User blog:Roads/Wikia Labs Tutorial

This tutorial is now outdated, as Wikia Labs is now a part of Wiki Features.

This is a tutorial for Wikia Labs, extended from the other tutorial from Mazter.

What Is Wikia Labs?
Wikia Labs is a special feature. Wikia introduces one of the projects they're working on, and admins on any wiki can choose whether or not to use those projects by enabling or disabling them.

Although only admins can turn on and off the features, registered users can view the Wikia Labs page and use the "give feedback" buttons.

Where Is Wikia Labs?
Wikia Labs is on a special page called Special:WikiaLabs. It can be accessed via Special:SpecialPages. You can also add it to your toolbar.

What's In Wikia Labs?
At the moment, Wikia Labs contains six projects: Chat, the new editor, Article Comments, Achievements, Category Exhibition, and Top 10 Lists.
 * Chat: Chat is the newest feature, located at Special:Chat. It lets users chat with each other, and even have private conversations between two users. Chatmods can make other users chatmods and ban users from chat.
 * New Editor: It is a redesign for the Rich Text Editor. It is supposed to "improve" the editing experience.
 * Article Comments: Like blogs, this allows comments to be displayed at the bottom of Main namespace pages. It replaces talk pages.
 * Achievements: Most of us know this by now, since it's the oldest feature of them all, even dating to before Wikia Labs (you had to request it special back then). It gives users badges for making edits, adding photos, adding categories, etc. Admins can customize badges at Special:AchievementsCustomize, and the top 19 ranked users are listed on the leaderboard at Special:Leaderboard.
 * Category Exhibition: It lets you view category lists as all pictures. It is not mandatory, even on wikis where it's enabled, since you can switch yourself between Normal view and Exhibition view.
 * Top 10 Lists: It allows you to make a "Top 10 List," a page where you can vote among more than 10 items. Make one at Special:CreateTopList.

What Isn't In Wikia Labs?
A lot of users, even a staff member at first, thought that all new Wikia projects go through Wikia Labs. That's not true. In fact, only a select group of projects go through the Labs. Many new minor features, like nonexistent categories no longer showing up as redlinks, the new bug fixes, etc. didn't go through it.

Did I Miss Anything Important?
Title says it all. If I missed anything, or if anything I said is wrong, I apologize. Please tell me what was wrong.

Please note that some of these features are disabled here at Community Central. Just becasue you can't find them here doesn't mean that I'm wrong.

ROADS! Roads! (Don't forget it!) 12:53, August 12, 2011 (UTC)