According to this blog update, the new "Wikia Labs" stuff will soon be available on Memory Alpha, along with an update to the rich text editor (hereafter noted as "RTE"). This is being done in order to roll out a new "Chat" system Wikia-wide.
To my understanding, the chat system is something we will be able to enable or disable through the Wikia Labs interface.
Some of the items that are currently available through this system are:
- Article comments
- This extension lets people write comments at the bottom of article pages and replaces talk pages.
- Gallery Exhibition
- Changes categories to show images with each entry.
- Top 10 lists
- Need I say more?
We've made a decision in the past to disable all of these items here on Memory Alpha, and that will continue to be the case. We will also likely disable the chat interface, as it is one more thing to keep track of, and I feel that it falls outside the purview of MA.
We previously had Wikia disable the RTE on Memory Alpha, as it caused a large number of issues with page layouts and templates. If the new update re-enables the RTE here, we will request that it be disabled again, especially if it exhibits any things that make maintaining MA difficult for our editors. -- sulfur 15:06, May 26, 2011 (UTC)