FANDOM Staff Blog

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…

Part of the fun of wiki editing is the flexibility and interactivity that come from templates and scripting, by building internal and external layers (respectively) onto page content. The more involved into wiki community building editors go, many will get involved with creating layers deeper or atop the wiki page through those templates and scripts.

While the most important parts of a community are the people involved and the content inside, these additional layers have best practices recommendations, too. Like icing on and filling in a cake, a solid foundation of content deserves details to make things interesting.

JavaScript (sometimes abbreviated as "JS") can be a great way of adding some fun flair to communities. Because of how it is di…

“How can people find my wiki?” is an age-old question. Most people find their way to wikis through Google search. On Fandom itself, there’s never been a truly effective way to showcase content from other wikis that people might be interested in. We have the Popular Pages module in the right rail and the Fan Feed on the bottom of the page, but your feedback on those over the years have been clear -- they’re not always relevant, and the Fan Feed is massive at the bottom.

Today we’re excited to tell you about a project we’ve been working on throughout the year, one that will help fans better discover content you create that, most importantly, is relevant to them.

We’re building a Global Taxonomy that we’ll be able to use on our current platform…

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…

Happy Halloween, everyone!

As I’m typing this, I’m wearing my normal Halloween costume, so we’re in for a very festive recap :)

This month, we revealed that Fandom and Gamepedia will be coming together on a new software platform that is codenamed Unified Community Platform. This was followed up with a blog post revealing four features which have to be replaced due to non-viable, tangled code. To be clear, we are not deleting these features and moving on with nothing to fill the void. All of them are being replaced with newer versions which are compatible with a 7 years newer version of MediaWiki, the underlying software which runs the wiki platform.

Your feedback on these two blogs was extensive and we really appreciate that both sides are li…

Ohayo, everyone!

For the first time ever, the Anime vertical at Fandom is here to say hello!

Now that we have a full team, we are actively assigning Wiki Managers and Content Team Members to the top Anime Wikis. If you need assistance on your anime wiki, please reach out on the official Fandom Discord through the “Anime” channel!

We are kicking off the holiday season with ten of our favorite ghoulish and sweet themed anime communities for some tricks and treats! The following wikis are some of our Anime team’s favorites! We selected a range of wikis to participate in this giveaway, from a spooky story about the rise of Ghouls in the heart of Tokyo to the adorable Vocaloid, Miku Hatsune, who has won the hearts of millions. Take some time to ch…