User blog:Acardwell415/Wikia Parent Pages Get a New Home

This week is the official start of the holiday shopping season, and parents are beginning to look at what gifts to buy for their kids. Since Wikia is the home of the most knowledgeable superfans, we know that our communities have the ability to help parents who are looking for guidance on what's appropriate for their children.

Last year, we created Parent Pages to formalize a space on each wikia that would tap into the collective knowledge and expertise on a community. These pages inform parents about age ratings, objectionable content, hidden costs, and more.

Now, a year later, we have roughly 300 Parent Pages created across all of Wikia's categories. Today we're announcing new Parent Page portals under each Hub&mdash;Games, TV, Movies, Comics, Music, Books, and Lifestyle&mdash;to help parents more easily find these guides.

If you haven't yet created a Parent Page for your wikia, here's how you get started:

1. Go to your Parent Page:

Parent Pages are on the same page type across all communities. You can get there by pasting /wiki/Project:ParentPage to the end of your NAME.wikia.com url. We placed Parent Page in the Project namespace, so it'll sit alongside other essential content like your About page.

2. Add a Parent Page template and complete the fields:

The fields in the template are there to guide you on providing information we think would be most helpful to parents. And for admins, please note that adding a Parent Page helps you complete an optional task on your Wikia Progress Bar, so work with your community to fill it out.

Check out these examples from the Destiny, Adventure Time, Sims, and League of Legends communities. As you can see, they provide information that gives parents and new players/viewers helpful insight, instead of just providing rating or value judgements on who should consume the game, show, etc.

3. Add a link to your Parent Page and give us a heads up, too:

We'd love for communities to link to this new page, so we're hoping all wikias that fill out Parent Page will also link to it in their navigation and their Main Page. Be sure to tell us that it's live as well, so we can include it in promotion on the Hubs.

We're hoping this new push for Parent Pages will help us build out a bigger and better database of helpful info. The more Parent Pages we have, the better a service we can provide to parents, and the more helpful Wikia is seen as a resource.

Share some of the great Parent Pages you've built or seen. That way, yours can be an example for other communities!