FANDOM Staff Blog

There are several ways in which Fandom communities craft their articles. Some are focused on encyclopedic-like descriptions, while others are oriented towards fanon, role-play, or other discussion. The vast majority document a specific game, television show, animanga, or films. When presenting documentary articles, sometimes narrative text and images stand alongside data tables. Presenting data can be a challenge to avoid overloading a reader's attention while informing with the most clarity.

An important part of presenting data in articles also involves imagining if that data were not there, adding clarity to the text. Like images, data should enhance the article itself. If the article is not sufficient length without adding fact tables an…

Happy Halloween, everyone!

As I’m typing this, I’m wearing my normal Halloween costume, so we’re in for a very festive recap :)

This month, we revealed that Fandom and Gamepedia will be coming together on a new software platform that is codenamed Unified Community Platform. This was followed up with a blog post revealing four features which have to be replaced due to non-viable, tangled code. To be clear, we are not deleting these features and moving on with nothing to fill the void. All of them are being replaced with newer versions which are compatible with a 7 years newer version of MediaWiki, the underlying software which runs the wiki platform.

Your feedback on these two blogs was extensive and we really appreciate that both sides are li…

Ohayo, everyone!

For the first time ever, the Anime vertical at Fandom is here to say hello!

Now that we have a full team, we are actively assigning Wiki Managers and Content Team Members to the top Anime Wikis. If you need assistance on your anime wiki, please reach out on the official Fandom Discord through the “Anime” channel!

We are kicking off the holiday season with ten of our favorite ghoulish and sweet themed anime communities for some tricks and treats! The following wikis are some of our Anime team’s favorites! We selected a range of wikis to participate in this giveaway, from a spooky story about the rise of Ghouls in the heart of Tokyo to the adorable Vocaloid, Miku Hatsune, who has won the hearts of millions. Take some time to ch…

Boo! Yeah, I know, not very scary. But Halloween is right around the corner so I had to give it a shot. So what do people have planned? Parties? Trick or treating? Pumpkin carving?

How about a good old fashioned editing marathon about horror movies and television series? Because that's what the Movies/TV Vertical (M/TV) have planned and we want you involved!

From Wednesday October 30 to Sunday November 3, M/TV will be leading an effort to organize and focus editors to contribute to horror-related wikis. Each community selected will have specific content goals we would like to hit, but the focus of the project is to have fun and collaboratively edit.

We've made that simple for you! Come and join our dedicated project Discord server and sign up! You …

Hello, all!

As promised, this is the follow-up to last week’s blog post with our first update on what is being called the Unified Community Platform (UCP) project.

Before we dive into work we’re doing or have completed already, I’m going to address some concerns from last week’s blog.

What will happen to my wiki’s content?

It will be migrated onto the new platform. It will still be your wiki. Your edits will still be your edits. We’re working to make the migration as painless as possible.

What will happen to my account permissions?

Your account rights will be respected. We may have to make some slight changes to the rights themselves, like names or exact permissions, but you will have the equivalent of your current rights on the new platform.

Wha…

Hello, all!

Since we announced the new platform and the Community Contract governing our work on it, our teams have been very hard at work building the foundation for Fandom’s next chapter: our new home.

The new platform will be unifying Fandom and Gamepedia. That’s right. We’re going to be one big, happy, modern MediaWiki platform. Our internal teams have been referring to it as the Unified Community Platform (UCP).

The UCP will be a modern wiki platform, the best of both worlds between Fandom and Gamepedia, that puts powerful tools into the hands of its editors, facilitates deep community engagement, and dynamically presents all the best information on all your fandoms to all the fans. We will be able to support new extensions you’ve been c…

We all know that wiki articles and other pages compose a wiki. The fundamental building blocks of a wiki, though, are its users and its content. Each community has its own tone and they commonly use guidelines and manuals of style to maintain a cohesive "voice". The traditional guiding principles of big wiki communities — such as Fandom, Gamepedia, and Wikipedia — have an open model where articles can be potentially edited by many people. Constructing articles must be a team effort, with no one "owner" and flexibility on what makes for an ideal article. Articles make up the bulk of what most communities supply on a day-to-day basis, more than blogs or images or video.

To attract an audience and more contributors, as a best practice, content…

Hello everyone!

I'm Mike and I'm the Content Team Lead for the Movies/TV Vertical! Welcome to my first Staff Blog! A bit of history to start us off – I joined Fandom as an employee in 2016 working in Community Development, but I've been around the platform since 2007, primarily as an administrator over on Wookieepedia.

During my years with Community Development at Fandom, one of the issues I struggled with was the discoverability of our wikis. Community Development would regularly create wikis for new shows and movies, populate it with information and then ... nothing. No one showed up to continue the work. No community formed around the new wiki. No one came to view the content.

Does that mean that no one was watching the show or movie? Or w…

Hello, all!

Another month has gone by with a lot of big things happening and we’re here to recap what you may have missed, as well as hand out some accolades! Let’s dive right in.

Back in August, we announced the launch of Editor Rewards after a number of successful pilot programs over the course of the past several months. In September, we launched our first merchandise storefront to help support the Editor Rewards program.

For more information on the storefront, be sure to check out the announcement post.

Gaming

This month, Gamepedia celebrated its 7th anniversary! The joyous occasion was marked with a special achievement, fun stats, and a Hydra banner that shoots fireworks. Read more on that here.

We are currently holding an art contest to ce…

The word "wiki" comes from a Hawaiian word, meaning "quick". The original idea is that pages can be rapidly constructed and threaded together by links to grow organically. It should come as little surprise that they don't always begin with organized models, and can flow quickly from one article to the next without putting them into more carefully considered structures. This can contribute to the rapid growth of small wikis, but can make maintaining large wikis with many articles and contributors harder to manage.

Spaces like wikis can need a plan or blueprint to avoid the chaos. Well organized spaces come together either after there are pages, or when a wiki is first created. It helps to have a plan ready before multiple contributors start…