User blog:MisterWoodhouse/This Month at Fandom - November 2019

Hello there!

With the end of the month falling over Thanksgiving weekend in the United States, we opted to push This Month at Fandom out a little bit, so here’s what happened last month!

Global Taxonomy
A few weeks ago, we introduced what we’re calling Global Taxonomy. It’s a way that we’re structuring wiki data to look at the relationships between different wikis and their content. The first benefit to our users from this project will come early in 2020 as we leverage the Fan Feed feature at the bottom of wiki pages into a data-driven wiki recommendation experience. By looking at data we already have about wikis with user overlaps, we can provide recommendations based on your currently viewed wiki. We’ve had a lot a fantastic feedback about this feature already, but make sure you check out the announcement blog linked above and leave any thoughts you might have!

Best Practices
As 2019 comes to a close, we are putting the Best Practices blog series on hiatus. The upcoming changes with the Unified Community Platform may impact the efficacy of Best Practices recommendations, so we want to make sure that what we’re putting out will remain relevant for a long time.

The Staff AMA Series
If you’re not in our Official Discord Server for verified editors, you definitely should be. In November, we hosted the inaugural event in our Staff AMA Series. AMA stands for Ask Me Anything, a crowd-sourced interview format brought into the mainstream by Reddit. Our aim is to have a member of staff come into the special Ask Me Anything channel of Discord at least once a month and answer your questions about their job, their favorite foods, which wikis they frequent, whether they would rather fight 100 duck sized horses or 1 horse sized duck, etc.

Our first AMA participant was Adam Bradford, General Manager of D&D Beyond, our official digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

You can see the questions and answers from that session at any time, but you’ll need to be around to ask questions during the next session!

Vertical Updates
Let’s check in and see what the Vertical teams would like to highlight from November...

Gaming

We ran a contest to send a lucky winner to The Witcher's fan experience in LA!

The German Death Stranding wiki is working directly with Sony to run a great contest with a chance to win a limited edition Death Stranding PS4 Pro!

The Gamepedia Fellowship was established. They are a dedicated feedback group consisting of long-time Gamepedia editors and community leaders. The focus of the group is to provide Gamepedia-specific feedback for the Unified Community Platform.

Editor Rewards program keeps soldiering on! More and more editors are getting free games, shirts, and swag.

TV/Movies

2019 is ending, but even more great titles are still being released. We’re currently working with over 200 communities, including See and Servant, two new Apple TV+ series. Rick and Morty came back as well, and we’re keeping up to date on all their last antics. Don’t miss the chance to join our Trivia Quiz contest and see if you can win a cool prize!

Or maybe Watchmen is more up your alley. After years of anticipation, the new critically acclaimed series, where superheroes are vigilantes and outlaws, has continued on 30 years after the events of the original graphic novel and each episode continues to take fans by surprise.

In a galaxy far, far away, everyone’s getting ready for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the epic conclusion to the 40+ year telling of the Skywalker Saga. In the meantime, The Mandalorian has broken the internet with thousands of memes. No spoilers, but if you’ve seen it, you know what we’re talking about. Head on over to Wookieepedia’s Discussions to keep up with the latest Mandalorian internet fanfare.

Anime

It happened! Congratulations to our first official Anime wiki, Hinamatsuri! We are still searching for active editors to take on administration roles. Check out the adoptions page for basic qualification guidelines. More official wikis are in the works! We will update this monthly as we acquire more.

This month, some members of our core Anime team will be traveling to Japan for Jump Festa and Comiket. Poke us on Discord in the “Anime” channel if you would like to meet up! We will be sharing some of our experiences on the staff blog when we return.

Next month, we are kicking off the new decade with a ton of new releases! Haikyuu Season 4, Strike the Blood: Kieta Seisō-hen, Radiant Season 2, Oda Cinnamon Nobunaga, Somali to Mori no Kami-sama, Plunderer, and many others. Oh, there are too many to name! Check out the schedule, and visit the corresponding wikis to get a headstart on those edits!

Editors of the Month
With another month in the books, let’s hand out some Editor of the Month awards!

Gaming

The Gamepedia Editor of the Month for November 2019 is, in recognition of their incredible commitment to helping others with wiki questions in our Official Discord Server, as well as their service on the Gamepedia Fellowship.

The Esports Editor of the Month for November 2019 is Epamynondas, in recognition of their extremely significant and helpful contributions to the Chinese roster changes on the LoL Esports wiki.

The Fandom Editor of the Month from Gaming for November 2019 is Recludam, in recognition of their outstanding work pre- and post-launch on the Death Stranding wiki.

TV/Movies

The Fandom Editor of the Month from TV/Movies for November 2019 is Tazemda of Dresden Files and Twilight wiki fame!

Anime

The Fandom Editor of the Month from Anime for November 2019 is Fandyllic! Fandyllic helps maintain an impressive Anime database wiki. Here you can find seasonal schedules and links to over three-thousand Anime wikis. What an incredible resource! Thank you for keeping it up to date Fandyllic!

Emerging Interests

The Fandom Editor of the Month from Emerging Interests for November 2019 is Andrewself, in recognition of their continued efforts to edit and lead the London Bird Club wiki.

In Closing
I think that does it for November happenings. With the Fandom offices being closed for the December holidays starting December 23rd, the next edition of this blog series will also be delayed until January.

Happy Holidays!