User blog:Brandon Rhea/How the South Park Wiki Kicked Off FANDOM's Community Video Program

One of the most exciting parts about adding video to the site and accomplishing our goal of slashing 30% of the ads on FANDOM wikis is that we now have a quickly growing team that’s dedicated to Featured Video. The number of videos we're able to create is growing too, and producing quality content that complements the quality of written wiki content is incredibly important to us. To help do that, we're in the beginning stages of a community participation program where admins and editors can create and review Featured Video scripts.

We recently had a great success with this program on South Park Archives. We posted a video on the page for Kenny McCormick&mdash;of "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" fame&mdash;and the community contacted us with some ideas to make it even better. We were able to offer them an opportunity: write a video script that addresses their concerns, and we can produce it!

Jamesb1, a South Park Archives administrator, took us up on that offer and wrote a really fun, new script about Kenny and how he's seemingly immortal. We asked him about the experience writing it and he said that he enjoyed doing it: "I struggled at first to think what to say," he said, "but I eventually started and it worked very well. I have never made a script for a video before so this was a first for me." In writing it, he also consulted other community admins who were able to give some of their ideas for the video.

Once the script was in, our team was able to quickly produce it into a quality Featured Video that now lives at the top of Kenny's page. James said that seeing his video, along with his name underneath it as the script writer, "feels great&mdash;like I have achieved something. I felt the clips were put together well too. I would love to do this more in the future."

This program is still in its infancy, and we're really excited to see how it grows. We're going to continue sharing these sorts of success stories here on Community Central, and we'll post more information about the growth of this program.

In the meantime, if your wiki is in the Top 1,000 on WAM, we would love to work with you on original scripts that we can produce for your community. You can submit scripts using our script submission form, and we'll review them and let you know whether we're able to move forward with a video for that page at this time.

We're looking forward to working with the community on this growing endeavour!