User blog:BertH/Introducing WAM



This week we're introducing a new way to track the health and well-being of Wikia Communities — WAM! The Wikia Activity Monitor (WAM) gives a Wikia Community a score between 0 and 100, based on a variety of measurements, including page views, contributions, and level of user activity. WAM scores are calculated daily for the top 5000, and the scores are displayed at http://www.wikia.com/WAM. Scores can also be seen on each of our Video Games, Entertainment and Lifestyle hub pages. Like all of the things that factor into the calculation, the scores and rankings are sensitive to real-world events and so will change frequently.

For example, it's no surprise to see the Wikia's Mad Men wiki score going up due to the show's new season starting recently. Other changes might be less predictable, and that's what makes this so exciting and interesting to watch.

It's important to remember that Wikia has over 300,000 wikis, so you shouldn't feel disappointed if your favorite wiki is "only" ranked at number 4,998 on the WAM list. Just being in the top 5000 is a huge win! And if you don't see your community on the list at all, then you can make that a goal for your community during the next year. It's definitely possible. We've been tracking WAM internally since January 2012, and already we've seen smaller Wikia Communities experience rapid growth and shoot into the top 400, such as Injustice: Gods Among Us, Defender of Texel, and Puzzles &amp; Dragons (a Chinese wiki about a mobile game).

What can you do to improve your WAM score? There isn’t one quick, simple way to improve your score and ranking. It will take time, and a little bit of work. In that sense, it's actually similar to your Wikia Community's ranking on Google and other search engines. Since the entire content of your wiki is taken into account in both cases, there are a number of things you can do to help boost WAM and search status. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) help page is a great place to start. If you're an admin, you've probably got a running list of improvements and changes you want to make. Update that list, with WAM and SEO goals in mind, and ask your community to help out. Remember all of these tips as you add content on Wikia.