User blog:Sarah Manley/2012 - A Great Year for Wikis

As the end of 2012 approaches, the Wikia office has quieted and each team is reflecting on their achievements. Besides growing our office and teams, the past year has been busy with new features from Product, performance upgrades from Engineering, new initiatives from Marketing, new support programs from both Community Teams, and much, much, more!

Wikia as a whole has seen tremendous growth:''' 33% growth year over year! (comScore) and voted a “Top Ten Social Network” by Nielsen for both Web and mobile! '''More than 4.6 million people currently have Wikia accounts and over 280,000 communities call Wikia home. Just over 2 and half years ago I announced here that we had reached 2 million users and 100,000 wikis - the huge growth since then is something we can all be proud of!

So what happened in 2012 besides the release of The Hobbit and Call of Duty Black Ops 2? On Wikia, a ton! The Community Support team answered over 32,000 emails from the community, and the Community Development team helped over 1,000 wikis with their design, content and growth. The Community helped us to create the Admin Mentor Program, which has taught 8 wikis’ admins the ins and outs of adminship. Our monthly community webinar series have been attended by hundreds of contributors, and the recordings watched by thousands. It is these programs, and more, we hope to build upon in 2013.

From a Product perspective, throughout the year we have strived to improve current and build new features for the community - from search improvements, to a tool to Promote your community to the release of a new Forum. We have worked hard to improve accessibility of video by creating the Wikia Video Library, which currently houses 160,000 videos (and grows daily). We built a new video embed tool, related videos module and introduced the Special:Videos page. On the mobile front we took great strides to improve the mobile experience. This only skims the surface of what we have planned for next year.

Our Engineering team has worked hard to not only build out these features, but to also make sure all of Wikia is fast, stable and always ready for you to contribute. This includes upgrading the site to Mediawiki 1.19, as well as making numerous adjustments to improve site performance. The highlights of this saw improvements to page load times of over 1 second for anons and over 2 seconds for logged in users, as well as over 2 seconds decrease in load times for the editor!

The Marketing team has been super busy working on many events including celebrating Wikia communities at events both real: Comic Con and virtual: the Video Game Olympics. Our Fantasy Fellowship Alliance was inspired by the Hobbit, and brought light to any and all communities passionate about the fantasy genre. Most recently Time to Play celebrated the time of year where we all play together - the Holidays! 145 communities jumped in and were a part of a showcase on Wikia.com, giving visitors a sampling of our diverse and dedicated communities. We are ecstatic about the level of interest in these initiatives, and hope to engage you in more unique and interesting marketing programs in 2013.

'''Is there something you truly enjoyed or appreciated on Wikia in 2012? If so, share with us below.''' We would love to hear what you enjoyed and look forward to an exciting 2013!