The future of Central Wikia

KyleH January 23, 2010

Hi everyone,

Last month, Sannse posted on the forum to ask what you thought the future of Central should look like. It's a subject that we've been thinking about a lot at Wikia because we don't believe the current system supports the community in the best way possible. Today, I'd like to share some plans for the future of Central.

First of all, the current Central will be split in to two different sites: 1) a corporate site, with information such as Wikia's "About Us" page and Terms of Use, and 2) a community site, designed to help Wikia community members find each other and find help. The corporate site will be entirely new, live at www.wikia.com and have a custom skin and homepage designed to show off "what's hot" on Wikia and make it easier for visitors to find the content they are interested in.

The community site will move to community.wikia.com and undergo a bit of a transformation:

The homepage of community.wikia.com will be the "Community Portal" for all of Wikia. We will prominently feature forums, a revised help and FAQ, staff blog posts, and other areas important to the editing community. In response to Sannse's forum post, some expressed frustration about having to refer certain types of questions to Special:Contact. Community.wikia.com should make it easier for people to find information and get help from both staff and users.
The new homepage will prominently feature cross-wiki search. The current directory pages (also known as "blue box pages") will be removed. Our research shows that these pages often rank higher in Google than actual wikis and that readers who encounter them tend to leave Wikia rather than clicking once more to visit any of the wikis on the blue box page. So they are frustrating visitors and confusing Google.
The community site will receive a face-lift. We'll be applying a skin which will closely resemble the new homepage skin and provide a more consistent user experience. We'll also be freshening the pages on community.wikia.com to make them as helpful as possible.

All these changes will take a while - so we're targeting to have everything done by the end of February. Please bear with us as we create some dust -- we'll work hard to make sure the core functions of Central, such as the forums, are not interrupted.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions!

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Retrieved from "http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:KyleH/The_future_of_Central_Wikia"

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dcv

April 12, 2010 by Elson6666
MtaA knows that; he just thought the links on the main page should go to the wikis' main pages by default. :)

March 10, 2010 by The 888th Avatar
@MtaÄ - You can change that in your Preferences " MISC " tab -- Remove the check mark by the " Disable my redirect to My Home " and your searches will go to the Main Page""

March 10, 2010 by Jrooksjr
I'm going to second what Supermorff said. Since the blue boxes were removed, it's easy to get thousands of results when doing a search, and the larger wikis are going to drown out the smaller wikis. For example, I stopped counting at 25 results for "Lois Lane" on dc.wikia.com and 22 on smallville.wikia.com.
The change from the blue boxes to the cross-wiki search bar has changed the function from "find me a wiki on this topic" to "find me all possible pages on every single wiki that has this information". The search bar could provide that function again if it would group the results together, presenting the top result for a wiki and offering a link to other pages from that wiki. AltaVista does it. Bing and Yahoo try to do it but can spread out results from the same site. Google has their "similar" link, but that starts going off on tangents, too.
Right now, Special:Newwikis is more useful for this kind of search, but it has two problems. First, there's no link to it on the main Wikia page, so one one will find it unless they know to manually type in the address by hand. Second, it presents the list in reverse order with the newest wiki listed first, which gives us the opposite problem: the newer wikis are going to drown out the larger, more established wikis.

February 27, 2010 by RRabbit42
The weirdness of Central's search has become a little annoying. Trying to navigate between pages etc. is becoming pretty tedious. Checking the "Search Community Central only" box often doesn't work properly. Are there any improvements planned in this area?

February 25, 2010 by The 888th Avatar
Any link to another wiki on the new home page should go to the main page of the wiki, not to my home.
Also, the category issue is very bad for all languages beyond English, since you can barely find wikis/content. See this example, it's quite a unique (German) subject, and barely info appears (and if, just English pages). It should show http://meerundmehr.wikia.com/wiki/MeerUndMehr

February 18, 2010 by MtaÄ
It is now more difficult find smaller wikis without specifically searching for them, for instance, one wiki I am an admin of, the Zuda Database, cannot be found anywhere on Central or Entertainment.
In the past I found several wikis I was interested in by browsing categories.

February 15, 2010 by Level
Yes, those broken redirects that weren't caught during the main deletion run will be handled when the special page updates.

February 10, 2010 by Grunny
I think they're going to handle the broken redirects after they're done with the clearing of the blue boxes.

