Hello, hello, hello, my lovely people! Nope, this isn't the second Technical Update blog of September, that's for this Friday. Since I recently took over from Antonio as the Product Support team's liaison with the UGC team, I am writing this to bring you all up to speed with the latest feature update on Fandom: Suggested Pages.
If you've been around the past months, this may sound already familiar to you. Before making the decision to productize this feature, we ran it as an experiment to see how it would work on our platform. As such, we've talked about it before in an experiment announcement blog as well as Technical Update blog blurbs. However, since we did tweak the end result from the experiment based the received feedback, I'm going to take you through the details.
What is it?[]
Suggested Pages is the name of a banner pop-up appearing in the down-left corner to desktop users only. It surfaces to the editor after they successfully complete an edit as a call to action to continue making edits on related pages. The prompt includes 5 hyperlinks as potential other areas that may need similar edits.
Why is it?[]
New and existing editors often have low edit volumes and never get into the habit of making consistent contributions. An editor making a change on one page may also not think about updating or adding this new information on related pages within the wiki. Less than 3% of new editors become loyal editors within a month of their first edit, and of all users that have edited since 2021, 28% have only edited once.
With those statistics, the goal became clear: help people find the way to more pages to continue their editing journey.
How is it?[]
How it started[]
So we started an experiment with the clear hypothesis that by providing editors with a call to action and links to potentially relevant pages after each edit, it will increase editor retention and number of edits. We tested two variants on both new and veteran users. Read more about the Suggest Pages experiment.
The data showed a significant uptick in edits made by users receiving the banner: an overall increase of 7.45% was recorded, which was great news! However, data isn't everything, and the user feedback was more of a mixed batch. Aside from the statistical benefit the Suggested Pages provided, we heard back from all of you that you did like the concept of the banner, the idea of helping new users find their next page to edit, but there were two big issues you identified with it:
- The banner showed for both new and seasoned users, the latter often citing having no need for the feature and wanting it gone
- A desire to control the content being shown by the banner
How it ended[]
Suggested Pages banner on light (left) and dark (right) theme
Armed with the data and user feedback, semi back to the drawing board we went to see how we could best tweak the experiment to become a full product with the necessary changes.
All that resulted in the release of the Suggested Pages product as followed:
- By default, the banner will only show to users who have less than 5 edits on the wiki they edited.
With this, we hope to remove the obstacle this banner caused to the workflow of our more seasoned editors, while keeping the positive incentive to newcomers to move on to their next page to edit. If you feel like this number is too low, discuss this with the rest of your community, and reach out to your Community Manager in case there is one assigned to your wiki, contact Fandom Staff, or reach out to me directly.
- The banner will only appear after a main namespace edit.
- The banner will show links that are either
- 5 related pages, if the recently edited page is used as a link on at least 5 other pages;
- 5 popular pages, if the recently edited page was not linked on at least 5 other pages;
- 5 random pages, if the wiki doesn't have popular pages due to being new or unused for a while.
For the moment, there is no direct user content control over the links that are shown in the banner, although this is something that we still hope to add later on. In the meantime, the logic behind the links has been tweaked to ensure that the shown pages are from the main namespace only, excluding the main page, and have not been protected to restrict editing privileges.
That's it from me about this new feature! If you have any questions, bug discoveries, or general constructive feedback about this, don't hesitate to sound off in the comments, reach out to me on my message wall, contact your assigned Community Manager, or contact Fandom Staff. The only way we can move forward is together, so we'd love to hear your feedback about this product! Happy editing, everyone!
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