- Monday: Product Support & Stars
- Tuesday: User Generated Content (UGC) Team
- Wednesday: User Experience Team
- Thursday: Engagement Team
- Friday: Ad Experience Improvements
This year's Community Connect, with the theme "Gears of Progress," was a collaborative event where Fandom Staff, admins, and editors worked together to shape the platform's future. This teamwork led to new initiatives like the first in-person Hackathon and the Virtual Community Connect experience. Now, Fandom is launching "Progress in the Making," a blog series that showcases the real changes made based on community feedback, including new features and tools. The series invites continued input from the community to help keep improving the platform.
User-generated content (UGC) is a crucial aspect of platforms like Fandom, which enable users to create and share their own content with multiple points of view, coming together to enrich the vision that we have about our favorite topics. It enhances the quality and depth of available information, promotes community engagement, and knowledge sharing among users.
Understanding the significance of UGC, we have dedicated a specific Product team to facilitate its creation by focusing on user and community needs. Last year, the team was focused on attracting new editors to the platform, referring both to content creators (editors) and consumers (readers). Rather than doing one big thing, they achieved that goal by making several small but significant changes. Building on that success, the UGC team pivoted this year more towards engagement and retention of those users. By making the existing editing tool more attractive and accessible, as well as the learning process to create new content easier, we aim to transform new editors into loyal contributors who consistently return to our platform and continue to generate valuable content.
With that goal in mind, the UGC team has 3 different pillars for this year:
- AI-assisted suggestion tools
- Structured content assistance
- Widgetized WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools
Let’s see what we’ve done so far and what’s yet to come.
Our efforts until now[]
The main focus of the team has been on the first two pillars thus far. Perhaps one of the most controversial subjects when talking UGC is the use of AI, as it inherently comes with the idea that it will replace the human component. We wish to be very clear that we know that the value of our wikis comes from the diversity of points of view that generates the content. We reject the idea of AI creating new content, but we recognize the potential of AI supporting our editor efforts. We want to explore ways to support our users while they are writing the content, suggesting to include the content created by them in other parts of the text. Are you talking about a specific character? Our AI will propose to include quotes authored by this character.
However, in order for any AI tool to be truly useful, it needs to be able to understand and analyze the content users created. This is where the second pillar of “Structured Content” comes in. Structured data means information that is organized and structured using a predefined format, providing a clear understanding of the relationship between data points and allowing for it to be consistently understandable across wikis and topics.
Design mock of the new Simplified Editor - Souce Mode
Earlier this year, we already completed initiatives like the Simplified Editor and the CodeMirror upgrade to make content creation easier. We also ran experiments, such as Suggested Pages, to encourage our editors to continue the fantastic work that they do by editing other pages. All of them had positive results and are helping to drive more engagement and retain more editors in our platform.
The Structured Content project aims to build on those successes by offering certain ways to create content that makes it easier for tools to understand that content and make things such as recirculation, suggestions, editing assistance, etc. possible, even across multiple Fandom wikis.
Two samples of structured quotes
The first initiative related to the Structured Content project has been the Structured Quotes. Many communities use quote templates to highlight notable snippets of text such as lyrics, book passages, spoken phrases, or extracts from interviews or news articles. These templates can contain quotes from a single source, dialogues, etc. We have been working with some testing admins on creating a new template, with a specific markup that will allow our communities to create quotes that they can easily use in other articles. Quotes that will be automatically updated after editing the original quote. Creating automatic lists of quotes without having to write all of them repeatedly.
This initiative is teaching us important lessons that we need to create more Structured Content, we see how important is to give you the flexibility to create the content as you need, and we have a better idea now about how to continue with more kinds of content.
And the rest of the year[]
We have 4 months more until the end of the year, and a clear vision about what we still have to do, although not all of this may already result in something tangible and noticeable for our users.
One of the next steps for structured content will be related to structured categories. We want to investigate how articles are connected through categories in order to prepare more Structured Content experiments for next year.
Another one is looking into the potential of "structured links". If you are browsing levitation charm from Hogwarts Legacy on the Harry Potter Wiki, you’d most likely be interested in other spells too, not some random character from one of the books or a movie. We have to detect that and improve the relationship between pages, thus exploring the creation of “structured links” where you can specify extra context around wikitext links to other pages.
Combining the Structured Quotes and future initiatives related to structured content will improve our assistance to our editors. We are going to test a dashboard where admins can list tasks with different priorities for other editors, helping them organize the community efforts more efficiently. This dashboard will help to improve collaboration and will serve as a base to integrate our AI and suggest more content to be improved together with the tasks proposed by the admins.
Last but certainly not least, we have not forgotten the Welcome Tool, of which we tested its return earlier this year. Although it didn't show much positive results in terms of user engagement, we will bring it back because it has been one of our users' most requested tools.
We are excited about the future of all these initiatives. We really think they will help to improve the experience and will retain our users transforming them into loyal members of their wikis!
Please stay tuned for more information and don’t hesitate to give your feedback at any time. Our UGC team and we will be more than happy to hear your suggestions!
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