For ease of reading, I've included the blog below from Community. You can use the link to view comments directly on the blog.

Sadly to say our wonderful rep KylaraE will no longer be our [The Vampire Diaries] community's Wiki Representative. It's tremendously sad to see her go. The future is not yet clear on a new Community Manager, or if we'll even be appointed a new contact person; at least a year ago, we [TVD] were still a top 100 wiki in the TV/Movie vertical.

As new information is brought forward, I'll be sure to make any necessary updates.

All the best to Kylara and wherever the future takes her. She's still a Fandom Star so you may still see her around, whether on this wiki or elsewhere.

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Hi everyone, I have some difficult but important news to share with you today. Over the next several weeks, we will be winding down and ending the Wiki Representative program as we head in a new direction with how we support the Fandom community—which includes bringing on a number of new, full time Community Managers to Fandom staff, sourced directly from the Wiki Rep program.

As of today, a number of Wiki Representatives have been impacted by this change. This blog will be the first in a series of updates over the next several weeks that goes into why we made this decision and how we will continue to support our wikis into the future.

As many of you may know, the Wiki Representative program—previously known as the Wiki Manager program—is a part-time, contract staffing model that began on Gamepedia and was brought over to Fandom in 2019 after Fandom and Curse Media joined forces.

The program has had a long history at Fandom. Still, first and foremost the best part about it has been the talented group of people who have been Wiki Representatives and Wiki Managers over the years. Before we get to anything else in this blog, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge and thank all of them for everything they’ve done for Fandom, our wikis, and our users. They have been core parts of the community before and during their time as Wiki Reps, and we’ve enjoyed our time working with each of them. Their hard work and dedication have been truly appreciated, and we wish the departing Wiki Reps nothing but the best moving forward.

The reason we’re making this change is that, since last year, we’ve been working on overhauling our community support strategies, processes, and mission to make sure that we’re providing the best service possible with a team structure that we can bring to its full potential. That’s something that the Wiki Rep program, despite its many benefits, was not set up to be – even in its earliest forms. So we want to ensure that, as the platform continues to grow, the Community team is set up for long-term growth too, in a way that supports everyone involved as best as possible—including the community and staff.

We’ll go into more detail between now and Community Connect about what that strategy and mission looks like, but the most important thing to know right now is that we are shifting to a full-time staffing model and bringing on multiple new Community Managers who are joining us from the Wiki Rep program. These are talented individuals who should all be familiar faces, and you’ll get to know them even more in the coming weeks as they begin their new roles. You’ll hear more about that in a Staff Blog soon.

Over the weeks leading up to and after the program’s retirement, you’ll see the transition from the Wiki Rep program to this new support setup. As we work through this process, there might be a brief gap in time before wikis hear who their new points of contact are. We apologize for that in advance and appreciate everyone’s patience during this necessary but admittedly bumpy part of the transition. Supporting wikis is at the heart of what our team does, so we’ll be working to reach out as efficiently as we can.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that many of you may have questions about the Wiki Specialist program. We are currently continuing with that program to provide content coverage and partnership support, so you will still see Wiki Specialists working within the community uninterrupted.

I recognize and appreciate that there are probably a lot of questions right now about what this announcement means, and a lot of blanks looking to be filled in. I can commit the following actions to you, taking place in early to mid-April, as part of that:

• We will introduce the new Community Managers to you, so you know who those new team members are who are joining our community support efforts;

• We will post more here in the Staff Blog about how our Community team operates, as the team setup has changed since last year even beyond this announcement;

• We will reach out directly to wikis that have a Wiki Representative to discuss how best to find support from April onward;

• Our Customer Support team is and remains always available to answer any questions you may have, whether your wiki has an assigned point of contact or not.

• We will discuss a number of aspects of the Community team setup in even more depth at Community Connect, taking place at the end of April.

If there are any questions I can answer in the comments, I will do so, but I apologize in advance if I’m not able to. This is a big announcement, and we want to make sure that we give it the space it deserves before we get into the details of what comes next.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, thank you to all of the Wiki Representatives who are departing for all of their contributions over the years, and thank you to all of you for your patience as we make this transition.

