Recent Blog Posts

As you may well know, the United States, where Fandom is headquartered and where the majority of our community lives, is having a Presidential election this fall.

It’s not Fandom’s role to discuss an election, so we’re not going to do so. Adjacent to that, though, is the topic of today’s blog, which is an overview and reminder of Fandom’s rules about politics and its role on the Fandom wiki platform.

One of the core strengths of Fandom wikis is that they are, most prominently, encyclopedic reference sites about the topics they cover across gaming and entertainment. What brings users to Fandom wikis is a shared celebration of a common interest, and that’s the fandom itself – whether you want to look up a piece of information, contribute conte…

Hello hello,

At Fandom we're committed to fostering a safe and inclusive online environment for everyone, especially our younger users. As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance child safety, we're excited to announce an important change coming to our platform on Monday. This change was anticipated in some of our Tech Updates in May, but it's time to give more details.

When creating a new wiki, you have the option to designate it as "for kids," which activates special protections to ensure that participating users have verified their accounts and are properly identified. The Fandom staff can also add this label later, the admins can request it by contacting us.

Up until now, users without verified email addresses have been able to contribute …

Hey everybody!

We have been publishing information about the experiments and tweaks in the Fandom Stars Wiki. After some conversations, we have decided to move the blog posts into Community Central to make them more visible to our users and give all of you the possibility to ask questions, make suggestions, and follow the changes.

This blog post is about a new experiment that we will run in the upcoming weeks.

• Experiment name: Suggested Pages

• Test Launch: Next week

• Test Closes: 3 weeks

• Will Be Tested On: New editors - to push them towards becoming loyal editors - and regular editors - to keep them active -

• Hypothesis: Providing editors with a call to action and links to potentially relevant pages after each edit, will increase editor retention and nu…

If you've visited our Closed Wiki page recently, you might have noticed it's been feeling a bit... well, closed off from the rest of Fandom. We heard your feedback, and we're excited to announce that a major refresh is underway! Our UX team is transforming this page to reflect the vibrant Fandom brand and say goodbye to that little remnant of the Monaco skin on Fandom in the middle graphic. Sorry, Monaco!

Tweak: Closed Wiki page design update
Launching: Next week
Premise: The Closed Wiki page is undergoing a much needed redesign. The update aims to modernize the page's aesthetic, aligning it with the current Fandom brand identity.
Designs

Yesterday, I posted a blog announcing design changes to the Popular Pages & Recent Images widgets. We received the results for the Other Like You experiment and have turned the design change live to all users.

Tweak: Unification of Others Like You
Launching: Today!
Premise: We are unifying the designs of these widgets - instead of having similar but different designs, they will have the same design with differing content depending on the widget.
Data: Similarly to the other Unification of experiments, we did not see a massive pageview increase (we saw a slight one, though!), but that is okay because it was not our goal. However, unlike the other two experiments, we tested multiple variants - one with the new design, and one with the new design…

Last month, I announced an experiment we were running to unify the widgets designs for the Popular Pages and Recent Images widgets. As I mentioned in the blog, this is part of our broader effort to make Fandom widgets more visually consistent.

The experiment is complete, and I'm back to announce the rollout!

Tweak: Unification of Popular Pages & Recent Images widget designs
Launching: The new design for Popular Pages went live last week, and the new design for Recent Images will go live this week.
Premise: We are unifying the designs of these widgets - instead of having similar but different designs, they will have the same design with differing content depending on the widget.
Data: In some experiments, our primary goal isn't always to increas…

Hello everyone!

While we’re currently running the third iteration of the experiment to track progress in maps, I’m here to announce another planned enhancement to this interactive feature for every community. Since the end of March, we already announced we were working in parallel, to both experiment with features like progress tracking, but also adding native enhancements to the Interactive Maps tool and for all the communities. The first one was the option to use the full screen to display a map, and we’re currently starting to test how we can embed maps on pages in different ways.

Project Name: New Ways to Embed Interactive Maps on Pages

Test Launch: June (Tentative) *

Type: Early Testing with Voluntary Communities

Will Be Tested On: All logged…

Hi all!

You're hearing a lot from me this week, but hopefully that is a good thing! Today, I am announcing a change we are making to Quizzes. Please look below!

Tweak: Quizzes will be shown on Discussions, Articles, on both

Launching: June 13, 2024

Premise: Previously, Quizzes could only be either enabled and displayed in both Articles and Discussions, or completely disabled for the entire wiki. However, we received feedback from various communities requesting the option to show Quizzes only in Discussions and not in Articles. In response, we have now implemented the ability to enable Quizzes exclusively in Discussions, exclusively in Articles, in both, or to disable them entirely.

If you would like to see this change on your wiki, please either c…

Hello!

The UX team is continued to work on unifying designs for right rail widgets, & this time we've tackled the Others Like You Also Viewed module!

Experiment Name: Unification of Others Like You Also Viewed
Test Launch: Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Test Closes: One Week
Will Be Tested On: 3% of logged out users on desktop
Hypothesis: We believe that creating a single Fandom-ized design for widgets in the right rail will lead to a better user experience. We believe that users will be more interested in visiting others pages if the widgets are branded in a single, Fandom-like style. We began this with design changes to the Recent Images & Popular Pages widgets, and we are continuing here.
Other Notes: We are running two variants - one with the new d…

Hello again!

We have a mobile-based experiment coming through the pipeline this week!

Experiment Name: Mobile Drawer
Test Launch: Thursday, June 6, 2024
Test Closes: 1-2 weeks
Will Be Tested On: 6% of logged out users
Hypothesis: We believe that creating a Mobile Drawer to house widgets and other Fandom offerings outside of the article content will allow fans to either engage or not in a way that is both comfortable and useful for them.
Other Notes: The drawer will expand after the logged out user scrolls past the first paragraph and can be collapsed by clicking the arrow on the right. We are running two variants - one where the mobile drawer will not deploy if the video ad is active, & the other where primary video ads on top are suppressed.
Prel…