Wikia Staff Blog

Hiya lovelies! It's been another two weeks with lots that happened behind the scenes. As we're nearing the end of the year, the teams get busy building a roadmap for what we'll be doing next year. Every two weeks, we post these tech updates blogs to inform you all about a selection of public bug fixes that we tackled, as well as some ongoing or upcoming experiments and platform wide changes. If there is an issue you're encountering still, don't hesitate to sound off in the comments about it. Today is no different, so let's dive in!

• 1 Recent Fixes
• 2 Fixes in Development
• 3 Development Updates
  • 3.1 Engagement

• Several issues relating to syntax highlighting (misalignment) in the 2017 VisualEditor - Source mode editor have been fixed:
  • Incorrect line height…

On October 18, 2004, Fandom was born – the beginning of what has become the world’s largest fan-generated entertainment platform. It’s been a heck of a ride that’s now headed into its third decade of being the companion to 350 million fans worldwide.

This summer, on July 25th we kicked off our anniversary celebration with our annual, highly-anticipated Fandom Party in San Diego. This is a yearly event, held unofficially during San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC), that usually generates a lot of exciting buzz in San Diego, as it brings together fans, creators, and industry members in a celebration of fans and pop culture. This year, the theme “20 Years of Worldbuilding” was a tribute to the editors and fans like you who have come together over the ye…

Eyo lovely people, and welcome to October already! This month does not only mark the start of the spooky season, but also the start of the last quarter of the year! As usual, I will be taking you through a selection of changes that happened since the last Tech Blog two weeks ago. You can expect some noticeable bug changes, potential experiment announcements, and even platform-wide noticeable changes that happened since. If you have questions or suggestions about anything technical related, the comment section is always a good place to reach out. So let's see what happened this time!

• 1 Notable Changes
• 2 Recent Fixes
• 3 Development Updates
  • 3.1 Engagement
  • 3.2 Monetization
  • 3.3 Platform team
  • 3.4 User Experience (UX) Team
  • 3.5 User Generated Content (UGC) team

The…

Hello everyone!

I recently shared the roadmap the Engagement Team had for 2024, and while it was primarily influenced in Interactive Maps, they are also working on different areas. During these last days, the team has been working on different updates for the registration form, and today I’m sharing more details about a related experiment we’re performing to ensure our work is useful for people interacting with it to create a new account.

Experiment Name: Registration Form Update

Test Launch: Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Test Closes: 2 weeks

Type: A/B Test (for logged-out users)

Will Be Tested On: 100% of logged-out desktop users (50% control group and 50% variant group) using English language

Hypothesis: Our plan is to bring a better registration form UI…

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the second run of the Editor Impact Notifications experiment! You can read more about the first one in the Experimentation Announcement: Impact notifications blog. In short, we experimented with sending a notification to users with an estimation of the impact their edits have in terms of pageviews as an incentive to keep going.

That first experiment sadly ran into some data processing issues, due to which we could not draw a trustworthy conclusion on how this feature did, which prompted us to rerun it.

• Experiment name: Impact Notifications (still)

• Test Launch: Thursday, September 26th

• Duration: 4 weeks

• Will Be Tested On: 100% of our logged-in users on English wikis using desktop with at least 1 edit

• Type: A/B test…

Hiya lovelies! I hope September has been treating you well. As those of you who've been following our Technical Updates series already know, this will be the second of two update blogs this month. If you're now here, this is the place to be in case you'd like to get a quick overview of what's been happening on the platform. I'll be sharing a selection of bug tickets that have been fixed between the previous tech blog and now, as well as inform you about general changes and experiments we may be or will be running. The comment section remains a good place for you to let us know if you're encountering a certain issue (in which case, please share some links and ideally even a video or screenshot about what the issue is) or if you have general…

Policies are the backbone of how we protect user safety on Fandom and ensure a welcoming experience to fans of all backgrounds and beliefs. As part of that mission, we regularly review our policies to ensure that they are as clear as possible and contain all information about how we approach user safety. These reviews can lead to us adding important new clauses to pre-existing policies, creating brand new policies to fill in gaps, or formally documenting rules that are already largely in practice so that our standards can be applied consistently and fairly.

One policy we are releasing today, the Offensive Terms Policy, is a reflection of that last option - it’s not so much a new rule, but it’s formalizing something publicly that has been an…

Hello, hello, hello, my lovely people! Nope, this isn't the second Technical Update blog of September, that's for this Friday. Since I recently took over from Antonio as the Product Support team's liaison with the UGC team, I am writing this to bring you all up to speed with the latest feature update on Fandom: Suggested Pages.

If you've been around the past months, this may sound already familiar to you. Before making the decision to productize this feature, we ran it as an experiment to see how it would work on our platform. As such, we've talked about it before in an experiment announcement blog as well as Technical Update blog blurbs. However, since we did tweak the end result from the experiment based the received feedback, I'm going to…

Hello everyone!

Over the past few months, I've been discussing in blogs how Fandom's UX team is dedicated to decluttering your desktop and mobile experiences. Our aim is to create well-defined areas for the content you and your communities generate, while also leaving room for elements like widgets that encourage logged-out users to explore a wiki beyond the first few pages.

(I've written an entire blog post about this in our Progress in the Making series, which you can read here: link)

We're continuing this journey by experimenting with two tools: the Mobile Drawer and the Desktop Drawer. We're launching two new experiments this week to gain further insights into how users interact with these features. More details below!

Experiment Name: Des…