Sourece: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Brandon_Rhea/Announcement_about_the_Fandom_Wiki_Representative_program

Announcement about the Fandom Wiki Representative programCommunity Central

Traffic team

Quick Answers rollout. Last week, you may have noticed that we began a ramp-up of a previously experimental feature called Quick Answers, which we removed over the weekend after a number of reports from the community about the accuracy of the content. I wanted to take this opportunity to share more information about the feature and what’s coming up next after we’ve spent time reviewing the previous rollout.

Quick Answers is a feature we first teased at Community Connect, back in April, as part of our “Canonical Pages: The Ultimate Portal to the World of Fandom” session. The gist was simple: we wanted to format information from wiki pages into a Q&A (questions & answers) format that would appear as a module on the wiki page it's based on. The goal is to increase SEO and, therefore making it easier for readers to discover your pages on Google. To achieve the scale needed to make this have an impact across the site, we said we would leverage GenAI in order to create the initial content.

We began experimenting with that throughout the spring and summer months, using a GenAI partner to leverage information from Fandom to create an initial set of answers to questions garnered from related Google searches. The questions and answers that were live during the experiment were reviewed by Fandom staff for accuracy, and then posted once they were reviewed.

We saw promising results from this experiment, including a bump in traffic to the site. You can even see in the image on the right how that was starting to get picked up by Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Once we saw those results, we decided to prioritize starting to scale this feature out even further, with a set of questions and answers generated for 6,500 character pages across the platform. The goals of this next rollout included testing for accuracy in the model that was being used, as well as seeing how the rollout impacted traffic numbers on an even bigger scale. That was released to those pages last Thursday, and we started seeing that traffic bump we were looking for!

Then, the weekend happened.

On Saturday [Aug 19th, '23], we received a number of reports from the community about the accuracy of the content. I was online at the time and saw some of those issues coming in, particularly on Discord. At first, not seeing the full impact of the issues yet, I asked that any inaccuracies be reported either to the wiki teams or to our Customer Support team. Throughout the day, in large part thanks to reports that were collected over the previous day, compiled, and sent to cross-team leaders by the Entertainment Wiki Team, it became apparent that this was a growing issue not just of accuracy but also of the appropriateness of some of the answers. After hearing those reports, we decided we would turn the feature off site-wide until we could assess the issue and figure out the next steps.

As we reviewed the issue, we saw that while many of the questions and answers were accurate, the inaccuracies that were seen were glaring enough that it was clear that the initial method of generating the questions and answers was not the right approach. When you’re testing new features out, that’s not the worst thing in the world. We learned from it (both what went right with traffic and wrong with accuracy), we adapted, and we’ll try something else. Fortunately, we had already been working on a different model (let’s call this “method B”) where both questions and answers were generated directly from the wiki pages themselves. Compared to the previous approach (“method A”), method B’s approach improved the accuracy of the questions and answers.

So, here’s what’s coming next. Next week, we’re planning to re-release the initial experimental and staff-reviewed questions and answers from method A as well as an initial set of questions and answers from method B. This initial set of method B content has also been reviewed by Fandom staff, and we are confident that they are as accurate as possible. We’ll be testing to see what the SEO impact is for method B questions vs our previous attempts at method A, to see if this is the right path forward to achieve scale and accuracy all at the same time. The total number of pages these will all appear on next week is less than 300.

This feature will go through changes over time, which will add some level of quality assurance capabilities from the community. That was always going to be something we looked at, but given the issues that cropped up last weekend, we’ve spent the last week talking about ideas for how we can make that happen. More info to come there.

For now, if you spot any accuracy issues with the questions and answers, please let us know by contacting a staff member or emailing our Customer Support team. If you look at the questions and feel they’re a bit bland, that’s okay, and we know. Since it’s based on existing content, it may seem somewhat repetitive, but we want to test if formatting that content in this way helps SEO and whether it brings value to readers. The questions themselves will certainly be improved over time, particularly once there’s a UGC component to the feature.

We’ll continue to share information about how this next phase of the rollout goes, what we’ve learned, where we’ll go next, and the UGC decision that we make. So stay tuned for that!

