FANDOM Staff Blog

Hey gang!

This Wednesday, February 26th, we are holding an Ask Me Anything session with our CEO, Perkins Miller, on our official Fandom and Gamepedia Discord server for registered users. That’s right. The guy at the top will be taking questions on anything from editors like you!

At Community Connect, we as a company made a number of commitments to our attendees in the closing segment that Brandon and I presented. While the video of that is not yet available (there is a LOT of footage to parse), the final of those commitments was this AMA session.

Perkins Miller joined Fandom just over a year ago as our CEO. Beyond his Fandom experience, he has had a really interesting career that many of you might want to ask him about, including working for …

Hello everyone!

As promised in my recap of Community Connect 2020, it’s time to talk about the Unified Community Platform (UCP for short) again. For this post I'd like to briefly take a step back to provide more context before diving into the details of the project. After that, we can talk about what Phase 1 and Phase 2 mean, the schedule, and some Phase 1 specifics you need to know about right now. Full disclosure, this is a long post, so buckle up!

At its core, the Unified Community Platform is all about bringing Fandom and Gamepedia wikis together on to the same version of MediaWiki, serving as the foundation upon which we can innovate. Right now, the Fandom platform is a very customized version of MediaWiki 1.19. This was done intentiona…

Love is in the air this Valentine's Day week! In the spirit of October's Halloween-themed Project Monster Mash, the Movies/TV team is excited to kick off Project Yoda One.

Is the name a silly pun? Yes.

Is Valentine's Day a manufactured holiday to help sell greeting cards and chocolates and make single people feel bad? Absolutely.

But no matter your romantic status or level of cultural cynicism, we can all agree to be deeply in love with Baby Yoda. So we're going with it.

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

From Wednesday February 12 to Sunday February 16, The Movies/TV team will be organizing an effor…

Hello, everyone!

Even though January has felt like half a year, it really was only one month and it's just about over! Let's take a look back at all the awesome things which happened in the past 31 days...

For the first time since 2016, we held our signature Community Connect event. It was a fantastic opportunity to get 40 staff members in a room with 50 editors to discuss everything from the Unified Community Platform and Search Engine Optimization to cheesecake and which staff member would kill Jar-Jar Binks given the chance. The answer to that is Adil, our Chief Technology/Product Officer, who absolutely cannot stand that goofy Gungan. The long weekend at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida was incredibly productive and you can read mor…

Hello everyone!

As many of you know, we held our first Community Connect in several years a couple of weeks ago, down at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida! The weekend was spent discussing wikis, the Unified Community Platform (UCP), the future of Fandom and Gamepedia, and other burning topics like video, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), theming, editor updates, and the types of enhancements we can make for our users once the UCP work is done. While the entire conversation we want to have with the community about what all was said there will take some time, I wanted to share some big takeaways from the event now and preview the next few blogs.

A recurring theme of the weekend was how getting together and communicating beyond just text i…

Hello everyone!

As the decade draws to a close and we all turn our focus to time with friends and family over the holidays, we wanted to take a moment to look back at all the amazing highlights and accomplishments from our work together in 2019. As a company and as a community, 2019 has been really exciting.

In a lot of ways, it’s a brand new Fandom. One of the things that we said earlier in the year was that while Wikia rebranded to Fandom in 2016, it was really an incomplete transition. It moved our business forward, but it didn’t move the editor experience forward in any meaningful ways. The backend was still Wikia, and that came with it a lot of history and issues to resolve. 2019 has been a year of re-focusing on the core of Fandom—you …

Hello everyone!

We wanted to give you a quick update on our progress with the Special:Forum retirement and replacement .

In order to provide the best experience and to aid in transitioning forums-heavy communities to Discussions/Feed model, we have decided to delay the migration of those particular communities until April. We are committed to making improvements to the Discussions/Feeds experience so it better meets the needs of Forum users when communities are migrated to the Unified Community Platform. We know that there are still many differences and pain points for Forum users, so we want to thoughtfully address the issues we can before we transition those communities to it.

We will have more details on the improvements, including design …

Hello there!

I am very excited to announce that, in January, we are bringing back Community Connect, an opportunity for direct, in-person dialogue and insight- sharing between Fandom and the communities we serve. This was an event we held previously in 2015 and 2016, and it was well received by the editors who attended. Throughout 2019, we’ve made important efforts toward bringing a stronger Community First approach to everything that we do. So with upcoming platform changes on the horizon, it felt like the right time to bring this event back and hear directly from users across Fandom and Gamepedia about what’s important to them and what their ideas and feedback are.

The conference will be held January 17th through 20th in Orlando, Florida and…

Since we last talked to you about Featured Video and how we want to eventually replace it on the platform, we’ve been working on what that replacement experience looks and feels like for our users. While we are making progress, we are also finding that we need more data points and experimentation to give us the insights to get it right. We’ve found, for instance, that featured video does not change the bounce rate (people who come and leave immediately) vs pages without featured video, and that session lengths and page views are equal with and without featured video. But is there an opportunity to actually extend sessions and engage users more? We hope so. There are many potential solutions, but it is important that we arrive at the right …

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!

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 al…