Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-1038387-20200121135049

I've mentioned this indirectly in Discussions, but I wanted to do a bigger post about this to highlight some things.

This past weekend, I was at the invite-only Fandom/Gamepedia event Connect. This is the third such event; for some reason, they've invited me every time. This is an event where admins of new and established wikis can connect with each other and staff, and can learn more about certain processes. The key talking points were the UCP, UXR and SEO. And it's not under NDA.

We also got to go to Disney World. Rapunzel was definitely on cocaine.

I got to meet amazing new people, and also reconnect with old friends from previous Connects. Relevant to our wiki, I met Emitewiki2 (he edits on Marvel, but I didn't speak to him much), our wiki managers TimeShade and KylaraE (yeah, we're shoved in TV/Movies), Manager of SEO Becky Westmorelandm and Editor Experience Specialist Isaac Fischer.

Some key points:

UCP:

This is the Unified Community Platform. With the merger of Fandom and Gamepedia, a noted discrepancy was the difference in MediaWiki version. Gamepedia ran roughly up to date, but Fandom had so many custom features that it still had a forked 1.19. Which is heavily outdated. This UCP, which will start rolling out in Q1/Q2, will bring both platforms to 1.33. Therew will be noticable differences; Forums will be retired, Message Walls and user pages will have new elements. There will finally be a mobile editor. For more information, follow the Staff Blog on Community Central. There's an update coming soon.

UXR:

I've thrown the term UX around. User Experience. The R here stands for Research. You have to write for your audience, and know your audience. Michael Morgan and Derek Hart showed graphs of demographics and statistics. Nothing too specific for us. But...

SEO:

In UXR, a recurring theme is that more than fifty percent of page views is on mobile. Websites isn't the only one who see this: Google sees it too. For their Search Engine Optimization, they use multiple crawlers. This year, they will be giving priority to their mobile crawlers, and their content researchers will also prioritize mobile. So we have to be portable. And luckily we are (go to Marvel on a cell phone and weep). There's just one or two templates I still need to update. Sites can no longer afford to ignore their mobile performance. MediaWiki by nature has several strikes against it, as it is a 2005 product that's largely unchanged. As Wikipedia, Wikimedia's flagship, has such good name recognition, they can afford to ignore the SEO hits. But Fandom can't, and Fandom is a major stakeholder in MediaWiki as the second largest user. We, the DC Database, are big, established and usually end up on top, but we too have things that are major SEO killers - like large gallery subpages. But there isn't really a workable alternative to that. Marvel's idea of using cover galleries as the issue list is... just no. Look at it on a mobile screen. We'll have to take that hit, but we can alleviate that by adding captions. So by all means, add a caption if you make a gallery. Also, character galleries should be trimmed. There's no need for 85 images of Batman on a rooftop. Another hit point is large categories, as they're counted as duplicate pages by Google. Fandom has created Dynamic Categories to mitigate that, and we've got a custom solution for the classic view.

I've made some SEO and UX improvements to our templates the past year, adding leads and hatnotes (but I don't like the current hatnotes and will fix them). I will probably take some more unilateral decisions regarding this, including with some page names and (Arrowverse). But there is something I will run by other admins, and I'm talking to FishTank about it more soon. He hates our page templates. I hate our page templates. They're restrictive, user-unfriendly and outdated. We love 2020 Jamie, but 2020 us don't love 2005 Jamie. It's a big project and a big change, but we've discussed alternatives, and Page forms looks promising. This essentially works the same as the edit tool bar buttons, but instead of a character page template, it gives you an infobox and a set of standard headers. We've got some kinks to iron out, like maintenance categories, but from what I know of Page Forms, it can work.

I'll be happy to try and explain more and answer other questions once I'm less jet lagged. 