FANDOM, also known as Wikia, have begun pushing out Featured Videos to numerous wikis around the network, including The Sims Wiki. These are videos created by the company's "Featured Video" team. While we welcome contributors to add videos to our articles, we are highly critical of their decision to make Featured Videos play above all other page content and not be removable by editors. These videos will play automatically, follow the user when they scroll, and will appear at the top of the page, being the first thing readers see. It looks something like this:
Like I said, we welcome contributors to contribute videos to the wiki; however, this is absolutely unacceptable to forcefully promote one's own video by placing it at the top of the page, making it autoplay, and making it unremovable by editors. This is a clear show of favouritism, if not domination over community processes and consensus. The Sims Wiki has always operated on the principles that 1) anyone can edit; and 2) things are decided by community consensus and not by the whim of one person or a group of people isolated from the community. With these changes, FANDOM Staff have essentially interfered with our community processes by promoting content that they themselves have created and forcing it to appear before our content. This is unacceptable and a complete violation of the principles our wiki operates on.
In addition, I've gotten numerous complaints from users on the Discord server that these videos are annoying, sometimes malicious in the fact that they autoplay, and often even contain factual errors or inaccuracies. There is no dedicated venue for reporting inaccuracies or errors in these videos, only the general contact page. We also don't know who specifically made the video, which is also problematic given how everyone else needs to attribute their work to their username.
We welcome FANDOM Staff to contribute their videos to the wiki in a volunteer capacity like everyone else; however, if they wish to add their videos to the wiki, they should do it in the same way everyone else does, in that 1) their videos must be uploaded to the wiki using a user account; 2) embedded normally into the article via an edit, so that they can be vetted, adjusted, or removed by editors if needed; and 3) they must not be forcefully located at the top and they must not autoplay.
The Sims Wiki has operated on the principles of the community as a whole working together to build the encyclopedia, and decisions have been made by community consensus with input from members of the community. There is no reason to cede this control suddenly to a company that forcefully injects their own content into our articles in such an intrusive way without seeking community input first.