User blog:MisterWoodhouse/This Month at Fandom - April 2021

Hey gang!

It is said that April Showers bring May Flowers and while that may be true, we are certain that April Showers bring This Month at Fandom - April Edition, so let us observe our monthly ritual and debrief on the month that was April 2021.

= A Deeper Dive into FandomDesktop = After revealing FandomDesktop for the first time at Community Connect in March (over Brandon’s birthday!) and then more widely a few weeks later, we spent April taking a deeper look at different core components of the wiki platform receiving changes with the new design.

Derek Hart, manager of the Product Design team, joined us for his third Discord Ask Me Anything session on April 13th, answering questions about his day-to-day responsibilities, design thinking around FandomDesktop and FandomMobile changes, and some fun miscellaneous topics.

I also published two blogs about how article pages and navigation are changing with FandomDesktop. These serve as opportunities to expand on what we’ve already shown, with thoughts from the Product Design team, notes about how feedback shaped our work, research conducted in early prototyping, etc. Be sure to check those out, if you haven’t already, as they include new and updated design mockups.

We have blogs coming up to cover Theme Designer and creator tools. We also have two blogs being worked on that are direct results of creator feedback. Frisk from the Polish Minecraft Wiki and SOAP team noted that it would be nice to understand how Fandom processes user feedback into product decisions. We’re going to have a blog about that. Kaydeethree from Wowpedia reported a bug with some advertisement code that led to a fix for that unit, which got us thinking about how you ought to be better informed about what the different advertisement units on the platform are and how they are supposed to behave. That way, you’ll know when something is intended behavior or a bug. We’ll have a blog about that as well.

= Meeting Fanatical = Back in February, Brandon introduced you to the newest addition to Fandom, a United Kingdom-based digital gaming retailer called Fanatical. Over the past 6 weeks, we’ve been working on bringing out two companies together and one of the things we’ve done is introduced the Fandom creator community to Sam and Dec, the content manager and social/community manager - respectively - at Fanatical.

Sam and Dec joined us for an Ask Us Anything session on Discord last week, which was a lot of fun. We discussed games, blogs, pets, and the now defunct European Super League of association football. If you’re not on our Discord server, we highly recommend it to all registered Fandom users, as we have lots of staff programming on it, from monthly Ask Me Anything sessions and the bi-weekly Community Checkpoint with myself and Brandon to monthly Search Engine Optimization Office Hours with Becky Westmoreland (Director of SEO) and Community Roundtables with the Community Experience team.

You’ll be seeing Sam and Dec around more often as we find great ways to leverage Fanatical’s gaming expertise with great community-focused opportunities.

= Cool April Data = One thing you’ve made abundantly clear to me is that you find data about wiki trends very interesting, so I’ve enlisted the help of our data friends here at Fandom to surface interesting tidbits for you.

Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 leads to Big Bang Theory wiki spike

With the season 4 premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale, the show’s wiki jumped 205% day to day, reaching 107 thousand pageviews. This outperformed the season 3 premiere in June 2019 by 76%, which is remarkable.

The history and geography of Gilead are of particular interest to readers, with geography becoming the 2nd most visited page on the wiki in the month.

What’s really interesting is how this affected a seemingly unrelated wiki. The wiki for The Big Bang Theory spiked after The Handmaid’s Tale season premiere, as people started to figure out from where they recognized newcomer character Esther Keyes. They knew the actress, McKenna Grace, from The Big Bang Theory’s spinoff series, Young Sheldon, in which she plays Paige Swanson. The Paige page on the wiki shot up 110% and McKenna’s character from The Haunting of Hill House, Theodora Crain, jumped 26% on The Haunting wiki. It just goes to show you how interconnected the wikis truly are!

Inanimate Objects with Very Animated Communities

In April, we saw two wiki communities for inanimate object animation series on YouTube get a lot of traffic. Inanimate Insanity’s wiki jumped 250% to 243 thousand pageviews after its April 3rd episode. Top pages included characters Bow, Blueberry, and Paintbrush.

Battle for Dream Island saw a big spike as well, with the 62nd episode on April 9th driving a 50% jump in traffic to 446 thousand pageviews. Top pages included characters Four, Flower, and Gelatin.

= Editors of the Month = With another month in the books, it’s time for some honors.

Gaming - 

She's been with the Temtem wiki for about a year and a half now, and has been providing the wiki with super useful encounter maps and info, Temtem locations, and the maps used for the postal service project. We wouldn't have some of our most useful projects without her.

Esports - Spindl3r

His contributions to the Call of Duty wiki over the past few years have brought unmatched coverage of Spanish and LATAM COD to the community.

Anime - Ninja of War

Ninja of War has been on our Staff team's radar for some months now. They are a passionate fan of Naruto and a thread moderator for Narutopedia. They are always assisting users in need, and supporting the community where necessary. Ninja of War is a master of Naruto lore and trivia knowledge to boot! You can always learn something new about the fandom from Ninja of War.

TV/Movies - Brett3801

Brett3801 has proven to be a hardworking content mod on Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki, especially during the release of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. This was a much-anticipated series, and Brett has been putting in a tremendous effort to make sure the wiki content is factual, formatted and organized correctly for fans to discover.

Emerging Interests - Dean Orbong

Dean Orbong edits on one of our more obscured wiki communities, Logopedia. This astoundingly popular wiki is the home of logo archives dating back decades. Our very own arbiter of history, Dean Orbong, has been helping keep Logopedia up to date for years. He deserves recognition for his passionate hard work!

A big round of applause for all of our Editors of the Month!

May has arrived and it’s back to work for us. We’ve got a lot in flight right now and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on all of it.

Ciao!