User blog:Jpearson/Technical Updates: October 6, 2023

Hey everyone! Check out the latest Technical Updates since September 22nd. We’ll continue to update the editor community on bug fixes and product development updates on a bi-weekly basis!

Notable Changes

 * Editors can now access the tilesheet extension’s createsheet!
 * If editors included a forward slash in the template name on Special:InfoboxBuilder, they couldn’t save the page. Instead, editors received an error message when clicking publish. We’re happy to share that this has been fixed and now editors can save their changes.

Known Issues

 * Some editors are experiencing a 500 error when accessing Post History on wikis.
 * Template pages created by the new InfoboxBuilder do not have the example infobox for editors to reference.
 * Editors are having trouble viewing edits in the VisualEditor. When editors close the modal and click the “Preview” button, the same preview is displayed without the edits or changes made.
 * When editing on mobile, two related issues occur for users: some text that is on the page is lost when saving, and some text that was deleted from the page is restored after saving. A fix is proving far trickier than expected and we’ll continue to report in the future updates.
 * We’re continuing to look into the issue where, for some but not all users, clicking the “Mark All as Read” button does not actually mark notifications as read. As our User Experience team continues investigating this, they discovered that the fix will be more complicated than they originally anticipated. They are discussing the best path forward to try to fix this as soon as possible.

User-Generated Content (UGC) team

 * Thanks extension is in testing. Thanks continues to be actively used by many editors, but mostly to thank experienced editors, not new ones. Because of this, we won't launch it everywhere as a default feature - but we will add an Admin Dashboard toggle to give admins the choice if they want to use this extension on their wiki in the near future. We’ve made some fixes to Thanks including consistent styline of the Thanks feature throughout. When editors reloaded Special:RecentChanges with the live mode when a new edit was made, the thank feature lost the parentheses around it. We also fixed the link that is added to send a Thanks via RecentChanges. It had some spaces that caused undesired effects with word wrapping. Stay tuned to learn more about Thanks extension and other extensions you can utilize in an upcoming blog post on Community Central.  We’ll provide more updates about Thanks in future Technical Updates.


 * Reported Notifications. As previously announced, moderators are currently not notified in any way when social content on their wikis gets reported. The UGC team is working on notifications alerting moderators of content that needs their attention which will decrease the average time it takes for reported content to be actioned. We’ve rolled out reported notifications to 25% of wikis and are reviewing the results of this launch. Stay tuned for more updates!


 * First-Time Editing Experiment. The UGC team experimented with showing first-time editors a web notification right after they publish their first edit, to thank them and welcome them to the editor community on Fandom, as a way to give them a more positive impression of their first contribution and motivate them to edit more. A previous version of this experiment, where the notification was a stand-alone pop-up message rather than a regular web notification, performed significantly better, and so we will be delivering the first iteration as a full feature. We tested two variants, one a regular web notification, one a popup that disappears on its own after a few seconds, and the latter was more effective at getting people to stick around for more edits (6.5% more, to be exact). This variant is already live now, so all people who make their very first edit on Fandom will be seeing that right after publishing their change going forward.


 * Editor Engagement Experiment. This social proof experiment showed that visible page stats and a reminder that each page is created by fans can result in significantly higher registration rates (and, by consequence, likely an increase in editors). However, it also pushed down page content, which is likely the cause for the decrease in time visitors spend on the Fandom site and PVs/session that it caused. Since we were not able to find a variant here that worked, i.e. that brought us more registrations and more editors without degrading the experience for consumers, we abandoned this concept. It was ultimately not a successful experiment.


 * Edit Section Experiment. We’re currently running an experiment that will impact the logged-in user experience. For logged-in users only, we are replacing the social sharing buttons on the module that appears when you highlight text on desktop with an edit button. This works much the same as an edit button next to a section header: When clicked, it opens the editor for the paragraph in which you had highlighted content. This aims to remind logged-in users in more places that they can, in fact, edit the content they're consuming, and make it even easier for them to jump to the editor when needed.

Traffic team

 * Quick Answers. We recently released a feature known as Quick Answers, which helps search engines like Google recognize more easily what kind of information is present on wiki articles, boosting your pages' ranks in Google search results and so increasing traffic to your wiki.. Upon its initial release, users didn’t have the ability to edit the answers generated. In the previous Technical Update, we announced that admins and trusted users will have the ability to edit these questions and their answers in the near future. You can read more about what that entails and how you can engage with Quick Answers. We’re also going to run a new experiment for Quick Answers and put up some new questions and answers on 150 character pages to test how people engage with them. These questions and answers are being reviewed by our internal teams for accuracy and being shared with communities that will receive them. Stay tuned for more updates on this experiment and improvements to Quick Answers!

If there’s anything you still think needs to be fixed that hasn’t yet, please be sure to either contact your Wiki Representative or, if your wiki doesn’t have one, send us a bug report!

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