VisualEditor - the past, present and future
Good morning Wikia,
Today we're bringing you an update on the VisualEditor (VE) - what's happened in the last few months, where we're at now, and where we're going next.
Over the past few months, our team has been hard at work adding features, fixing bugs, and improving the general feel of the editing experience. A combination of the work at the Wikimedia Foundation and our own work means the VE is now faster, has better media and template tools, a reorganized toolbar, better theming, and much more. We've also updated the editing preferences, allowing users more control over their experience.
More recently, we have started rolling VE out as the default editor for anonymous users - starting at the smallest wikias, and working our way up. At th…
Announcing Our New Lyrics App For Fans, By Fans
Wikia music fans have a lot to be excited about this month. Our largest music community, LyricWiki, recently turned eight years old! To celebrate, we’re excited to release — today — a completely redesigned lyrics app called Lyrically. Along with the new mobile app, the LyricWiki community will get a fresh new look and name, LyricWikia.
Since its launch in April 2006, LyricWikia has grown to over 2.7 million pages and has been used over a billion times by music fans around the world. Not only is LyricWikia one of our largest fan communities, it was also the first fan community to appear on a second screen, bringing more than a million fan-created lyrics to Wikia's first ever mobile app. Because of this, our mobile team was thrilled to have an…
Updates to the Wikia Mobile experience
Can you believe it? 2014 is now knocking on the door and we’re anticipating that in this upcoming year, more than half of all Wikia visits will be coming from mobile devices. For many of you, this may seem to be a surprise, especially when thinking about how mobile devices comprised less than five percent of total Wikia visits just a couple of years ago, but the reality is that each and every one of us now shares the responsibility of making sure our wikias are ready for the inevitable dominance of mobile traffic. And let’s not treat this as some change we have to cope with, but a challenging opportunity to get even more fans of our work. Just in case you’re curious, here’s how traffic share stands today:
Please understand that these releas…
New VisualEditor now available in Labs
For the last couple of months we've been talking about the new VisualEditor and its role in Wikia's evolution: helping to make every community a collaborative space for all types of users. Your feedback from the beta release has been very helpful for setting priorities, identifying bugs, and making sure the feature is ready to take its next step into the spotlight. And that time has come!
The new VisualEditor is now available to enable in the Labs section of WikiFeatures. We've been making updates over the past few weeks, to make sure this feature is ready to be the default editing experience for communities that choose to activate it. Those include:
- Adding options to change the filename and set the license for newly added images
- Making sure …
Licensed Video Swap Update
Back when we announced Wikia Video we wanted to offer a solution to videos that get taken down due to Copyright issues from sites such as YouTube by providing 100% properly licensed, high quality videos for you to use on your communities.
Shortly after, we released another tool to streamline the process allowing you to replace non-licensed videos with our licensed videos –Licensed Video Swap (LVS). This new tool allowed admins to quickly swap videos from outside providers to the same (or very similar) video that exists in our library at Wikia Video.
We are happy to announce that last Wednesday we yet again updated Licensed Video Swap (LVS) with a few new features to further make the process even easier for you and your communities.
The update…
The Road to VisualEditor
It's been exciting to see all of the comments and feedback about VisualEditor, and encouraging to hear that so many of you think it will be beneficial for newer users on Wikia communities. Be assured that source editing will remain available to users who prefer it, and we're working hard to make sure that VisualEditor can serve the needs of a wide range of contributors. Today I'd like to highlight some of the challenges and achievements on the road to creating this update to the WYSIWYG editing experience on Wikia. We'll also touch upon the next steps of the beta release that we have coming up.
Wikia engineers Christian and Inez have been part of a long-term collaboration with the talented folks at the Wikimedia Foundation. Together they de…
Wikia's evolution continues with VisualEditor
In the beginning, there was wikitext. Way back at the end of the last century, who might have suspected that this novel markup language would one day be the framework for the amazing array of fan communities that comprise Wikia, or the vast repository of human knowledge that is Wikipedia? As platforms for collaboration grow and evolve, the tools we use to contribute to them have to do the same. For almost two years, Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation have been working together on an editing experience that's elegant, intuitive and most importantly, shows the user what the published page will really look like. Today we're excited to announce the first beta release of the VisualEditor feature on Wikia.
Making a first edit on a Wikia community s…
Improving the Tablet Experience
As we began to define Project Darwin and discuss potential changes in site layout, one thing became clear: the ever-growing number of users on tablets demands a tablet experience that lives up to its use. In August 2013, almost 8% of the total traffic on Wikia came from tablet devices. 6 months ago, that number was just slightly over 6% and current trends point to a steady increase in tablet page views over the coming months.
Currently (without fluid layout), tablets get what looks like a "zoomed out" version of what you see on desktop computers. This makes an article tiny and hard to read, while links and buttons are small and hard to click. Readers usually need to use multitouch gestures to zoom in on the article content area in order t…
Licensed Video Swap
Have you ever watched a video online, thought it would be great for your wiki, added it and then come back the next day only to find that the video has been taken down due to copyright issues? This happens often with videos from sites like YouTube, where the content is not properly licensed. To offer you another solution, we’ve created Wikia Video, which contains 100% licensed and high quality videos for you to use on your community.
This week we’ve released another tool to make it easier for you to replace your non-licensed videos with our licensed videos—Licensed Video Swap (LVS). This is a new tool that allows admins to quickly swap videos from outside providers to the same (or very similar) video that exists on Wikia Video. How does thi…
Darwin - The Next Evolution of Wikia
Wikia communities are evolving every day: fresh content is added, new fans participate for the first time, and seasoned experts find different ways to share their knowledge. Change and growth is at the heart of Wikia, and the platform for all of this amazing collaboration must also keep evolving. We’ve been listening to your feedback and collecting usage data about what works in our current product, and where we can make improvements to Wikia's look and feel. After taking a hard, honest look at all of this information, it’s time to start bringing those improvements to life with an initiative we’re calling Darwin.
Darwin will be an ongoing project to improve on a set of goals that are important to all of us: optimizing the user experience no …