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 to those wikis by creating content, but they have not been able to interact with other users in Discussions. This protection has been quite effective to limit the negative interactions, and we want to extend it to other areas. This is a crucial step in ensuring that all participants can engage in a responsible and respectful manner.
We understand that these changes may affect some users, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. However, we believe that prioritizing the safety and well-being of our younger members is paramount. We encourage all users to verify their email addresses promptly to continue enjoying full access to our communities.
- Tweak: Restriction to edit wikis aimed at children for non-verified accounts.
- Launching: Monday, July 8th
- Premise: Adding an extra step to participate in Discussions has proven to be very effective to limit negative interactions in wikis aimed at children. Extending the limitation also to edit wiki content, will prevent other kind of vandalizations where malicious users publish non-friendly content for a young audience.
- Details: Only emailconfirmed accounts will be able to contribute in wikis labeled as being "aimed at children". Non confirmed accounts won't be able to edit articles, publish article comments, upload new files or contact other users via Message Walls or Talk pages.
Those non-confirmed accounts will be alerted with a notice indicating they will need to verify their emails before contributing in the wiki. And they will be directed to Special:Preferences in order to confirm the email.
We know this measure will reduce the number of active editors on those wikis. But this feels like an acceptable tradeoff in order to protect our younger audience.
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