Forum:SH:Wookieepedia admins visiting Wikia HQ

Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH:Wookieepedia admins visiting Wikia HQ
This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. Advanced Jedi Training Droid 6 (Talk to my master) 00:05, March 12, 2015 (UTC)

Hello, Wookieepedians. I'm taking this opportunity to announce to the community that Wikia has invited a few Wookieepedia administrators to visit their main office in San Francisco this November. The admins will visit with Wikia's different development teams over the course of a few days, with a specific emphasis on improving the site's functionality for mobile users. The administrators have discussed the matter, and right now, pending final confirmations, the plan is to send Cavalier One, CC7567, Cade Calrayn, and myself, Toprawa and Ralltiir, to represent the site.

This Senate Hall thread is to give the rest of the community an opportunity to publicly offer some suggestions and ideas for what they might like to see us discuss with Wikia during the visit. Thanks. Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 02:43, September 26, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion

  • I would like to see an option where I am notified in my Watchlist (or some other way) that there's a new thread in the Senate Hall or Consensus Track, rather than always having to manually go there and check.--Richterbelmont10 R2 sig(come in R2!) 17:46, October 2, 2014 (UTC)
    • You can. Follow Forum:Senate Hall and Category:Senate Hall. Either of those should trigger an email saying something has been added, if you're set up to receive emails. It may update your watchlist as well, but I'm not certain. - Brandon Rhea(talk) 18:03, October 2, 2014 (UTC)
      • I followed your instructions and it didn't work. I "followed" the Category:Senate Hall. (I was already "following" Forum:Senate Hall). I set up my preferences to receive emails. Now I'm getting tons of emails every time a page on my watchlist gets changed. Not only that, but I'm still not being notified by any means (watchlist or email) that there's a new thread in the Senate Hall (and there was one, I just checked now).--Richterbelmont10 R2 sig(come in R2!) 17:06, October 3, 2014 (UTC)
        • Yes, if you set your preferences to receive emails, you will receive emails for everything on your watchlist. That's what the email preference states. As for not receiving an email when a page gets added to a category, I can't speak to why you're not receiving that email. You should be—I always receive notifications when that happens. Try sending a message to Special:Contact, and someone on Wikia's technical support team can potentially help diagnose the issue. They may also be aware of a means to do this that I'm not aware of. - Brandon Rhea(talk) 17:15, October 3, 2014 (UTC)
          • There's no option to email me when a change is made to a category. Unless I'm not looking in the right place, these are the options available in my preferences. Which one do I check to get emailed for category changes?
            1. Email me when a page I'm following is changed. (generates massive amounts of emails)
            2. Email me when a page I'm following is minorly changed (generates massive amounts of emails)
            3. Email me when my user talk page is changed (I have this checked)
            4. Email me when a Weekly Digest of changes to my followed Wikia pages is ready (I have this checked)
            5. Email me when Wikia has news and events (I have this UNchecked)--Richterbelmont10 R2 sig(come in R2!) 17:33, October 3, 2014 (UTC)
      • "Email me when a page I'm following is changed" will send you emails for categories that you follow. That option doesn't distinguish between mainspace pages and category pages; "page" is all-encompassing. There is no option to send emails just for categories; account preferences generally don't get that specific. - Brandon Rhea(talk) 17:39, October 3, 2014 (UTC)
  • Another option I would like to see is in the Watchlist: an option to "Expand All" rather than having to manually click all the little triangles to see the pages that have been edited more than once. "Expand all" would automatically expand all page-changes, enabling you to see all changes at once.--Richterbelmont10 R2 sig(come in R2!) 18:09, October 3, 2014 (UTC)

Full report

Hi, everyone. We've all returned from our trip to San Francisco, no worse for wear. Everyone has been eager to know how things went and what we discussed, and I promised we'd give a full debriefing, so here goes. We covered a lot of material over two days' worth of meetings with Wikia's various development teams, so I'm probably going to accidentally leave something out. Brandon, Cade, CC, or Cav can fill in anything I've missed. I guess I'll start with the biggest stuff and work down the list. Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 18:13, November 18, 2014 (UTC)

Our first app

We've had people asking us for years now why we don't have an app. Well, now we can say we do. Wikia rolled out the first Wookieepedia app a couple months ago, and we got our first look at it in San Francisco. You can see here that it's gotten many outstanding reviews so far. The admins have full access over its content (here), so this is a great asset for us moving forward.

