FANDOM Staff Blog

Hi, everyone!

I’m Brian, and I’m Director of Partnerships for the Movies/TV team. This is my first staff blog, but I’ve been with Fandom since 2013 and I’ve worked in marketing, editorial, and sales. In my new role as Director of Partnerships, it’s my job to work with TV and movie studios and connect them directly with the communities dedicated to their shows and films.

These connections are something that the community has told us for years they’d like us to help with. Last year when working with the Community Council on comprehensive feedback about Fandom’s direction, we heard that connecting the community with studios and publishers would be very welcome and would be a great way to recognize all of the hard work that communities put into …

Hey editors!

In the reorganization announcement, we outlined a few areas of focus for our current projects. We already told you about the Fandom Wiki Managers and Content Team and the MediaWiki Upgrade. Today, we’re happy to share another project ready for launch: the official Discord server for Fandom and Gamepedia editors and admins!

A big ask from the community has been better communication with staff. This new server will allow our editors and admins to have increased access to staff with lower communication barriers.

A lot of wiki teams already use Discord to organize editing and admin activity, so it makes the most sense to go where so many of our users are already comfortable. Discord also represents a nice unification opportunity for …

Images, when they're available, should break up text on a page to make it more interesting. Thinking about how and why images are used is important, as all the imagery of your pages build reader impressions for your communities. Compelling images can also uniquely inspire and engage your readers to contribute useful information.

All pages have a purpose. Images should be applied carefully to support that purpose. Some pages are articles, but most that aren't should be for the purpose of linking or leading to articles.

1. Identify and prioritize all the messages of the page. What is the intention of the page you're editing? Is the page primarily meant to navigate or describe your community? Or is the page meant as an informative article?
2. Define ho…

Hello all!

This is the first edition of This Month at Fandom, a monthly roundup highlighting cool and noteworthy things which happened with wikis, content channels, and dev teams over the past month. It is the next step in our commitment to better communication with you and providing more recognition for our incredible wiki communities.

Last week, we announced the project to upgrade Fandom to a modern version of MediaWiki and received a lot of great feedback from the community. We followed up yesterday with the Community Contract for the New Fandom Platform, our long-term covenant with the community as we build out the future of Fandom. We are so excited to work with all of you on the next chapter of fan experiences!

Let’s check in with our ve…

If you haven't read last week's staff blog about upgrading to a modern version of MediaWiki, please do so before reading this one.

Hello all!

Today we’re making a big announcement and entering into a long-term agreement with you, the community.

In 2016, we announced that Wikia would be renamed Fandom powered by Wikia, a move to establish that the platform was more than a traditional wiki experience. The branding decision, while ultimately the correct one, was incomplete. It was an important decision to move our business forward, but the editor experience didn’t really change in any meaningful way. The name changed, but the back end was still the Wikia platform, as those of you who watch our github know very well. To borrow a construction meta…

Hello all!

This is a big announcement, and one many of you have wanted for a very long time. We will be embarking on a massive undertaking to upgrade the tools and platform that are crucial to wiki editing. We are very excited to share that we are upgrading our instance of MediaWiki, the software that powers your wikis.

To be upfront, we don’t have a lot of details yet. This is going to be a very long process. So while I may not have the specific what or specific how just yet, I want to talk about the why behind making this decision now and why it wasn’t made earlier.

Back in August, we kicked off a series of conversations with the Community Council asking them for input on a lot of areas of the platform. That included how the community staff …

Hey editors!

I’m Will. In the reorganization announcement, I was introduced as one of the Community Managers for the Gaming vertical. Since then, I’ve transitioned into a new role as the Global Community Lead, working on the Editor Experience team. Part of this role will be sharing new cross-vertical initiatives with you, like the two I’m announcing today!

Since January, we have been studying unique aspects of Fandom and Gamepedia to discover opportunities to provide even better experiences on our wikis. One such aspect from Gamepedia that stood out as a great opportunity for Fandom was the Wiki Manager team. For those unfamiliar with Wiki Managers (WMs for short), they are part-time staff members assigned to specific wikis. They are here to…

Hello, I’m Ben, co-founder of Gamepedia, and along with Brandon we're very excited to share some big news!

Today we’re announcing a major change to how we’re organizing and approaching the core of our business: wikis and content sites. This is just one of the big announcements teased in our recent post about Featured Video.

Fandom is an extension of the passion you demonstrate for your favorite games, shows, movies, books, anime, teams, artists, etc. every single day, from Minecraft to Borderlands, from Arrow to Game of Thrones, from Naruto to One Piece, from James Bond to Harry Potter, from the Boston Bruins to Liverpool. We serve this passion and our purpose is to provide you with the platforms to express it and be recognized for it.

To tha…

Featured Video has been a controversial feature. It helped achieve the goal of removing a lot of ad clutter and performance issues on wiki pages, but the content just didn’t work. Way too many videos are of too low quality, and many of them quickly fell out of date or relevance. Plus, the video player is really big, the videos were made almost entirely without community involvement, and they were added above community content.

As a result, we have a product and content on the site that editors resent and doesn’t provide the right value to the broader audience. It made money for Fandom, but it cost us a lot—for many of you, that includes your trust in us. A lot of talented people tried to make it work, but no matter how good the intentions m…

It’s been a long time since you’ve seen a meaningful update to Discussions, leaving communities feeling rightly frustrated with the state of Discussions and with Fandom for not providing long-awaited features. Honestly, we don’t blame you. You weren’t wrong.

For the last eight months, we’ve been taking a long, hard look at our priorities and the things that we need to focus on in order to create a better community experience. There’s a lot we’re going to be announcing over the coming weeks and months because of that, but right now I’m excited to say we have some fresh improvements for Discussions that will go live next week!

When analyzing how people use Fandom, we see that there are a lot of users who drop in on your wiki, find what they’re…