FANDOM Staff Blog

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…

Hello, all!

A couple of weeks ago, we announced Fandom Editor Rewards, a comprehensive program to express our gratitude for exceptional editors in new ways.

In that post, I teased that there was another way to get your hands on cool stuff from Fandom coming soon. Today, I am happy to announce that we have created a merchandise portal on Design by Humans with a selection of brand new Fandom swag designs.

While you are more than welcome to buy this merchandise, this isn’t about selling you Fandom t-shirts, mugs, hoodies, etc. You can buy items if you want, but this is ultimately about having a better way for our Editor Rewards programs to source Fandom merchandise to you, for free, than we have had in the past. I could go into incredible detail, …

Hello, all!

Welcome to the August edition of This Month at Fandom, your monthly recap of all the things you may have missed on the platforms. We had some pretty cool things happen this month, so let’s dive in!

On August 20th, we at Fandom published our first video game, an awesome action-adventure roguelike with RPG elements called UnderMine, developed by the incredible two-person team at Thorium Entertainment. The game has been a great success, currently sitting at Very Positive in Steam ratings after just over a week in Early Access. Not a PC gamer? Fear not! UnderMine will be hitting the Xbox Game Pass and Nintendo Switch in 2020!

This is a new venture which allows us to explore how our expertise in the gaming space can be leveraged into e…

Hello, editors!

Back in April, when we announced the formation of the Growth Organization, we teased 5 things, the pillars of our 2019 work:

• Platform improvements, addressing major community wants and needs
• New wiki-focused features and editor tools
• In-person and digital events to connect with our awesome community members
• Better ways to recognize and reward awesome editors
• Better ways for contributors to communicate with staff

To date, we’ve announced the first steps on 3 of those 5 things: platform improvements, wiki-focused features and editor tools, and better ways for contributors to communicate with staff. Today, I am happy to announce our first steps on the 4th pillar: Editor Rewards.

All summer, we have been piloting new ways to recognize …

Wikis are full of information, and organizing that information leads to a better experience for readers exploring your wiki. Categories are a part of our communities that add grouping and association to pages. They’re also a very wiki-centric concept; as such, there is less general research available under that term, and we rely on more of the data Fandom collects to determine the Best Practices. For research purposes in the non-wiki world, the Category is most akin to a web model called “topic clusters”, but categories also have elements typical of tags (aka labels) common in blog posts.

While there are many methods of moving between wiki pages, only a few show highly organized clusters of pages. The most common of those used for navigati…

Main Pages are the central points to focus on for many communities. They are often, but not always, popular landing pages where readers enter a community (and the greater Fandom network). They create the first impression for some visitors, and are the navigational crossroads for others. However, there is a lot of tradition around Main Pages that may not be ideal choices for today's wikis.

One thing that takes getting used to is that Main Pages are not nearly as "main" as many think they are. In fact, Main Pages might be the most popular pages on some communities but are very far down the list of others. With global search engines pointing to individual articles on a wiki, Main Pages are often not the primary "entrance" into a community's a…