Additional information can be found here: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Brandon_Rhea/Technical_Updates:_August_25,_2023

Technical Updates: August 25, 2023Community Central

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Feel free to respond to this when the feature goes live here on this thread. I'm pretty sure this is for logged out viewers. I.e. I wasn't even aware of the initial rollout until a few hours before it was globally disable... but we (the admins) did notice a few questionable responses. We can report any questionable/wrong content to our WR.

Coming in at number....

10. The Vampire Diaries series itself finished years ago, in 2017, but Legacies, the third show in the durable franchise, concluded this year, marking the end of a vampiric era for longtime fans, with no other spinoff currently in the works. The Vampire Diaries lore contains multitudes, as not only are there the books to explore, but The Vampire Diaries itself ran for eight seasons and its two spinoffs – The Originals and the aforementioned Legacies – went for five and four seasons, respectively.

In terms of sheer volume, The Vampire Diaries-verse contains within it more content than any other live-action vampire saga. So the final 10 episodes of Legacies, which were oddly/frustratingly spread out over five months, were almost designed to keep the TVD wiki fires burning, with the Legacies finale featuring a bit of a full circle moment for fans, via the long-awaited return of original Vampire Diaries cast member Candice King as Caroline Forbes. Will there ever be more to this story? We shall see…

Source

Fandom’s 10 Most Popular TV Wikis of 2022Fandom

Hello, Everyone!!

I wanted to reiterate one of the points in Kylara's discussion post:

Users who visit Fandom will start seeing trivia quizzes on our top wikis, and the quizzes will be directly relevant to the page topic. These will initially only be **visible to logged-out users**, so it won't impact your regular logged-in user experience just yet. Her complete post for a News Roundup for the start of the year can be found here: https://vampirediaries.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003352244

Fandom News Roundup for March: Trivia Quizzes, Women's History Month, and more | FandomHey everyone! As your Wiki Representative, I'm…vampirediaries.fandom.com

At large, the news can be read about on Community Central, found here:

https://community.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Brandon_Rhea/Fandom_is_expanding_Trivia_Quizzes_after_a_year_of_successful_experimentation

For right now, the quizzes are limited to the following pages:

• Hope Mikaelson

• Niklaus Mikaelson

• Elena Gilbert

• Lizzie Saltzman

• Josie Saltzman

• Alaric Saltzman

• Bonnie Bennett

• Katerina Petrova

• Damon Salvatore

• Vampire

E.g.:

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Enjoy!!

Users will now see supported Theme Designer in Discussions, bridging some of the visual disparity between Feeds content and the main namespace.

First Release next week:

• Full wiki color theming choices

• New global navigation on the left with Fandom’s new brand identity

• Your chosen Light or Dark theme preference, controlled by the theme chosen on the wiki or your global preference

• Background support 2.0 - both header and full background styles will be supported

Follow up releases in October:

• Light and Dark theme toggle within Discussions

• Revised local navigation

For more information, please see the blog: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:MisterWoodhouse/Theme_Designer_support_for_Discussions

Theme Designer support for DiscussionsCommunity Central

There's a nice announcement by Staff in regards to Discussions update today.

"Today, I am thrilled to announce that a long-requested feature is getting its first release: search for Discussions posts!

New in the Special:Search page on the Unified Community Platform is a Posts option which allows you to search through Discussions posts. This has been a major user request since we first launched Discussions.

For now, default search behavior will not change, so you’ll need to enter Special:Search to get to the Post search tab. This first release is desktop-only and will not include Discussions results in the Everything tab or advanced search options. Next year, we plan to start experimenting to see how we can best surface relevant Discussions content in additional ways while respecting user intent with their search. We know you have a lot to say about this subject, as well as other aspects of search, and it is a conversation we are excited to have with you next year.

Until then, please enjoy the new search functionality and please give us feedback about it! We want to know what you like, don’t like, and/or wish was different about it. Your feedback will help fuel the next releases of this new feature." Feedback can be given directly on the blog comments: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:MisterWoodhouse/Discussions_search_is_now_available

Discussions search is now availableCommunity Central

For desktop users, the following link can be used to search Discussions.

https://vampirediaries.fandom.com/wiki/Special:Search?scope=internal&query=&contentType=posts