This week we're introducing a new way to track the health and well-being of Wikia Communities — WAM! The Wikia Activity Monitor (WAM) gives a Wikia Community a score between 0 and 100, based on a variety of measurements, including page views, contributions, and level of user activity. WAM scores are calculated daily for the top 5000, and the scores are displayed at http://www.wikia.com/WAM. Scores can also be seen on each of our Video Games, Entertainment and Lifestyle hub pages. Like all of the things that factor into the calculation, the scores and rankings are sensitive to real-world events and so will change frequently.

For example, it's no surprise to see the Wikia's Mad Men wiki score going up due to the show's new season starting re…

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I’m Stanley, and it has been a busy day for me! I'm the Mobile Product Manager at Wikia, and today I am happy to announce not only the release of the My Wikia iPad App, but also the second version of our Game Guides app!

Back before Wikia was focused on Mobile, Federico, now our Lead Mobile Developer, had an idea to make an app that would give gamers quick and easy access to the rich information produced by Wikia’s awesome editor community, anytime and anywhere. Federico made Wikia Game Guides as a weekend hack and the Product Team decided to launch the app thinking it would at least get some valuable feedback.

Over 300,000 users downloaded Wikia Game Guides in its first year. This may not be impressive when comparing with heavy hitters in t…

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Exciting news! Today marks the release of the first version of My Wikia for iPad, our official flagship app.

For the past couple of years, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning how users first discovered Wikia and ultimately, how they became loyal Wikians like you. A prolific contributor and fellow Product Manager, Trevor (Ohmyn0), became a Wikia-addict as he was watching LOST during college and this led to prominent roles on Scrubs Wiki and Arrested Development Wiki. I often wonder what would have happened if he had never stumbled upon Wikia after watching that one LOST episode. What a shame it would have been for him to never click the edit button?

We should never have to ask that.

What Wikians do on a daily basis is truly amazing and the rest o…

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"Mobile is the future!", "Mobile is the future of the world!", or "Mobile will dominate the future!"

You might have read similarly-titled articles around the web in the last couple of years. From new apps to skins, mobile is the latest big buzz. Here at Wikia, we have been similarly intrigued, and today I am happy to announce we have our own exciting mobile news!

We at Wikia are always looking to innovate and give you, the community, the best experience possible. Whether it's reading, editing, or just enjoying a chat with your favorite wiki community; we're always thinking of new ways for our users to enjoy their content and be proud of what they've created together. That's why we're developing the Wikia App!

This will be our flagship app that …

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At Wikia we're continually exploring different ways to help communities connect, collaborate and grow. An important component of that effort is making sure that readers and contributors know where to start interacting with a community, and how to keep up with all of the latest developments. Many of you have asked when you'll be able to try out the new Forum on your own wikis, and we're pleased to announce that the day has finally arrived! Our new Forum feature is now available to enable in the Labs section of WikiFeatures.

• 1 What is the new Forum all about?
• 2 What happens when you enable the Forum?
• 3 What's next for the new Forum?
• 4 Update: December 3

One word: Communication! This update to the Forum concept is meant to both encourage participation…

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You may have noticed a lot more videos popping up around Wikia lately (such as these awesome videos on halo). We have been working hard to partner with professional producers in order to offer your community relevant video on a variety of topics. Why video? Video is an exciting way to chronicle and curate around topics you love. It adds a new dimension to your storytelling and documentation that complements the text and images currently on wikis.

However, when you showcase videos found randomly on the web there is a risk of it being copyrighted material which can be taken down at any time. When this happens, it causes broken video links on your wiki. We’ve heard your frustration around this and are offering you legitimately licensed video f…

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One of the most common questions we encounter here on Wikia is "How do I attract more people to my wiki?" In the past we've posted some pretty sweet guides as well as created a space for wikis to ask others to join them. We would now like to introduce you to a new and exciting feature we hope will help your community grow and flourish!

Back in April, we redesigned the main page of to feature some of our most popular and interesting wikis. We always had the intention of opening the space up to anyone who wished to show off their wiki. Today we're pleased to announce our latest feature, Promote!

Promote allows any admin to submit their wiki to be featured on the main page of . To do so, visit the admin dashboard on your wiki, then click the Pr…

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Hi folks: I'm Danny, one of the Product Managers at Wikia, and my team has been working this summer on a new Forum feature. We've got an early demo version up for you to try out today, and we'd love to know what you think!

As I'm sure you know, wiki-wide discussions are really important. There are many decisions that are made by the community at large, from design to content structure, and drives to engage new users. MediaWiki's standard Forum namespace is basically just blank pages that you can put templates on -- they don't offer a lot of the features that a Forum usually does.

The Forum we're working on offers a more efficient way to have wiki-wide conversations:

• Discussions are threaded, so you can follow individual conversations rather th…

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As Dan discussed yesterday in a post about the big picture of search development, we are now investing in improvements to search at Wikia. Search is more than just a way to navigate to a specific page -- it’s also a way to discover new content, browse related articles, and explore a wiki.

Our goal with improving search over the next couple of months is to bring Wikia’s search not only up to industry standards, but also to a place where our communities get the most benefit out of it on both a local and global scale. Today’s update is still part of the early stages, and we have more in the works coming soon.

Here’s what’s new right now:

We now have a global search with grouped results. Previously, if you searched for a wiki on the Wikia.com hom…

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Hi everyone,

My name is Dan Baran, and I’m the Director of what we call the “Platform Team” here at Wikia. We focus on systems that support multiple front end features -- one of which is search. The recent improvements we’ve made represent many months of hard work and careful decision making. As with many foundational systems, it was necessary to weigh the options of integrating an external search service, versus developing our own (based on a Solr/Lucene core, for you tech types). It was not an easy decision, but in the end, we decided that having fine-grained control over our search tool outweighed all other factors. Wikis, as documents, do things a little differently than other content systems, and the only way we’re going to be able to …

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