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Brandon Rhea Brandon Rhea 12 June 2018
46

Why Social Media is Important For Communities

Wikians are often at the epicenter of their favorite fandoms. You represent the biggest experts there are, not to mention that you have some of the most intense passions for pop culture in the world. That's why it's not very surprising to know that social media is an important tool for your community. What better way is there to talk to other fans and let them know about your community?

Every day, we talk to fans on our own brand accounts, @getfandom and @Wikia, and we've learned a great deal about the importance of engaging with an audience on social media. As social media becomes more and more important in the evolving internet landscape, I wanted to share some of what we've learned with you.


When you have a well-established community, you…


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Rupert Giles Rupert Giles 10 September 2015
21

Introducing Curated Main Pages

Greetings Wikians! I’m very excited to announce a new feature today - Curated Main Pages on mobile devices.

For most communities the main page is its single most viewed page. Four out of the top five pages on Wikia are main pages, in fact, and that makes sense — a search for “Star Wars wiki” is very likely to return the main page as the first result.

Main pages on desktop are typically a large collection of content, galleries, templates, and design elements, representing each community very well. Unfortunately the styling that makes them look so distinct on desktop often results in a less-than-stellar mobile experience. Given that more than half of our users now access Wikia on something other than desktop, this tool aims to construct a high…

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BertH BertH 17 June 2015
17

Update your Facebook widget

Hi Wikians!

Many of you have created Facebook pages for your communities to help get news and updates to your readers and editors. Some of you also use your main page to promote the Facebook page of your community's topic. If you use the Like Box plugin/widget to show Facebook content on your wikia, you'll need to update to a newer plugin from Facebook.

Next week (on June 23), Facebook will drop support for the Like Box, which used the tags |}

Got questions? Let us know in the comments. Need help? Let us know via Special:Contact.

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Sammylau Sammylau 11 April 2013
8

Adding a Fancy Countdown

First of all, I've written this countdown for my wiki at the very beginning because the "official" one suggested by Wikia isn't cool to fit in the Chinese language. (We don't have commas in the date/time!)

You may use this timer to do a vivid countdown on an upcoming event, the release date of a new game or episode or movie or the remaining time of the ongoing activities.


  • 1 Feature
  • 2 Setup
  • 3 Making as Template
  • 4 Limitation
  • 5 Demo



As the name suggests, it's a countdown timer. It's simple and it works. It got a dynamic flipping effect!


  • You have to be an admin of the wiki
  • Insert the code into the MediaWiki:common.js page of your own wiki: (or extend it with proper syntax if you already using some plugins)

The time value should be a time in the near future. …





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DangerousDangerously DangerousDangerously 11 April 2013
10

Playing A Questionnaire Game when the Chat is Dead

As those who frequent any chat know, sometimes the chat goes quiet, or it "dies." When the chat is "dead" many people like to state something along the lines of "Dead chat." When people say that the chat is dead, more often than not, the chat remains dead. When there is no discussion going on, a good idea for getting a discussion started is to play a game. Not a long game or an in depth game, but a game that allows all the users in chat to participate if they choose too. This game can also be played when there is a topic going on that is getting heated and needs to be changed.

Appropriate times
  • When the chat is dead
  • When a topic needs changing
    • Do not try to change the topic just because you don't like it. If other users are participating in the…
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Rappy Rappy 20 September 2020
1

Guide to Infoboxes

As a member of the Community Support Team and long time wiki editor, one of the areas I most often get questions about are Templates. Templates allow for you to create a consistent look across your wikia, but can be tricky to set up. Here I would like to offer steps of how to customize a basic template called an infobox. This guide is meant for those with at least a basic knowledge of templates and will cover some of the more advanced techniques. It may be helpful to read about Wikia's default infobox first. This template is included on all new(er) wikias and is set up to allow quick and easy infobox creation.

Infoboxes are essentially templates that are generally organized to sit in the top right of an article to summarize what the article…

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BertH BertH 8 January 2013
8

Wikia Help 101

Many of you have probably consulted a help page on Wikia at some point. You might have done that here on Community Central, on your home wiki, or on a wiki you just founded. Did you ever wonder how the same help pages exist in all of those different places? When you're done reading this, you'll know all that and more!


Until recently, there was a separate wiki called the Help Wiki where all of the Wikia Help articles resided. A few months ago, we migrated all of that content onto Community Central in the Help namespace so that they could be more easily monitored and maintained. Through a nifty extension called Shared Help, the content of these pages is automatically shared out onto the Help namespaces of all other Wikia wikis. This allows us…


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Semanticdrifter Semanticdrifter 14 March 2013
19

Understanding Fair Use

Any discussion of copyright on the internet usually comes around to the subject of fair use. Some people (usually the owners of the copyright) conveniently forget that fair use exists, or tend to ignore it completely. Other people (usually avid reusers of copyrighted material) attempt to invoke "fair use" as a magic word that excuses any and all appropriation of content. The truth about fair use falls somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

Fair use is a limitation of copyright law that allows the public to freely use portions of a copyrighted work in certain situations. The internet as we understand it today would not be possible without the doctrine of fair use, and it is an important check on the reach of copyright. However, fair …

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Sannse Sannse 12 June 2018
22

A Wiki Citizen's Guide to Communities

We often talk of wikis as "communities", but I don't know that we stop and think about what that means.

A community originally meant a group of people living and working together in the same area. But Wikia certainly isn't that, there are people from all over the world here, and you are probably more likely to come across people from the other side of the world than you are your hometown.

Communities are more than just people connected by a common location, they are also people linked by a common interest, or occupation, or belief. We are a community because we care about wikis, and using wikis to create awesome sites about things that matter to us.

And within the wider Wikia community, there are many smaller communities. From Adventure Time …

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BertH BertH 19 September 2012
164

Layout and navigation updates coming October 3

Over the past few months we have been exploring ways to make the site layout more consistent to support easy development of new features and functionality. As a result, on October 3 we will be releasing a sitewide update to a few aspects of the Wikia skin. Since many of you have customized your wiki's layout, you will likely want to adjust your background and customizations to account for these changes. The backgrounds provided in Theme Designer will be updated to accomodate these changes. If your wiki has a custom background, it may need to be updated.

We know that any change to the look and feel of your wiki needs to be considered carefully, so we have grouped these updates together into one release so that you only have to make one round…

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