February 10, 2010 by Brandon Rhea
The Create Wiki page needs more options. Mainly in the "Category" section, for example Entertainment should have sub categories like: books, movies, cartoons, comics, manga, anime, fanfiction... and so on, or maybe even check boxes(instead of a dropdown list) as they could be in multiple categories.
This would then help with finding wiki on the List_of_Wikia page, since you could sort by more than just the Language. I've recently seen quite a few anime wiki created under Lifestyle instead of Entertainment for some reason. Some of these categories were manually added to the blue box pages could still be used to help categories existing wikis(even if they were deleted they're still in the DB history, or maybe they could be exported to a temp wiki for user categorizing)

BTW, there are still blue box redirect pages that haven't been deleted yet.

February 9, 2010 by Sxerks
history
These suggestions are quite valid. I acknowledge the first suggestion - searching for wikis by name rather than by content - may be a difficult one, but it should happen in an ideal world.

February 9, 2010 by The 888th Avatar
Hi. I have some concerns regarding the loss of blue boxes. I have already contacted Wikia staff, but I thought I'd mention it here too.
Blue box pages allowed users to search for wikis by name, regardless of the wikis' size or activity. The new cross-wiki search bar no longer allows this, instead searching by Wikia content, and thus is predisposed to produce results from larger and active wikis. Small and inactive wikis are likely to fall through the cracks. I suggest the creation of some sort of search function that looks for wikis by name and subject, rather than wiki content, and will list wikis regardless of size or activity.
This problem is made worse by the simplicity of the Create a New Wiki function (which, don't get me wrong, is itself a very good thing). A lot of people make new wikis and, from experience, many of them don't think to check whether there's a wiki already in their subject area. I suggest adding a comment to the top of the Create a New Wiki, suggesting that users search for wikis before making one (perhaps linking to the search function, above).
Perhaps it would also be sensible to provide guidelines of what users should do if they want to change the name of their wiki. I have seen situations in which two wikis are created on the same day by the same user, for no other reason than that the first had a typo in it.

February 9, 2010 by Supermorff
PROBLEME GRAVEEdit
- Arrêter de supprimer des pages et des catégories, le serveur ne trouvant plus les pages disparues reporte les connexions vers le moteur de recherche, et ça bouchonne et finit par bloquer tous comme cela et arriver hier soir.
- Cela laisse aussi un nombre considérable de liens rouge dispersés un peu partout, pour que le moteur de recherche trouve ce que l'on cherche il faut qu'il y ai des données si vous les supprimés comment voulez vous que ça marche, et wikia n'est pas google, et même sur google il y a des répertoires avec les donnés sur les sites. C'est pas bien de supprimés le travail que d'autres on eu du mal à faire pendant des années, ça décourage et ça insite a tous laisser en panne. Toutefois si il y a des pages a suprimmés il ne faut pas les laissés en rouge il faut faire des redirections ça débouchonnera les connexions vers le moteur de recherche, même chose pour les catégories, moi je suis arriver a dire qu'il ne faut jamais supprimes une page mais toujours la modifier pour l'améliorer, la renommer, ou la rediriger, parce que vous irez aprés rechercher chaque lien rouge dans toutes les pages de tous les wiki, et sur wikia il y en a un paquet, je vous dit c'est plus normal de renommer et de rediriger que de supprimer ça ne bloquera plus, ni informatiquement, ni moralement vis à vis des utilisateurs.
- Wikisoft* ^@@@-fr 09:35, February 9, 2010 (UTC)
February 9, 2010 by Wikisoft*
I provided the link a few days ago a few posts up, but it's working now. My posts here were before the problem was corrected.

February 8, 2010 by Brandon Rhea
purge the page that a template is transclusding onto if it didn't fix itself.

February 8, 2010 by Joeyaa
@brandon, where is it not working still? let us know with as much details as possible

February 8, 2010 by Uberfuzzy
If anyone could let me know when template fetch is working again, that'd be fantastic. The fetch for the Star Wars footer template here on community central still wasn't working tonight, so I've temporarily added the template to Star Wars Fanon here for use on the main page. Once the fetch works again, I'll get rid of that.
About the use of the logo, I've put the license under fair use since that's what it seems to be. The template here on community central says it may require permission, not that it does require permission. Please let me know if anyone on the community team objects to its uploading on Star Wars Fanon for use in that template.

February 7, 2010 by Brandon Rhea
history
I like the merging of Watercooler and Help desk forums into the one Community Central Forum
I look forward to seeing new/edited blog comments flagged in the Watchlist section of Special:MyHome.

February 7, 2010 by Najevi
Brilliant, can't wait!!!

February 6, 2010 by SGCommand
Yeah thats been a problem. Then again that happens everytime they do updates like these. The dust if you will.

February 6, 2010 by Devilmanozzy