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

Hey gang!

The spookiest month of the year is nearing its Jack-o'-Lantern-studded finale (Halloween) and it’s time to observe our not so spooky rituals with a recap of the month that was October 2021.

Content Review and Dev Scripts on Historically Gamepedia Wikis
Earlier this month, our engineering team finished the work necessary to enable Content Review on wikis which came to Fandom from Gamepedia. Content Review is a security process involving a manual review of changes to wiki-level custom JavaScript, to make sure wiki visitors are safe from malicious or poorly-designed code. As an additional benefit of this work, admins in those communities can now load in custom scripts from the library over on the Dev wiki.

We have a Bug Bounty program!
About a week after Content Review went live, we announced that Fandom now has a Bug Bounty program for the community platform. The focus of this program is to provide monetary rewards to ethical security researchers who help us to find areas for improvement in the security of our platform. We are currently working to get some security-savvy community members with good track records of bug reporting into the program.

Closing out Hispanic Heritage Month
From September 15th to October 15th, Fandom recognized and celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month with a special blog showcasing our favorite shows, characters, and movies with Hispanic roots, a dedicated Discord server for discussing Hispanic culture and its influences, and a closing Twitch stream with a panel of users talking about their Hispanic heritage and representation in media. You can watch the replay of that stream here.

Welcoming a new Community Manager!
Earlier this month, we welcomed a familiar face to the ranks of the full-time staff on the Community Experience team. Lder1995, a long-time Fandom contributor and wiki team member, became our new Community Manager, focusing on Anime content. He took the time to pen an introduction to all of you.

''“Hello all! I'm Lucas DeRuyter and I first connected with Fandom back in the summer of 2017 under the old Fan Contributor program. Apparently I made a pretty good impression, because since then I've filled a variety of roles, and am thrilled to now be Fandom's Anime Community Manager! As the title would suggest, I'm a huge anime fan, and when I'm not watching anime or reading manga, I'm writing about the mediums for outlets like Anime Feminist. When I'm not writing, I spend my time training for the upcoming Los Angeles Marathon and cheering for any and all sports teams from my home state of Wisconsin.”''

We’re all psyched to have Lucas with us on the team full-time and I know you’ll join me in congratulating him.

The end of Featured Video and the launch of Interactive Video
This past week, Brandon got to post a blog that really brought things full circle for him. We are officially in the process of retiring all remaining content from the Featured Video program. Back in 2019, we announced that we were replacing that content with The Loop on a number of wikis and evaluating the future of video on Fandom. That evaluation has concluded that it’s time to remove Featured Video content and replace it with more timely content produced by Fandom that is more firmly grounded in the communities we serve.

While most wikis will see The Loop or another Fandom production pertaining to a new release or big news within their wiki’s content genre, some wikis will be getting a new type of video content called Interactive Video. Debuted at Community Connect in March as proof of concept work, Interactive Video is tailored to a specific community and provides a surface level briefing on different concepts within the topic area, with an opportunity for viewers to drill down into the wiki content directly from the video player. We have a few videos of this type already in circulation (you can find two examples in the blog above) and I’m pleased to say we are collaborating with admins from Memory Alpha, DC Database, and Minecraft Wiki on Interactive Videos for their communities.

Community Spotlight - Forgotten Realms Wiki
The Forgotten Realms Wiki, the largest fan community for D&D lore, just hit a massive milestone in their year-long project to document more game locations, with 1,000 new locations added to the wiki! We asked Regis87, who spearheaded the project, to share some of the team's favorite new locations documented. Here are a few of our favorites from that list:


 * Ford of Goliad
 * Downunda Patisserie
 * Waterdeep Sewers
 * Angalpuk (complete with climate notes!)

Data Is Fun
Let’s take a look at some of the interesting data trends on the Fandom community platform from October!

The Lightyear trailer this week sent the Disney wiki soaring to infinity and beyond with a 21% spike in pageviews per day at 537 thousand. It was the 12th highest traffic day for the wiki this year and the most impactful Pixar moment in 2 years. This is noteworthy because, with the constant flow of Disney content, the Disney wiki has a high baseline of traffic and a spike like this is out of the ordinary.

Uncharted finally got its movie trailer with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg. The impact on the Uncharted wiki community was dramatic with daily pageviews going up 6x from 6 thousand to 36 thousand. The traffic spike didn’t raise the baseline much, so the wiki didn’t make it into our trending tracker, but I’m sure we’ll see it trend when the movie releases.

Dune finally came out in theaters and on HBO Max! The Dune wiki was our #1 trending TV/Movies community overall with a 230% spike in traffic to 2.1 million daily pageviews. The top pages are Paul Atreides, his father Duke Leto Atreides, and the lore surrounding the messianic Kwisatz Haderach (typed that from memory!). The movie was a massive success, both critically and commercially, and WB has already given the green light for Villeneuve to make Part 2. The director has gone on to say that he’d like to make a third movie as well, adapting Dune: Messiah after he’s finished with the events of the original book.

