FANDOM Staff Blog

Hey gang! (I am channeling my best inner MisterWoodhouse because he is on a much deserved vacation)

Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve reached another milestone in the United Community Platform initiative, a minor technical tweak that has some big and exciting social ramifications. On wikis using the UCP, you will now begin to see some users referred to as members of the SOAP team.

This is just a new, combined name for two groups familiar to our editors. The VSTF (Volunteer Spam Task Force) from Fandom and the GRASP (Gamepedia Rapid Anti-Spam Patrol) from Gamepedia have merged into one team. We decided to give the group a new name, since we didn’t want to favor one platform’s history over the other. All the members of the team came up wit…

Hey gang!

The 2020 US election is coming up, so we are partnering with Gamers.Vote, a non-partisan group, to help promote voter registration among gaming communities.

Gamers represent the largest potential voting bloc in the United States with over 133 million possible voters. As such, Gamers.Vote wants to get eligible gamers to level up their civic duty by helping you register to vote. When we do our civic duty, we all win.

Gamers.Vote and Fandom do not care how you vote, just that you exercise your right to vote. As they say on their website, “No issues, no party preferences, no political agendas…” So just vote!

You may start seeing Gamers.Vote promotional materials on various Fandom and Gamepedia communities starting today.

We have put toget…

Update: 7/24/20 - The login system has now been merged. Thanks for your patience as we tracked down some bizarre issues. Two known issues remain that we're working on, but did not hold up the rest of the work: BotPasswords on Gamepedia aren't working and there are a number of users who had oddness with their renames. If your rename looks odd, please so we can get you in a batch for the fix.

Hey gang!

As many of you are aware, we have been working on unifying the login systems of Fandom and Gamepedia as part of the Unified Community Platform project.

I am happy to announce that this incredibly complex work is nearing completion (or already done, depending on when you read this)! One piece that needs to be called out, however, is the fact that…

Hey gang!

One feature which will not be making the jump from legacy Fandom to the Unified Community Platform is a feature called Shared Help. We’re making a specific callout about this because of the nature of the feature and how you might have some content which needs saving. Thankfully, we’ve managed to put in a very easy code change to make sure your content will not be lost with this change.

Shared Help basically takes Help pages from here on Community Central and transcludes them to Help pages on your individual wikis.

We’re replacing those transcluded local Help pages with redirects to their Community Central sources, allowing users to come where they can get the best platform help and staff attention, rather than unintentionally placin…

Hello all,

Today, I write to you with some sad news. As is the case with companies around the world, this year has brought about unexpected and unprecedented financial challenges brought on by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, we’ve unfortunately had to make the painful decision to make cuts to our Wiki Manager and Content Teams.

Wiki Managers and Content Team Members come from our communities, where they have shown their incredible talents as editors and volunteers, so we’re heartbroken we’ve had to say goodbye to some of them as members of the team. Fortunately, you’ll still see many around as admins, Councilors, and continued valued members of the community.

We would like to underscore that we are incredibly proud of the work tha…

We come in peace! June 14th marks the 73rd anniversary of the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, NM. Sure, the government says it was a weather balloon, but if film and television have taught us anything, it’s that it was definitely a coverup for a flying saucer crash. And if it was on TV, it must be true.

Therefore we will venture where no government has dared to venture before, and we will acknowledge the fact that there are aliens living among us by celebrating the anniversary of their crash on Earth with the exciting Project 51!

Is this our 51st editing project? No! It’s just the one with all the aliens. 😏 Join us for this editing marathon about alien-themed movies and television! The Movies/TV Vertical (M/TV) have got it planned and we want you invo…

If this is the first you're hearing about the Unified Community Platform project, read this to learn more about the entire scope of the project before commenting.

Hey gang!

We are happy to announce that the Unified Community Platform is entering the second stage of the rollout - moving wikis without complex extensions or feature sets over to the new platform!

What does that mean? It means that the Unified Community Platform has reached the point where a number of existing wikis on the legacy Fandom platform can now move over to take advantage of new and improved tools like mobile editing and the 2017 Editor from the Wikimedia Foundation, just like the one used on Wikipedia.

You’re probably wondering how wikis will be selected. That’s covered l…

If this is the first you're hearing about the Unified Community Platform project, read this to learn more about the entire scope of the project before commenting.

As Fandom continues to roll out our United Community Platform this year, one reason you have seen us cite for creating this new platform is that it'll allow our entire wiki network to exist together on the same version of MediaWiki. This means, for communities already on the Fandom platform in particular, upgrading to MediaWiki 1.33.

That explanation might make a lot of sense for our oldest, most experienced users, but for many of our users, the term 'MediaWiki' is a mystery. What is MediaWiki and why does Fandom care about it? Doesn’t Fandom have its own unique code? Why does upgr…

As everyone knows, we are in the midst of a worldwide health crisis that’s affecting millions of people every day. My heart goes out to the families and individuals who are suffering, directly or indirectly, from the impact of COVID-19. 

Meanwhile, there are millions of people turning to Fandom for knowledge and fun. Indeed, we’ve seen a meaningful uptick in wiki traffic over the last several weeks and I am enormously grateful that we have platforms and communities who can serve these fans. Thank you for helping Fandom be a service to people in this difficult time.

Unfortunately, the disease has created a real economic burden, especially for companies dependent on advertising revenue—like Fandom. We have taken every step we can to cut operat…

Fandom is the most comprehensive source of information for fans of all varieties of what we love. Contributors from the most comprehensive chroniclers to devoted enthusiasts share every aspect of their fandom topics on wikis. This leads to a lot of material for readers to explore, and getting these readers to what they seek is the purpose of nearly every wiki.

Sometimes, though, such information is not as easily found because it is buried or scarce. Many wikis use tabs and tab panels (called "tabbers") to arrange their content. In this post, we're going to talk about how to organize some article content to make it more accessible to seekers.

Wikipedia links and rationale regarding these topics : Article size

There's a big difference between b…