Templates and Scripting on Fandom
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…
Showing Data on Fandom
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…
Articles on Fandom
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…
Organized spaces on Fandom
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…
Categories and Navigation on Fandom
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…