Wikia Staff Blog

Wikia is written by all sorts of fans. From Marvel fanatics to Trekkers to genealogy enthusiasts and more, everyone can find a place for their passion in the Home of Fandom. One of the best parts of working at Wikia is knowing that, like you, the staff in our office are also superfans. The fact that we're all fans of something is a big part of what motivates us to make Wikia such an awesome place for fans.

Here in our San Francisco office, we display our passions on the "Wall of Fandom." This is a big wall at the front of the office that's covered in items that we all chose to represent the things we love. My contribution is the plushy chihuahua on the second shelf, representing my love of my dog Daisy and her furry friends.

Many of us like …

You won’t get a shiny diploma you can hang on your wall - but Wikia University is still a course worth going through. Maybe you’re nodding vigorously right now, because you’ve already completed every study track, and consider yourself an editing pro. But maybe you’re scratching your head instead, wondering what I’m talking about?

Wikia University isn’t a real life campus somewhere (although that would be awesome!), but a series of short videos that teach you how to use Wikia. The videos are divided into five study tracks, each one aimed at users on a different level of editing experience:

• Welcome to Wikia - start here if you’re new to Wikia and are wondering what it is all about
• Editing 101 - a walkthrough of your first contributions
• Building…

Allow me to introduce to you User:Sanns sock. She's a pleasant enough sort of user, not very active on Wikia, but she's been around for a while. She's useful when something goes wrong and there's a need for some non-staff testing.

Then there's User:Sanns bot. She's retired now, but used to do some work around Wikia every now and then. Just routine spelling corrections and other simple changes.

There's also User:A user name with spaces, User:Sannsetestingagainandagain and, for some reason, User:APrettyPinkPotofPreciousPetunias.

As you might have guessed, these are just some of the accounts I've made on Wikia over the years, my "sockpuppets". Most of them were made to test various features and verify bugs. Although, as an old Uncyclopedian,…

On Wednesday, we were treated to a visit from Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and Wikipedia, in our San Francisco office. When Jimmy co-founded Wikia, it started off as a broader spinoff of Wikipedia, one that would allow people to create their own wiki communities. He once said that if Wikipedia is the encyclopedia, then Wikia is the rest of the library. Now, Wikia is home to the greatest superfans in the world, and, with the launch of Fandom, it sits at the center of pop culture. So we were thrilled to have Jimmy speak to us this week in an open forum, where he shared his thoughts about Wikia and the future of Fandom. Wikia staff asked a volley of questions about all aspects of Wikia to get Jimmy's unique perspective on our company …

We’ve given plenty of advice in the past on how to deal with trolls, annoying users, and bad admins. But what if that user who is upsetting the community is a bureaucrat, and can delete anything and block anyone they like?

As in any dispute, the best option is to talk it out: Stay calm, assume your bureaucrat isn’t evil, but just coming from a different point of view, and see if you can find a way to work together.

Try these options, if a bureaucrat is causing trouble:

• Talk to the bureaucrat: Leave them a message and let them know what you think they should do differently, and why (be nice about it).
• Talk to the other bureaucrats and admins: Maybe they are on your side and willing to discuss matters with the troublesome bureaucrat on your beh…

Hello, Wikians! My name is Isaac, and I've been active on Wikia for a number of years under the name "FishTank". I recently joined Wikia's Community Technical staff, a support team dedicated to helping users understand and experiment with some of the new tools our Engineering team are designing to drive our communities forward.

So, today I want to talk to you about portability, an initiative and project worth getting your wikia involved in. You may have heard a lot about portability from some other really great Blog posts ("The Future of Infoboxes on Wikia", "Wikia's Portability Progress Check"). Now I'd really like to drive home that conversation and give you a more thorough introduction to a new community specifically designed to make por…

Blogs are a unique space on a collaborative community. Most pages on a community are edited by many people, building a resource on the community's topic. But blogs are usually an article written by just one person, not collaboratively at all.

In a way, that's similar to Message Walls and talk pages, but Message Walls are generally a conversation between two or more people. They might be about an issue on the wikia, or figuring out how to best write an article, or just saying hello! Blogs have people reacting to what's said, but aren't a conversation in themselves. They are a more like an article followed by a conversation.

And then there are forums. These are similar to blogs in some ways, but forum posts are often just a couple of lines long…

UPDATE: The voting is now LIVE on the Greatest Love of All Bracket Tournament! Go cast your votes for your favorite couple .

Happy Valentine's Month, Wikians!

It's February, and we're bringing back a fan-favorite event from last year - the cross-community Greatest Love of All Couples Bracket Tournament.

Last year's bracket was incredible, garnering hundreds of thousands of votes! In case you missed out, last year's Final Four couples were:

• Naruto & Hinata from Naruto

• Kurt & Blaine from Glee

• Korra & Asami from The Legend of Korra

• Sasuke & Sakura from Naruto

And after all the dust settled, the final winner - with over 101,000 votes - was

Sasuke and Sakura!

Did your favorite couple not make it to the finals last year? Or if they did, are you hoping to help th…

At Wikia, being professional fans is something we take pretty seriously. Every day we get to provide a home for incredibly knowledgeable and useful content written by the biggest superfans in the world. Our passion is to serve your passions, and it's what motivates us to offer the very best fan experiences.

That's why we're excited to announce a brand new experience. What do I mean by that? Think of your favorite character. Maybe it's Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You can get everything you need to know about Rey from the largest Star Wars fan site in the world, Wookieepedia, or from one of many of our other Star Wars communities. But what if you also wanted to know about what's happening with the upcoming films? Or theories about wher…

A year ago, Wikia introduced a new user group across our network called “Moderators”. The purpose of this new group was to aid administrators by enabling and designating more trusted users to keep track of the conversations happening across different Wikia features, like Forum and Message Wall.

Since then, we’ve been monitoring how the group has been used, gathering direct feedback from our users on how the group can be improved and running some ideas by our Community Council.

Today, we’re announcing the next step in improving moderator groups by introducing two key changes that will become effective tomorrow, January 14th. First, the existing “moderator” group will be renamed “Discussions Moderator” and have a few additional rights granted …