User blog:Sarah Manley/Sneak Peek at the New Look - Community Activity

Welcome to the first Sneak Peek - a series of blog posts that highlight some of the features and changes in Wikia’s new look and share the reasoning behind the choices we’re making.

One big surprise during early user testing was that it’s not clear to newbies that Wikia pages are written by people just like them. How did we find this out? Simple! We sat testers down in front of a wiki on Monaco and asked, “Who do you think wrote this?” The most common response was “Ummm, I don’t know.”

When pressed further, some other responses were:


 * "Wikia wrote it!"
 * "Wikipedia?"
 * "This must be written by NBC’s media people." [on Muppet Wiki]

We were stunned that such a core part of the wiki experience could be misunderstood. If new users don’t know how the content is created, they are much less likely to join and contribute. We feel that one of the biggest causes of this disconnect is that the page History and Recent Changes can be tricky to find and difficult to understand. As highly active Wikians, this might seem strange -- but remember when you were brand new and didn’t have the deep knowledge of wikis that you do now. Wasn’t it kind of confusing?

The new look does a better job surfacing that the content on Wikia is written by a community. For example, we’ve moved the most recent editor’s name from the bottom of the page to the top, added an avatar, and a new mini-history dropdown. We’ve also added a new recent wiki activity module to the right sidebar on article pages.

These changes provide visual cues to visitors that they are viewing a living, breathing, real-time website created by people just like them. And hopefully it motivates them to dive right in and become passionate community members.