A Day in the Life of Wikia Staff: Product Management (Mobile)
Greetings Wikians!
After a brief hiatus, our "A Day in the Life of Wikia" staff series has returned! Today I chatted with one of our Product Managers, Stanley Tran who leads our Mobile team.
A Product Manager is a member of our product team who works to create new features as well as improve existing ones. Product Managers work with every single team within Wikia to ensure that everything is running smoothly. We have 4 major product teams teams, each specializing in their own field. Here, we'll be focusing on Mobile.
The Mobile team focuses on expanding and optimizing the product line for the rapidly growing Mobile user base (both the mobile web and apps). The team also builds APIs to encourage third party developers to use Wikia content to b…
Time To Play Across Wikia
It's that time of the year again, dust off the controllers and warm up the televisions. More vacation days mean more "Time To Play" your favorite video games, watch movies and enjoy delicious holiday foods! November to December is a special time for lots of different wiki communities on Wikia. Some wiki communities have huge releases coming out during this time, and with new games and movies comes more amazing content from each community!
We would like to celebrate all of your efforts and help everyone who visits Wikia find the amazing content that your communities produce during this time period. So to do this today we would like to introduce Time to Play! What is Time to Play? It's our way to help promote your wiki community on:
- Wikia.com h…
New ways to showcase Video
Back in September we announced that we are working hard to offer and integrate more videos into Wikia. Having videos on your wiki is a nice way to highlight content and give people the chance to really experience your wiki's topic. There are a couple of interesting ways we've been working on to display videos, and we wanted to share them with you.
We wanted to be able to show more than one video on a main page without taking up too much space, so we started experimenting with a randomizer. This code lets you feature 1 main video, with 3 smaller videos displayed below. When the page is refreshed, the 3 smaller videos are also refreshed, offering 3 new and interesting videos.
Check it out in action below, and find the code for doing it yoursel…
Tips for being a great admin
Long before I ever worked for Wikia, I was an administrator on the Star Wars Fanon wiki—and I still am. One of the most important things I’ve learned in my time there is what the ideal role of an admin is, or at least should be. I think this is a really important topic here on Wikia, and I wanted to share my thoughts on this with you.
Admins, as you know, are users with additional editing tools to help with more advanced wiki maintenance (such as deleting and protecting pages), as well as policy enforcement tools like the ability to block users. That gives admins a lot of power, but there’s often a question as to what the role of an admin should be and how that power should be used. Are admins meant to be the boss of a wiki, or are they meant…
Awesome Projects from our Interns
Hi All, I am a Macbre, an engineer here at Wikia. This past summer the Poznań Wikia office hosted a summer internship program for students studying engineering. We really appreciated all the interesting work our interns produced and thought it would be fun to share their work with the community here. Below is a short summary of user-facing projects our interns worked on. Currently none of them are live on Wikia, but we hope to integrate them into future projects.
Every wiki is a never ending story. This project tries to visualize the evolution of a wiki from the very first edit. Here a wiki is represented as a dynamic tree structure with each leaf being a single article. Branches are generated based on categories, user avatars, and wiki wor…
Promote Your Wiki
One of the most common questions we get here at Wikia is, how do I promote my wiki? We know that wikis do better with more contributors, so today I am going to offer you a few ways you can get the word out about your wiki on Wikia. We know you'll have even more ideas, so please share them with us in the comments below.
The Wikia home page is a great way to get your community noticed by a wide range of people. From everyday editors, to newbies just finding Wikia. Any admin can go to Special:Promote on their wiki, fill out the sections, and have their wiki added to the growing list of communities being highlighted on Wikia.com.
For more information on how to do this visit the help page.
"Get promoted" in the Community section on hub pages. This…
Official Wikia Communities
Back in June, I wrote about how excited I was to be here, and how at E3, numerous game developers and publishers made a point of telling me how much they love Wikia Gaming wikis, and how excited they were to work with us.
That enthusiasm is quickly turning into action. If you follow our Wikia Games home page, you probably already know that we’ve been lining up numerous developer interviews: Dragon’s Dogma, StreetFighter, XCOM, even Dishonored.
Now I’m happy to reveal that the developers who make the games we play and talk about are going to be working with us even more directly. Today, we’re announcing that Sony Online Entertainment is recognizing two of our wikis - Everquest II and Planetside 2 - as the official communities for these two ga…
Blocking Best Practices
Welcome to another installment of wiki advice. This time, one for admins: an overview of blocking.
First, a quick refresher on how to block.
The easiest way to block someone is via their contributions page. Go to their profile, and click the "contributions" tab. If you are an admin, you will see useful links the contributions page, including a link to the block page.
This will take you to the block page, with the username or IP already filled in. There you can choose the duration of the block, and the text that the user sees when they try to edit.
You can also select various options for the block. In general, it's best not to check "Prevent this user from editing their own talk page while blocked". Leaving the talk page open gives the user a wa…
Featured Wikian: Jspoelstra
Welcome to a special edition of the Featured Wikian blog. We're going a little off script here, and featuring Jspoelstra, a user who has made OVER 100,000 edits on the Fallout Wiki. Check out his blog here announcing this accomplishment and explains everything about how and why he's had 100k edits in 100 weeks.
Wikia: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
- Jspoelstra: Well, the account as I created it in November 2010 stands for my real name; first name starting with J, the rest is my surname. I’m from the Netherlands, northern part of the country, where I live in a small village. I’m a reserved guy, about twice the age as your average gamer. I’m single and due to some personal problems in the past I need to take things easy nowadays and avoid …
Videos on Wikia
You may have noticed a lot more videos popping up around Wikia lately (such as these awesome videos on halo). We have been working hard to partner with professional producers in order to offer your community relevant video on a variety of topics. Why video? Video is an exciting way to chronicle and curate around topics you love. It adds a new dimension to your storytelling and documentation that complements the text and images currently on wikis.
However, when you showcase videos found randomly on the web there is a risk of it being copyrighted material which can be taken down at any time. When this happens, it causes broken video links on your wiki. We’ve heard your frustration around this and are offering you legitimately licensed video f…