User blog:MisterWoodhouse/The Month at Fandom - June 2021

Hey gang!

Summer has arrived and with it comes the promised FandomDesktop rollout. We’re so thrilled by all of the communities who have participated in the opt-in period, with more than 30% of the overall wiki traffic represented by wikis whose admins took the time to get their new themes sorted.

Let’s dive into some highlights, fun data, and - of course - our Editors of the Month!

The arrival of FandomDesktop
As mentioned, FandomDesktop rollout has begun! First introduced to you as UCP Phase 2 last February when it was in pre-production and then unveiled at Community Connect 2021 in March, the team has been hard at work building this new modern design for the platform that gives users more choices for their experience, with width toggles, right rail collapsing for logged-in users, and light/dark theme switching.

The opt-in release started on June 1st, the search engine optimization test began June 14th, and full rollout started with our first batch (opted-in wikis) earlier this week. That batch rollout will continue for the next week, to reduce performance strain on the network.

Our help hub with links to relevant blogs and other resources can be found here.

Pride Month
As most of you know, June is Pride Month, marking the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City back in 1969, a major catalyst for the LGBTQIA+ movement. Each year, we celebrate the achievements in the movement, but also pause to recognize that so much more needs to be done. Here at Fandom, we have celebrated Pride this year with new resources and guidelines for the subject matter, as well as running a panel discussion with openly LGBTQIA+ editors on their experiences with Fandom, fan communities, and their role models in popular entertainment. It was called Power of Pride and you can watch the recording here.

Supporting the LGBTQIA+ community isn’t limited to a single month out of the year, which is why we added additional language to our Terms of Use about transphobia late last year and are seeking additional ways to make sure Fandom becomes even more inclusive.

Data Is Fun
In the first two weeks of June, our LGBTQIA Characters wiki shot up 43% in traffic to over half a million page views, making it the top trending lifestyle wiki in the second week of June. Visitors were particularly interested in Langa Hasegawa from Sk8 the Infinity, Alluka Zoldyck from Hunter x Hunter, and Katie Mitchel from The Mitchells Vs. The Machines. LGBTQ characters in anime is the most visited category by far, exceeding all other entertainment categories.

We also noticed a trend with our LGBTA wiki on Wikia.org, with a 73% spike in traffic during June to nearly 3 million page views. This month, visitors were particularly interested in Neptunic relationships, in which somebody is attracted to women, feminine non-binary, and neutral non-binary persons, and omnisexual attraction, which means somebody is attracted to all genders. A very cool trend was that people asking questions about Demigirl, a non-binary gender in which one is partially a girl or woman, were getting very supportive answers from the community. Truly wonderful community interactions.

Two new games dominated our June gaming trends: Metroid Dread and Dark Deity.

Metroid Dread is the first brand-new sidescroller adventure in the Metroid franchise in nearly two decades. A direct sequel to Metroid Fusion, which was previously the final story in the plot timeline, Metroid Dread will take Samus Aran into uncharted territory within her tale and end the titular Metroid influence on the series for good, according to the director. After being announced at E3, it was the #1 preselling game on Amazon for weeks and generated 1 million page views to our Metroid wiki, a 407% increase over May. Given that it is coming at the end of the established timeline, the timeline page was the #1 visited page on the wiki with 41 thousand views.

Dark Deity hit #1 on Steam after launching live during an E3 press conference. It is published by several former Fandom staffers, including Donovan Duncan, Ben Robinson, and Benjamin Tarsa. The turn-based strategy RPG released June 15th and hit #1 on Steam within 2 hours. Over the weekend after its release, the wiki for Dark Deity was our #8 trending community, beating out big names with their own recent buzz like Ratchet and Clank (new release in the series) and Fallout (new 76 expansion announced). It rocketed from 235 page views a day to 80 thousand by the end of the week. It is sitting at nearly 200 thousand pageviews over the past month now.

Editors of the Month
Another month has passed and traditions must be observed. Here are the editors we honor for the month of June in 2021:

Emerging Interests - Downtoearth1

Downtoearth1 is a dedicated content moderator at Witcher Wiki who's been editing it for years. They patrol recent changes, correct them, while adding their own contributions. They even propose changes and improvements through discussion with admins and community. Downtoearth1 is incredibly passionate about the Witcher series, and it totally reflects in their editing! They're also an active community member of multiple fantasy-themed wikis, such as The Elder Scrolls Wiki, The One Wiki to Rule Them All (LOTR Wiki), Game of Thrones Wiki and many others! (Author's Note: While Witcher has Gaming as its main category, it is also a Books and TV community and, thus, handled by our Emerging Interests team)

Anime - Pequezero

We have had our eyes on Pequezero for a while now! He has not only polished the Spanish Dan Machi wiki with the help of Ursuul's infoboxes, but he has offered up his unique CSS skills to the community. After completely revamping their CSS, he went even further, by reaching out to the English DanMachi and Re:Zero wikis to offer his talents, completely modernizing their CSS. Not to mention, Pequezero has been consistently preparing for FandomDesktop since the announcement. After finishing preperations for his own (ES) wiki, he moved over to EN DanMachi and Re:Zero! What a champion!

TV/Movies - Immi Thrax

Immi Thrax has been a stellar advocate for positive change on Wookieepedia and has solidified herself as a warm and friendly face within the community. She has recently founded an awesome initiative called WookieeProject: Pride, which aims to better represent the contributions of LGBTQIA+ authors and artists of the Star Wars franchise. Her commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is apparent in everything that she does, not only on the wiki platform but also in the real world, and Wook is ultimately a safer and more accepting place thanks in part due to her tremendous efforts. (Author’s Note: Immi was also one of our panelists for Power of Pride!)

Gaming - Cemblack

She's the main editor and admin on Township Wiki and has been providing lots of feedback for UCX. Cemblack does a load of the editing and wiki maintenance themselves and their efforts really shine. Her efforts on UCX and the feedback she has provided has been invaluable.

Esports - 

Carakutcha, for his contribution as part of the Fortnite Esports support team for over 1 year, helping out with everything from editing player and team pages to helping with power ranking issues in both French and English. He's also been a valued member of the Leaguepedia community for several years, where he helps out with French scene updates.

Wiki Rules and Blocking Policy Update
When we rolled out the Wiki Rules and Blocking Policy in February and activated it in April, a number of editors and admins asked that we keep them up to date on how it was going. I am pleased to report that, in our first quarter of the policy being active, we have only received 126 appeals under the policy. Many of these were duplicate requests or otherwise invalid, due to short length of the block or other confusion on the part of the user. Only a handful of valid appeals have resulted in block overturns, so admins have been diligent about having clear rules and blocking according to them. We have even seen that a few wikis with many appeals in the past have had ZERO new appeals since the policy went into effect, further evidence that the policy is working. I'll be working on more exact numbers for you soon, but in the meantime, great job, everyone!

Until next month, stay cool, friends.