From time to time we like to give the community some insight into the people at Wikia who you don't see posting on the staff blog regularly (such as Trella's 'A Day in the Life' series). Today I’ll be talking with the visual designers who worked on the My Wikia app, and finding out more about the process of creating the newest way to experience Wikia communities. We have Elsa Kawai, Wikia’s Creative Director, Mika Kozma, Lead Interaction Designer, and Danny Chung, Art Director.

How did the three of you collaborate while working on the My Wikia project?

It took more than just 3 of us to create this product. Stanley Tran and [former designer] Deb Lin were also a part of this process, and of course there was the engineering team involved that a…

Read more >

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…

Read more >

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…

Read more >

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…

Read more >

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Wednesday, so we’re posting this on a Tuesday to give you advance notice. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

• In the image addition tool, searches were also returning videos in the results.
• When editing a page with any 'intro' text (like, MediaWiki:Newarticletext), the editor lost an area of equivalent height from the bottom. Most instances of this bug have been corrected. If you see any other instances of this please let us know.
• Special:CreatePage will now give an error when attempting to create a page that already exists.
• Various minor fixes related to the recent layout and navigation …

Read more >