This Month at Fandom - February 2021
Hey gang!
The shortest month of the year has come and gone, but what it lacked in length, February made up for in intensity! I’m feeling musically minded today, so all of the segments this week are titled with songs and lyrics.
- 1 Harder, Better, Faster
- 2 You say Goodbye, while I say Hello!
- 3 New Rules
- 4 We Are Born To Play
- 5 Don’t Stop Me Now
- 6 Hey Look Ma, I Made It! (Editors of the Month)
- 7 That’s It
While the news this week that Daft Punk has broken up after 28 years of amazing music is sad, we’ll always have their incredible electronic beats and one of the greatest live action Disney soundtracks of all time. Seriously, if you haven’t watched TRON: Legacy let, go give it a watch this weekend and see if you don’t agree on that soundtrack being absolute …
Showing Data on Fandom
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…
The best possible local navigation bar
Did you know that 99.95% of the people on Fandom are readers, not editors? Admins tend to focus almost exclusively on the needs of their fellow editors, since readers leave no visible trace. Yet while wikis can’t exist without editors, their content is useful and enjoyable to a far larger audience. Many more people rely on the content you create and appreciate your work than you might have thought. It’s crucial that you keep this in mind when organizing your wiki’s local navigation bar, to make it as useful to your audience as possible.
(Can’t be bothered to read all this? Jump to the bottom for a
summary!)
Fandom’s User Experience Research team has looked into how users typically move around on a wiki and where they click (and where they don…
Fandom Acquires Gaming E-Commerce Platform Fanatical
Hey everyone!
I have an exciting announcement for you today. Fandom has acquired Fanatical, a leading gaming e-commerce platform based in the United Kingdom. Fanatical offers a growing catalogue of over 8,000 digital games, ebooks, and elearning courses from more than 1,000 official publisher and developer partners, and has sold 80 million officially licensed game keys and ebooks to customers in 200 countries. With more than 150 million gamers coming to Fandom wikis each month, this acquisition will introduce Fanatical’s passionately curated, unique product bundles to an even larger global gaming audience.
We’ve acquired Fanatical as a next step in our vision to be the entertainment and gaming fan’s first choice for community and experience …
The CC-BY-SA License and You
Part of contributing to Wikia means that you agree to our Terms of Use (TOU). Within our TOU it states that when you make an edit to Wikia, you are adding your content under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA). This license is the engine that makes wiki projects possible and there would not be a Wikia without it. But what does CC-BY-SA mean exactly? Let's break it down.
CC is short for Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing easy ways for people to share and use their knowledge and creativity while reserving some of the standard protections of copyright. They provide a number of model licenses like the CC-BY-SA that are designed to foster creativity, sharing, and innovation.
BY signifies t…
Updates to COPPA
Privacy is important, and despite how the online world seems sometimes it can exist on the internet. This post is going to overview recent updates to privacy laws and provide you with important information about how your wiki may be impacted.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is a United States federal law designed to limit the collection of personal information from people younger than 13 years of age. It was passed in 1998, and has been updated only once with a set of revisions that become effective July 1st, 2013. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversees the application and enforcement of the law. It applies to any website or service based in the U.S.
One popular misconception is that COPPA absolutely forbids anyone…
Enhancing Your Wiki with Video
FANDOM empowers you to add video directly into your articles, bringing them to life in ways that text or even images alone can't always accomplish. And as video becomes a more dominant part of audience expectations online, people will stay on your community longer if they have the right videos to watch.
That's why video is becoming an increasingly important part of FANDOM's content. While Featured Videos have been a major driver behind this shift, communities also have the ability to add additional videos anywhere they want on the page. Communities like Thomas & Friends and Tardis have taken full advantage of this for several years. By now, they have vast numbers of videos all across their content.
These video-rich communities are a great exa…
Where to start as a Newbie
So you've found your way onto FANDOM - congrats! You're in for fun discoveries, achievements you'll be proud of, and perhaps even new friends.
But where to start? What do you do first to make sure you get the most out of your time here? We've put together some basic tips.
- 1 Sign up for a FANDOM account
- 2 Find a community to join
- 3 Make your first contribution
- 4 Give your profile a personal touch
- 5 Your first step into a larger world
Most wikis allow you to edit articles and post comments without logging in, but having a FANDOM account brings you a number of benefits. As a logged-in user, you can receive notifications about article changes, messages and replies to your posts that you'd otherwise miss. You have your own user page and profile that you c…
Introducing the Wiki Rules and Blocking Policy
Hey gang,
This blog is a long time coming and, for some of you, it is the direct result of feedback you’ve given about our policies. Fandom has historically sided with admins on the validity of their local blocks, even if the reasons for the blocks aren't fair. With the onset of our new wiki creation policy’s prohibition of duplicate wikis, the prescribed remedy that users create their own wiki on the same topic is no longer valid, as it fragments communities of editors and readers. Thus, the best long-term solution was to figure out how we can handle instances of bad admins.
For a long time, our stance on local blocks for Fandom wikis was best summarized by the following phrase: admins can block you from a wiki for any reason or no reason at…
Did you graduate from Wikia University?
You won’t get a shiny diploma you can hang on your wall - but Wikia University is still a course worth going through. Maybe you’re nodding vigorously right now, because you’ve already completed every study track, and consider yourself an editing pro. But maybe you’re scratching your head instead, wondering what I’m talking about?
Wikia University isn’t a real life campus somewhere (although that would be awesome!), but a series of short videos that teach you how to use Wikia. The videos are divided into five study tracks, each one aimed at users on a different level of editing experience:
- Welcome to Wikia - start here if you’re new to Wikia and are wondering what it is all about
- Editing 101 - a walkthrough of your first contributions
- Building …