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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