Hey everyone! February certainly was eventful here at Fandom with the celebration of the accomplishments of Black and Afro-American people, the commemoration of which was concluded with an in-depth panel discussion on Black Voices & Content in Genre IP (read more about that here). As your Wiki Representative, I want to make sure you continue to be aware with what lives on Fandom, so buckle up for some more exciting news announcements!
For this year's Woman's History Month, Fandom tends to do its part to "break the bias" and spotlight creators, franchises, and women behind-the-scenes at Fandom and editors who forge a path that support women's equality. Read all about the exiting things we have lined up for it here!
With UCP, Fandom upgraded from MediaWiki 1.19 to 1.33, which was a massive jump. However, to prevent that from ever happening again and keeping the community impact as low as possible, Fandom is committed to staying up-to-date, which is why we're starting the update to MediaWiki 1.37 in the course of March. The first batch of test wikis is scheduled to be migrated by the end of the month, with the top 5,000 big wikis to follow in April, and the rest during Spring. Prior to the migration, a banner will appear across the site informing the community of the upcoming change along with a link to a help page explaining what changes to expect. These will be mostly backend changes, but read all about it here!
In line with the research that concluded that audiences are more likely to engage with dynamic, interactive content like a quiz than static content, Fandom wants to help wikis capitalize on that by offering engaging quizzes to our readers! At this moment, these will only appear on top communities on selected pages for logged-out users. For now, quizzes can only be created by Fandom staff, Wiki Representatives, and Wiki Specialists, as we want to ensure that the product works to engage people without expecting the community to do the necessary work for us. If you are interested to know if your community has any quizzes and on which pages, don't hesitate to aks me. Likewise, if you find there to be something wrong with a quiz in terms of accuracy, let me know which quiz and on which page, so I can make the necessary adjustments. In general, this is still largely a test to see if they'll engage people as much as we hope they will, so we want to hear from you. After you took a quiz, please share your thoughts with me. I'm especially interested in hearing your idea on future updates we can make to the feature! If you wish to read more about the research and idea behind the quizzes, read all about it here!
This was a lot to take in, so if I lost you somewhere along the lines, don't hesitate to reach out, and I'll be happy to explain and get you back on track. As usual, I love to hear back from you as a reaction on this post or any other means you have to contact me!