User blog:MisterWoodhouse/This Month at Fandom - March 2020

Hey gang!

March has been a whirlwind of a month for most of the world. We’re privileged to have things running smoothly here at Fandom, continuing to serve our communities and working hard on delivering Unified Community Platform updates.

UCP Launch
This month saw the first few releases for the Unified Community Platform, which is still only for new wikis on Fandom. We love how much feedback we’ve received from our adventurous editors. Be sure to keep an eye on the Technical Updates board for our release highlights.

As we get closer to the Simple Wiki Migration stage, we’ll have more blogs detailing big feature deployments.

Bridging Social Distance
Can't believe I forgot this when I published...

In the wake of so many gaming conventions getting cancelled and postponed due to COVID-19, many independent gaming studios ("indies") lost out on valuable (and expensive) opportunities to connect with potential players for their games, throwing their promotional plans for a loop. We offered them our reach on Gamepedia's Twitter account, using the hashtag #BridgingSocialDistance.

Indies were invited to share a 280 character or less pitch for their game and include their trailer, store page, and Twitter handle. In turn, we tweeted the promos out from the Gamepedia Twitter account to our nearly 125 thousand followers. It was free and we had no strings attached to it.

We had over 30 studios take us up on the offer and we're still accepting submissions here.

Best Practices
The Best Practices blog series made its glorious return this month with a deep dive on infoboxes. Be sure to check it out!

Vertical Updates
Gaming

Gaming has been continuing our exciting crossover project. Nearly 1,000 wikis already have come together to combine their efforts and make a better wiki for all! If you have sister wikis and are interested in joining forces we would love to help!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has released! It's topping the sales charts, and for good reason! Hop on Dodo Airlines and head over to our wiki to help you get the most out of this amazing game!

Ori and the Will of the Wisps also released this month! Head over to our Ori wiki for a breakdown of everything you need to know.

TV/Movies

We have seen important changes in the releases calendar for the next month. Because of the coronavirus, a lot of movies were delayed and we changed our focus. No Time To Die, Mulan, and Black Widow are just a few examples of this long list.

TV series, however, are continuing their normal releases for the near-term. We continued our work in Arrowverse running a Supergirl quiz to celebrate the 100th Episode of Supergirl!

And it wasn’t the only quiz that we have been running, we did another one for Doctor Who that has 3.7K unique visits!

And the last episode of Star Trek: Picard aired last week and our Choose Your Star Trek Dream Team contest ended. We picked our three winners who will receive vouchers for the official Star Trek store.

The release of the new season of Westworld, with Westworld Wiki reaching the 70K daily pageviews compared to the 29K before the release was also a good news. We are publishing episodes recaps and we are promoting the content with a special landing page.

We are also working actively in the Supernatural wiki, as Season 15 started airing.

Due to the postponement of the movie releases, we had the chance to focus on other TV and streaming releases such as Elite or Frozen II, which was released earlier on Disney+. They both showed an increase in pageviews, users and edits on their release days.

Our Content Team continues to support multiple IPs including efforts on the Motherland: Fort Salem Official Wiki, Altered Carbon and I Am Not Okay With This. And together with our Wiki Managers team, they are working on a huge project, transforming our Community Builder communities into normal wikis, to ensure that all our communities can be migrated into the UCP in the future. It means they are doing a great work merging communities, as the merge of Schooled Wiki into The Goldbergs Wiki.

But we don’t stop, our Content Team Members and Wiki Managers are actively supporting our efforts with the UCP, testing the platform and explaining the changes to the communities. This is just the beginning of something great!

Anime

Have you seen Beastars yet? Anthropomorphic animals not really your thing? Castlevania and Altered Carbon: Resleeved dropped too! If you download the Netflix Party application, you can practice social distancing and still get some good friendship time in!

Now for an update, we are about 600 wikis deep in the recategorization process. What does this mean for you? With the proper categorization attached, we will be able to successfully gauge metrics for the Anime vertical in totality. Which, in turn, helps us shift priorities based on necessity for wikis. No significant changes will be made on the front end if the wiki is recategorized, but we are assigning Wiki Managers and Content Team Members to qualifying wikis.

Editors of the Month
A quick note about Editors of the Month during the COVID-19 crisis: We have suspended Editor Rewards shipments which involve inventory from our offices, due to health concerns. As such, new Editor of the Month winners will not receive their Fandom hoodie or Gamepedia box until the crisis has abated. All winners will be properly rewarded when it is safe to do so.

In the meantime, our other Editor Rewards programs continue to flourish. For example, a small mountain of gaming rewards has been distributed, at a time where everyone could use some more gaming in their lives.

And now for the March winners…

Gaming

The Fandom Gaming Editor of the Month is Ruf67, recognizing their outstanding work on the Forgotten Realms wiki!

The Gamepedia Editor of the Month is BryghtShadow, for being a constant source of mentorship on Discord and for their continued work on the Mobius Final Fantasy and Alchemist Code wikis!

The Esports Editor of the Month is Lw94akaTim, for his incredible help with quality control and data management on the League of Legends esports wiki!

TV/Movies

The Fandom TV/Movies Editor of the Month is MrThermomanPreacher, recognizing their incredible edits on the Tardis wiki!

Anime

The Fandom Anime Editor of the Month is SnakePAN14! He jumped right in and started working on the Beastars wiki the moment it dropped. This fan’s passion is shown through his contributions on Beastars!

Emerging Interests

The Fandom Emerging Interests Editor of the Month is Anotherhalfblood, for their continued excellent on the Kpop wiki!

And finally...
Remember to be kind to others and to yourselves. The world is scary right now and we’re happy to provide a place for you to escape. Stay safe.

If you want to join us on Discord, we've been sharing food we're cooking during Stay at Home orders. We also have an exciting Ask Me Anything about Search Engine Optimization coming up in April, so stay tuned for the exact date and time of that event!