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Ohmyn0 Ohmyn0 5 July 2012
134

Making your wiki HTML5 compliant

We all know the internet is a series of tubes powered by the dreams and laughter of kittens. But what do those kittens eat?

They eat HTML, which is a coding language that is the building blocks of the internet. First developed by a renegade group of lawless web developers in the 1980s, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group took initiative in the early 2000's and became the authoritative group on HTML coding practices. Their goal is to get all web developers to use a standardized form of HTML which, in turn, makes HTML all the more powerful and versatile.

What does this mean for you? And the kittens?

Wikia is currently in the process of upgrading all of our wikis to MediaWiki 1.19. Some issues have arisen regarding some HTML c…

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Ohmyn0 Ohmyn0 10 February 2012
16

Highlights from our second Wikia Day

Last December all Wikia employees participated in our first-ever "Wikia Day" -- no meetings, no emails, no work -- just editing wikis all day long. It's a chance for us to get more familiar with the nooks and crannies of our website, root out pesky bugs, and to fall in love with wikis all over again.

December's Wikia Day was such a rip-roaring success that we decided to make it a recurring tradition. Last Friday we celebrated Wikia Day #2! Here are some highlights:


We're all quite excited with what we accomplished in just one day. In our office we have folks with all levels of wiki experience from Sannse (who made several hundreds of edits without breaking a sweat) to wiki newbie Patricia, who knocked out an awesome main page for the new Th…


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Ohmyn0 Ohmyn0 30 June 2011
66

Chat is Now in Wikia Labs

It's finally here — Chat is now available in Wikia Labs! This is the second most exciting thing to happen this summer (second only to the final Harry Potter movie release). Our previous announcements about this new feature created quite a bit of buzz, and many wikis volunteered to test it out. Now, Chat is available to all wikis via Wikia Labs. You can ask an admin to turn it on.

When enabled, a "Join the Chat" button shows up in the sidebar of article pages. Clicking this button will take you into a chat room for that specific wiki. Anyone with a Wikia account can join, and you can try it out on Community Central if you haven't already seen the feature in action.


In this version of Chat, we've added some features that you guys requested, most…


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Ohmyn0 Ohmyn0 1 June 2011
31

Let's Talk About Talk Pages

I'm in love with MediaWiki, the software we use to build wikis, but to tell the truth, I've never been able to fall in love with talk pages. Blank pages provide unlimited opportunities for writing awesome, in-depth articles; however, those same pages lack functionality for engaging multiple users in conversation. My Wikia cohorts and I are currently thinking about how to improve the talk pages — here's where we are:

Talk pages work perfectly if everyone knows about them, and agrees on how to use them. But Wikia is not a closed community — we have more than 2.9 million registered editors, and a new account is created every minute. Editors can join any of our 250,000+ wikis, and each community has different rules and procedures for using talk…

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Ohmyn0 Ohmyn0 28 April 2011
37

Introducing Chat

Howdy Wikia!

I'm Trevor (Ohmyn0 here on Wikia), newest member of the product team, and I have the pleasure of introducing a brand new feature that we've been building: Chat.

Currently wiki discussions occur over a long period of time via talk pages. The openness of this method is super helpful, but it doesn't provide the speediness that a modern online community needs. With chat, we aim to fill that gap. Already we've seen post-episode discussions happening on Glee chat, article architecture discussions in Muppet chat, and gamers helping each other solve problems in the Runescape chat.

Chat is still in its beta test stages, but we've already been blown away by the enthusiasm of some of our great communities who want it on their wikis, even tho…

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