Board Thread:Merger/@comment-1043212-20140813175002/@comment-188432-20140814160342

Dean, you're an incredibly valuable editor. Wikia's football content would be considerably poorer without your contributions.

But please be fair in your criticisms. You have not been editing at the rate of 400 edits a day at the old football wiki from the period of March through late July. You barely edited on football wikis at all during the World Cup, and these guys edited like champions during that period.

Everyone's involvement waxes and wanes on any project. This process is going to take a long time. I would not expect you guys to be done with the review of the merge until the end of the year — if you're proceeding carefully and collaboratively. And it has only been a day since the merge happened.

Please remember that these guys created a wiki that had roughly the same page count as the old wiki. In about a year. And they started from scratch. When one looks at their work rate as compared to the average Wikian's, one can only reasonably say that their work rate is phenomenal. It may not be quite as good as yours when you're really putting your back into it, but since March of this year, they definitely have outpaced you in terms of their edits relative to football.

Also, edit count isn't the only mark of any admin's value. They seem to have a different set of editing skills than you — 2A has a pretty good grasp of CSS, for instance — so he is able to have a different set of impacts than you, with fewer edits. Note that 2A has already started taking your concerns about the colour scheme on board, and has been making edits that conform more or less to your wishes.

None of that is to say — in any way — that your contributions are anything less than valuable. Again, you're a rock star in Wikia's football community. But so are they. Just cut 'em some slack. I'm sure you'll find within a month that they're editing at a pace that you would consider reasonable for a partner.

Finally, I have to disabuse you of one notion. This not "their merge". They never requested it. This was and idea brought to both wikis for approval, in order to create something bigger that could attract more editors and viewers. At the end of the day, it will definitely do that — so long as we believe it. To mix my sports metaphors, its absolutely true to say, "If we build it, they will come."

Of course there will be points, as in any creative endeavour, where we all will get frustrated. I totally get where you're coming from in your initial post. So if you need to release some tension over the project, my message wall is certainly there for you to use. As the representative of Wikia most directly involved with the project, it's quite literally my job to address your concerns and criticisms. And I've really tried to respond to you within 24 hours of every message you've ever sent my way.

But I urge you to understand — as I'm quite sure you do — that Recoded and 2A are just two football fans trying to do their best by this place. Just like you.