software.

There is, funny enough, an Android app for the wiki on the Google Play Store, and it is developed by Wikia, not The Sims Wiki. I have no interest in using such an app and the last time I checked, some irate users thought it was a game or something affiliated with The Sims series, due to the poor naming choice by Wikia. I also fail to see why an app is necessary; can you even edit pages with it? And if you can, is it easier or harder to do so with the normal mobile site? If there is no extra functionality given by the app that is not present on the mobile website (and I can't see why there should be any) then the app is, IMHO, a waste of valuable real estate on my phone.