You Season 3 premiered on Netflix this month, bringing a murderous influx of traffic to the show’s wiki with a 13x bump in daily traffic to 730 thousand pageviews. It outperformed Season 2’s premiere by 2x. Love Quinn is the top performing page, beating out protagonist Joe Goldberg. Oddly enough, the #3 page on the wiki is for a character that does not appear in Season 3, but has an outsized impact on the season’s events. No spoilers though!

Metroid Dread released earlier this month on Nintendo Switch, bringing a satisfying continuation to the events of 2002’s Metroid Fusion on the GameBoy Advance. Our Metroid wiki community jumped 229% to 628 thousand pageviews on release. Raven Beak, the game’s primary antagonist, saw his page jump 14,129% in page views as he went from an obscure character referenced in an unlocked memory segment of Metroid: Samus Returns to the “big bad” in the series’ most successful release ever. That’s right, The Hunter’s latest adventure has been her biggest release yet. Dread was the most preordered game after E3 this year, shattered records for release sales in the UK and was a commercial success in Japan, a rarity for this series, which is usually just popular in North America and Europe. Next up for Samus? Well, technically, we’re going back in time for her next adventure, Metroid Prime 4, due out sometime soon!

Bond, James Bond. Daniel Craig was neither shaken nor stirred as he closed out his tenure as the world’s most famous secret agent. No Time To Die finally reached theaters after numerous delays related to COVID-19 lockdowns and was a resounding success. The arrival of the 25th official Bond film sent the James Bond wiki up 52% in daily pageviews to over 400 thousand. This film beat out 007’s last adventure, Spectre, by 53% in traffic at launch and Madeleine Swann, who was featured in both films, saw a 5x increase in page traffic film-over-film. The search for Craig’s successor is set to begin next year, with speculation already brewing over who will step into his tactical tuxedo. My money is on Henry Golding of Crazy Rich Asians and Snake Eyes fame.

And finally, we get to Westeros. The Game of Thrones prequel series, House of the Dragon, had its first trailer release earlier this month. The show is set 200 years before Ned Stark heads to King’s Landing and focuses on the history of House Targaryen, the Valyrian dragonlords turned Westerosi conquerors, kings, and queens. The trailer’s release gave the Game of Thrones wiki a Balerion-sized traffic boost, jumping 160% to 270 thousand pageviews per day. 90% of the top pages are Targaryen-related, with Daemon, Rhaenyra, Viserys I, and Daenerys (not in the new show) all up there. Jon Snow was also a top page. If you know, you know.

Editors of the Month
We have recapped our events, our news, and our interesting data trends. Tradition now states that we name new Editors of the Month! Let the revelry commence!

Emerging Interests - Tamirobson

Tamirobson is a fantastic grammar specialist, helping with formatting pages on the Grishaverse Wiki into proper tenses. They’ve been super helpful with getting page styles sorted and configuring the wiki for light and dark themes. In addition, they do a great job of collaborating with other editors and admins, especially on impactful decisions for the wiki.

Gaming - Artemaz

Artemaz has been blazing new trails on the Forgotten Realms Wiki. Last month, he created 263 articles, mostly about people, places, organizations, and magic items from the continent of Zakhara, home of the Al-Qadim campaign setting (the Arabian Nights–themed corner of the Forgotten Realms). His 39 new locations documented were very helpful in the wiki reaching its milestone of 1,000 new locations for The Year of Maps (discussed above!).

Esports - Quegmaier9

Quegmaier9 has been doing an amazing job covering the Italian region on Leaguepedia, including live coverage of events, updating player & team pages, and reaching out to new editors who are interested in helping out with the region!

TV/Movies - JustLeafy

This award isn’t for work on any one particular wiki, but rather for a range of TV and Movies wikis over the past month. JustLeafy has been a force to be reckoned with in helping to update wiki pages about TV shows and movies relevant to Hispanic Heritage Month, becoming the program’s single biggest contributor. His dedication to the initiative was truly remarkable and, as such, his nomination for this award was heartily endorsed by multiple members of the Community Experience team.

Anime - 9Rfz

This award also isn’t for work on any one particular wiki. 9Rfz is just starting out as an editor, but their impact was immediately noticed by several seasoned administrators and surfaced to the Community Experience team. The My Hero Academia admins noticed their impact on wikis like Komi-san Can’t Communicate and Blue Period, showcasing technical skill and writing talent by creating fantastic episode pages from scratch. We will watch your career with great interest!

That’s it for October. I hope that everyone has a fun and safe Halloween. You’ll hear from me one more time next week, when I announce the winner of our Starlight Design-A-Gown contest, but then I’m off for my wedding :)