Wikia:Press: Spring 2009 Update

Wikia - creating communities

The past year was a great one for Wikia! Comscore's most recent report also showed that US unique visitors have more than tripled in the past year! In February, Wikia hit a new milestone of over 510 million monthly pageviews, up from 320 million pageviews in November 2007.

Wikia is now a top 200 website according to Quantcast, reaching an all time high of 18mm unique visitors in February (link). In addition, the number of content communities on Wikia grew from 4,600 to 11,000 in 2008. Wikia remains a stable host, with increased site availability and, with triple-digit revenue growth in 2008, is on track to be profitable for the first time in 2009.

Enhancements in the past year

Wikia's outstanding growth is only possible because we continue to work closely with communities to help them grow their content, keep their sites fast, improve their tools, and gain new contributors and friends that make it fun to come back. Over the past few months, the changes we have made have significantly decreased load times by forcing the ads to load last, and increased edit save rates to over 90% on some wikis by making the "Save" button easy to find. Here's some of what has happened over the past year:

Product improvements

Over the past year we introduced a number of new features which make it easier for new users to start editing, and for existing users to be more productive. Some of those improvements include:

• Editing enhancements, such as editing tips, link suggest, widescreen editing mode, and the save bar, which help new and existing editors make high quality edits. The introduction of the "Save Bar" increased the number of users who actually save changes after clicking the edit button from 53% to 65% across all users.
• Search Suggest, which suggests article names when a visitor starts typing text in the search box.
• Add Images and Video Embed extensions, which make it easy for editors to find and embed photos and videos into wiki pages.
• Global Help, which gives each wiki an up to date local copy of Wikia's Help Pages.
• Welcome tool which automatically welcomes new users after they make their first edit by leaving a customizable talk page message.
• MediaWiki 1.13: We upgraded all of our wikis to MediaWiki 1.13, which provides features like automatic double redirect correction and image thumbnails in search results.
• Search Engine Optimization: We also made a number of mostly-transparent changes which will make it easier for new users to discover our wikis in the first place. Over the past year, Google traffic increased from 41% of our overall traffic last year to 55% of our traffic today.

All of these features are currently available, although they may not be enabled on your wiki. If you see a feature that you would like enabled on your wiki, please contact us.

Infrastructure and performance improvements

We made a number of enhancements over the past year to improve site speed, stability, and user experience. Some of those enhancements include:

• Opening new data centers in London and Iowa in order to improve performance for visitors in Europe and the US
• Re-engineering the code which is used to display advertisements so that ads only display after all content on the page has loaded
• Switching to Varnish cache servers to improve the number of pages that can be served directly from fast cache servers rather than slower Apache web servers
• Improving redundancies to prevent problems from causing extended downtime

What's next?

We have a lot planned for the rest of 2009. Our primary goals are to make wikis more accessible and easier for visitors to read and start to contribute, and refining the experience to make existing editors more productive. Here is some of what we are working on over the next few months:

• A Rich Text Editor that provides a familiar and easy-to-use interface so users can contribute without having to learn the ins and outs of wiki markup. It is available today on hundreds of new wikis and we will be offering it as a site-wide user preference sometime in Q2 of this year.
• Improving wiki search results to ease navigation and help users find great content.
• Community Blogs that give multiple users the ability to contribute and comment on opinions, news announcements, fanon or other personal articles in a separate Blog Namespace. Blogs are already active on 30 wikis, and we'll be releasing them site-wide in April.
• Content widgets and User badges that will give users some fun ways to promote their wikis on forums, blogs, and social networking sites.
• MediaWiki 1.14, the latest MediaWiki update.
• Further performance improvements: We are continuing to build out our new datacenter in Iowa, which gives us a hot backup for when our main datacenter in California has a hiccup, which will reduce the likelihood of an outage in the future.
• We're working to reduce overall page size to further improve page load times.

We're not done planning yet, though; we want to hear your ideas! What do you want to see on your wikis? What would make your life easier? What can't you do now that you would like to be able to do? We'd like to hear your ideas for how to improve Wikia. Leave your thoughts on this article's talk page.