User blog:Antonio R. Castro

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…

Hey everybody!

We are running a new experiment on the platform:

Experiment name: Welcome messages for first-time editors

Test Launch: upcoming days

Test Clases: 3 weeks

Well Be Tested On: 100% of the editors after their first edit on a wiki with Message Wall

Hypothesis: We believe that welcoming editors after their first edit on a new wiki in a way that feels personal and relevant to the situation will make them feel welcome in this community, less clueless as to what to do next, and so motivate them to edit more.

Other Notes: After their very first edit on a wiki they have not edited before (regardless of whether they’ve edited other wikis on Fandom!), users will receive a message to their wall, authored by a Community staff member, thanking them for…

Hey everybody!

New update about an upcoming feature that you will see next Wednesday in our wikis:

Tweak: VisualEditor performance improvements

Launching: March 6, 2024

Premise: We believe that a faster-loading editor will make editing more appealing to new and experienced editors, leading to an increased success rate in the editor, and a higher number of editors overall.

Data: The User Generated Content team experimented with loading the VisualEditor before accessing it. During the experiment, the VisualEditor was preloading when users were hovering the top right edit button and other edit entries. It was limited to the users using the VE as predefined editor.

In this experiment, we saw around 4% increase in the number of editors completing an edit…

Hey everybody!

We are going to run a new experiment on the platform:

Experiment Name: Simplified editor for first-time editors

Test Launch: Wednesday, Nov 29, 2023

Test Closes: One Week

Will Be Tested On: 50% of the editors opening the Visual Editor

Hypothesis: We believe that providing first-time editors with a far simpler, more familiar editor interface will enable more of them to successfully publish their first edit, increasing the number of new editors per month.

Other Notes: We are moving/hiding any non-essential elements of the 2017 Visual Editor (the default editor for newly registered users), and increasing the editor’s similarity to other text editors users are familiar with (like Microsoft Word or Google Docs). To do this, we have analyzed …