| |
Hey, guys!
So I am currently visiting Wikia HQ in San Francisco, for Wikia's first ever annual Community Connect gathering of administrators from a wide variety of wikis. I've been in their offices, talked to their staff, and talked to the admins of various other sites. The purpose of this thread is just to update everyone on what I've learnt, what I've talked about, and what you people would like me to talk about.
- DAY 1: 9th September
- PortableInfoboxes. This one is the big one. You may or may not know of PortableInfoboxes, which is essentially some infobox syntax similar to gallery syntax that's meant to be simple and easy to use across the board, and display things perfectly for both desktop and mobile devices. I'm skeptical about how we can convert our stupidly complex infoboxes, but as someone who's worked with and written lots of them, I am going to have a chance to talk to Wikia Staff soon about our specific ones and how we can work on some sort of compromise-ish, so WATCH THIS SPACE.
- Portable data. I'm super excited about this. One thing Wikia are working on, and specifically with infoboxes as they've discussed so far, is having things interpret data specifically as data and have them be searchable across the entire site. I'm talking about people being able to search for, for instance, enemies with over 10,000 HP in Final Fantasy VII easily, and to be able to very easily call up the PSOne translation of Ultima Weapon in Final Fantasy VI, all stuff like that. This seems very up in the air and early, but they're working on the stuff we've wanted for ages already.
- Discussions. These are things mostly coming with the FFWiki's mobile app, but basically, they're planning on new discussion things that seem to have a very sleek design and look (imo) much better than their current forums and blogs. They're not hosted in a wiki namespace at all, but in a separate /d/ url as opposed to /wiki/. Also, these are not forced, so we'll probably still stick to talk pages with talk bubbles and signatures and blah, but even if we did, we'd have /d/ separate. Oh, and also, this would completely replace Answers wikis. They realise as much as us how little love they've gotten.
- JavaScript. They didn't just apologise for the hack, but they're taking a more hands-on approach with JS. This means lots of things, it allows a certain 'test' for new JS scripts so that Wikia can check them for security checks and terms of service violations, but more importantly, other users can peer-review them. As I understand it, this isn't forced either. Another thing they talked about was making it much easier for users to learn JS with tools provided, and to copy JS to other wikis. Neat stuff.
- Fan events. This is stuff BlueHighwind's already involved in, but they had a huge talk about fan events and interactions with the community and the wiki. Apparently, us attendees were already recognised as some sort of superfan, and any editor is recognised by these companies as a super important fan who they'd love to get feedback from and stuff. Furthermore, Wikia could make a bigger thing out of our Magicite Madness tournaments and stuff.
- Mobile. Lots on this. But it's mostly about using portable data and the like versus stuff that looks trash on desktops. I don't have much specific stuff, because they didn't seem to specific today (more on Friday?), but getting stuff to display well on mobile and on desktop and all those tools are in the works.
- Sprites and models. I don't want to say much, this is very up in the air, but Square Enix and Wikia already love each other. I've discussed the possibility of, instead of us hacking the games to download and then upload models, they can send them to us in one big zip file. The staff seem to think Square Enix would actually prefer that over us hacking their games, in fact, and would probably be cool with it, but don't think this is a promise because that's in even earlier stages than some of their other stuff.
- Other facts. We had loads of talk about demographics across the community, and there was tons of interesting factoids everywhere. One thing I learnt was that categories, statistically speaking, are basically not being used as navigation at all, while interlinking and navboxes and the like were the main way in which users transfer around the wiki. Another was that there's a very strong correlation between how well the main page is designed - at least on mobile - and how many users stay on the wiki, or just get confused and leave. Since we have our mobile subpage, we're already on the right track! Go us. Finally, mobiles make up more than half of our userbase and it's rising while desktop is staying stagnant views-wise.
- DAY 2: 10th September
- SEO stuff. Tons of info on boosting search results and whatever. Linking to pages isn't just important for directing users there, it's how lots of Google's bots will calculate which pages to display higher; the more places linking to a page, the higher the page is ranked as a good source of information. Also, redirect cleaning is important.
- Apps. When you see the video, you'll notice I forgot our apps existed. Oh well. They're important, they're used by tons of people, have received great feedback, and now we need to work on the apps.
- Other facts. Yeah, day 2 didn't really have as much info, honestly. I learnt the FFWiki was ranked 24th highest Wikia community and peaked at 8th, in terms of how much it's used and whatever. This means quality of the site, of the navigation, and popularity. We alone can't make the FF games popular, but we can make our site better. So, we're doing pretty well! Go us! To find this info, it's wikia.com/WAM. I also learnt that they've apparently cancelled Venus skin, but learnt a lot from the process and are thinking of other ways to make portable site designs.
- DAY 3: 11th September
- New contribution tools. This was mostly related back to the structured/portable data stuff. It'll be beyond portable infoboxes, but it's very, very early and very hypothetical. Still exciting.
- Flags. Okay, get this: instead of adding a template for maintenance stuff, stubs, and for the sideicons, flags will allow them to be built into the pages without needing to do that. This to me is very exciting, and as they begin to expand the functionality, I'm very excited.
- JS use. I was shown this in a 1 to 1 session because they found out I've edited the JS on the wiki a lot, but basically it was just about the new review system. It seems a lot easier than I expected, it'll make editing very easy but will only slightly slow down the time it takes for JS edits to get published. The feature is good, though, I like it.
- Other facts. This was another short day, not much, really. Except that I'm becoming a Wikia Star, which isn't so much important to everyone else. Anyway, yeah, Wikia are great dudes, I thoroughly enjoyed the event, etc.
I'll update as the event happens and close the thread once it's over, and update with the videos after the event! Please let me know if there's anything you'd want me to ask them. I'm speaking to them all personally, it's very one-on-one, they're all super friendly people and very much like our editors in fact, none of them seemed like the greedy corporate fucks whoring out to advertisers that some people (past me...) would think they are at all, they're interested to hear what you have to say. As a guy who does work on, well, lots of areas on the wiki and all the technical stuff, I'm probably among the best to represent us so I've already asked them probably lots of stuff as it is, but I'd love to know what else everyone has to say. Thanks! | |
