Hello hello!
I'm here today to announce one of our most exciting releases in recent months: a new kind of content, the Structured Quotes!
Structured content is information or content that is organized in a predictable way and is usually classified with metadata. What does it mean for us? This means Fandom will be able to understand the content created by users and offer better service to them. It will be possible to analyze the content you generate and give you some extra options for using it.
For example, you create content about a specific character, and we can identify the page and sections of that page, knowing that you are talking about the character's personality, relatives, etc. When you create another page about a relative of this character, our system will be able to show you content that could be added there, obtained directly from the first article. Imagine having suggestions for filling out an infobox based on other articles!
And that’s just an example; there are more possibilities for supporting you and improving the experience of our readers. Knowing how the content is connected will help us offer more interesting articles to readers when they have the information that they were looking for, and it will increase the chances of retaining them, meaning a potential way to have new editors in the long term.
Structured Quotes[]
Our UGC team has been instrumental in this journey, with the goal of developing new tools that will help to create this content. One of their innovative ideas was to kickstart the creation of structured content in our platform with the introduction of Structured Quotes.
We have thousands of quotes in our wikis. They are usually included at the beginning of the articles, but they can also appear inside the infoboxes, in other sections etc. All those quotes include valued information and are representative of the article. The quotes are a perfect introduction to understanding the topic mentioned in the article.
Fandom has a predefined Quote template that is added to every new wiki. It is a simple template where you can add the quote, speaker, where it was spoken, and you will have the possibility to customize the quote with an image.
However, some wikis use very complex templates, using wikitext, parser functions, magic words, CSS, JS, and even Lua. This means our team had to adapt the new kind of content to those tools because we wanted to create something new and useful without limiting your creativity.
That’s because we have been testing our idea from the early stages. We invited some admins to join the test and replicate their quotes in the new system, exploring the possibilities and indicating things that could be improved from our side.
Thank you to all of you who spent time testing this initiative!!
How do they work?[]
You have 3 new parser functions now:
{{#SQuote}}- Used to add quotes to the articles{{#SQuoteGet}}- Used to reuse a previously created quote{{#SQuoteQuery}}- Used to list multiple quotes using specific criteria
In addition to those functions, we have created a basic quote template called Template:StructuredQuote, which will be used every time that a new quote is created using the previous markup. You can ignore this template if you don’t want to use Structured Quotes, but we ask you to don’t delete it yet and give it a try!
It is possible to customize this template or use an alternative one, allowing you to have multiple templates to use in the Structured Quotes.
Source Editor users will see a new icon in the editor for adding Structures Quotes to articles. After clicking the icon, the new markup will be added to the articles, and users will only have to fill out the parameters.
Keep in mind that every quote will need a unique ID, which allows us to invoke the quote in other articles if necessary. We have created a new help page explaining the details here: Structured Quotes
How do I convert the current quotes to the new format?[]
Depending on the complexity of the current Quote templates, you would need more or less work here, but you will be able to directly copy the content from the Quote template in Template:StructuredQuote in most cases.
If you want to use different styles for the quotes, you can create other templates. The new markup will allow you to indicate which template should be used.
After customizing the default template for the new quotes, you will have to start replacing the previous template in all the quotes with the new markup. Please don’t add the new template directly to the article; use the markup, or it won’t work! And remember to add a unique ID for every quote.
You can find all the articles using the Quote template via Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Quote. This will help you identify the articles where the quote needs to be replaced.
We know this will be a lot of work for some wikis with hundreds or thousands of quotes. Just give it a try, see how it looks, and let us know if it matches your expectations. All feedback will be more than welcome. And if you like the new system, feel free to start converting the quotes —you don’t have to do it immediately!
Future of the Structured Content[]
Based on the experience obtained from this release, we want to explore new options in the Structured Content area: Structured Categories, investigating how articles are connected through categories; Structured Links, giving the chance to specify extra context around the wikitext links to other pages...
We want to combine the Structured Quotes and other future initiatives to improve our assistance to the editors. Using AI, we will be able to suggest more content to be improved, links that could be added in infoboxes, information obtained from some articles that could be integrated into other articles.
If you want to know more about the roadmap for the structured content and other initiatives from the UGC Team, take a look at this blog post.
But, specifically regarding the Structured Quotes, we are open to adding more functionalities. We can discuss them in the comments section below, and we will share the feedback with the Product Team to explore possible solutions.
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