Eyo, my lovelies! Another two weeks, another tech blog giving you some insights on a selection of the bugs that got fixed, experiments that are running or upcoming, and other notable tech updates.
This blog may feel a bit on the lighter side than usual, which is partially to be explained by lots of preparation work being done and different countries having days off, as well as Fandom having had its Hackathon last week. In short, that means an event of cross-team collaboration where people just get to work on any and all (crazy?) ideas they may always have wanted to work on. Regardless, there is still info to share with all of you, so let's go!
The Platform team finished rolling out a DPL optimization to all English wikis. This optimization affects only the DPLs that specify template in the include= and includepage= parameters, which is used on most of the longest rendering pages at Fandom. Release on all the other languages will be happening over the next weeks.
Recent Fixes[]
"Community site image" section in theme designer is now also translated in Russian.
The spacing between list items on History and Contributions pages has been unified once again.
VisualEditor no longer makes internal requests to generate Parsoid HTML, which leads to a nice little performance boost.
The global messages in the down-left corner now have a unified border design.
Fixes in Development[]
As part of the map marker process, we will be introducing a limit to the marker ID length to a certain number of characters. We do this due to database requirements, as unchecked, long ID markers can break the URL (max length) for marker copy, as well as make the marker progress tracking database larger.
[Experiment Improvement]: Earlier this week, we changed the storage location for the marker progress from your browser to the Fandom database tied to your Fandom account. Your progress will thus be accessible from any device as long as you log in. Read more about the marker progress tracking storage in the database
[Upcoming] Structured Data with Structured Quotes: A big item at last year's Community Connect, structured data means information that is organized and structured using a predefined format, thus providing a clear understanding of the relationship between data points and allowing for it to be consistently understandable across wikis and topics. While we already have some structured data wiki tools (Semantic MediaWiki, Cargo, and Dynamic Page Lists), they don't scale and are often inconsistent. If that problem was solved, if the content you all so expertly provide could be created using certain tags provided by Fandom, then it could be used for purposes such as recirculation, suggestions, search engine ranking, editing assistance, etc. and this even across multiple Fandom wikis. Imagine using the content created on a specific wiki across multiple Fandom wikis with just a few clicks and keeping it updated without having to edit all the individual wikis. Under the guise of "having to start somewhere", we are focusing on a new Structured Quote template that will eventually have a new user interface allowing for easy quote creation by filling out some fields. We will elaborate further on this entire Structured Content initiative in the weeks to come.
After the previously mentioned testing issues and delays, we're happy to announce that we will be resuming our experiments, the first ones being:
The fixed-height TOC variation of the experiment
[Ongoing Experiment] Collapsing the Table of Contents (ToC) on desktop: We hypothesize that by bringing the content higher on the page by removing or collapsing the "in content" ToC, logged-out users will find the content with less scrolling and will therefore spend more time on the page. Three variants ā a default collapsed view, a fixed height with an expand/collapse button, and the current experience ā are tested. It launched Wednesday May 29 and will run on desktop only for one week for 3% of logged-out users.
[Ongoing Experiment] Global Navigation redesign. To recap, on desktop only, 3% of randomized logged-in and logged-out users will see a horizontal bar at the top with a more prominent search bar next to the "Create a new wiki" button, Recent:Changes and notification bell icon, and the user profile. While scrolling, the Top nav bar will be hidden in favor of the local Wiki navigation. Read more about the global nav redesign
The old (left) and new (right) widget design side by side
[Ongoing Experiments] Unification of Recent Images and Popular Pages: To cater to a community request to better distinguish widgets populated by Fandom from user-created content and ads, as well as increase brand awareness, we redesigned and Fandom-ized the right rail widgets. We are monitoring if the new design at the very least does no harm and at best may entice users to engage more with the wiki content. Similar redesign experiments are planned for other widgets, such as the "Others like you also viewed". These two experiments launched Thursday May 30 and will run on desktop only for one week for 3% of logged-out users.
That's it for the past weeks! Per usual, if you encounter something that feels off about the platform, please report it by sending in a bug report, reach out to your Community Manager, contact the Product Support Owner on their Wall/talk page, or just simply sound off in the comments here. As always, thank you for helping us by continuing to communicate. Happy editing, everyone!
Lostris is a Wiki Team member at Fandom. When not online, she lives to travel, play roller derby, and escape the world by watching anything that has a good plot, good acting, and preferably a ton of sassy one-liners.