Mobile

The primary focus of our trip was basically talking mobile and how to make sure Wookieepedia stays relevant as the world moves deeper down the mobile rabbit hole. Wikia showed us some figures of how, if I'm remembering this accurately, by next year more than 50% of our site traffic will be from mobile devices, so it's increasingly imperative that we make sure our site, which was created and has always been engineered for computers, is able to accommodate the reality of where the majority of our readers are coming from. Our mobile skin has been something we've almost completely neglected to worry about in the past, because it's simply not something our core group of editors really deals with. But we've got to make sure our articles are working right across all three skins (Monobook, Wikia skin, and mobile).

Eric Moro and entertainment

I'm just going to group the next cluster of topics under "Eric Moro," because all of this is sort of being filtered through him. This was one of our most productive meetings and one I was anticipating some friction from, but it went above and beyond my expectations.

Promotions

Going into this trip, I had expressed to Brandon that Wookieepedia was feeling left out of some of the promotional endeavors Wikia runs through its relationship with Lucasfilm and that we would love to be included in some of these things. For those unaware, Wikia occasionally runs Star Wars-themed fan contests and giveaways with LFL, which in the past has included, for example, the March Madness thing, and recently they had a giveaway in which five people won TCW Season Six Blu-ray sets.

In the past, these things have been exclusively done through the Star Wars Fanpedia, but Wikia is absolutely ecstatic that we're interested in running these things through Wookieepedia, which I think is a great way to attract a larger audience to our project. Eric Moro told us that there's just a ton of things that he can get the ball rolling on through his various industry contacts (including Disney/Lucasfilm) as soon as we're ready to go ahead with this. This is something we can discuss more in depth in another SH thread.

Celebration Anaheim

Wookieepedia missed its chance to register a table at upcoming Celebration Anaheim in April 2015 (read more about this here), but we still have a chance to have a presence there. Eric explained to us that Wikia has a contract with the convention's producers, and we talked about ways to set up a cluster of Wikia-themed tables grouped together, which would probably include the Fanpedia and the Fanon Wikia in addition to Wookieepedia. This would allow us to actually be an attraction, which would be a big improvement over last Celebration, where our grand allure was a couple of flyers that we handed out to people. A number of Wookieepedians are already going to Celebration Anaheim, so we shouldn't have any trouble manning our table there. I think this is really a great opportunity for us, especially considering we blew our first chance to get a table, and it would be a shame for us not to have a presence at Celebration going into all the excitement of Episode 7.

Lucasfilm

We had the awesome privilege of touring the Lucasfilm/Industrial Light & Magic headquarters at the Letterman Digital Arts Center thanks to Matt Martin, who's one of the SW.com content team staff members. While we weren't able to meet anyone (though we did see Story Group members Leland Chee, Pablo Hidalgo, and Rayne Roberts walking the grounds) and many areas were off-limits due to Episode 7 being in post-production, we did see a lot of really cool stuff: George Lucas' personal movie poster collection; film props from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and many other ILM projects; the life-size, working Chopper model that the R2-D2 Builders Club created for Rebels; and a complete collection of the original Marvel Star Wars comic issues in mint condition (which I'm guessing probably no one else in the world has), just to name a few. We owe a HUGE thanks to Matt Martin for taking the time and letting us see everything, since they don't do public tours.

I'm going to end it there. If I've missed anything, let me know, and definitely feel free to ask questions about our trip and what we discussed with Wikia. I think you can all be assured that we did a great job representing Wookieepedia in San Francisco. Big thanks to Cade, Cav, and CC for going on the trip, and of course huge thanks to Wikia for having us. We've got a lot of exciting things on our plate moving forward, and I think the future looks very bright for Wookieepedia. Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 18:13, November 18, 2014 (UTC)

Post-trip discussion