Board Thread:Wiki management/@comment-20211881-20151030050251

Hello all!

A recent thread on this forum called 'Make mobile look better' caught our attention and while we have yet to find solutions for every possible issue when it comes to viewing articles on mobile devices, it's something that we at Wikia are taking very seriously and we are working every day to accomplish. The feedback we receive from communities such as yours has been essential in helping us develop better tools and products that will allow our communities to become more mobile friendly then ever before. One of the new tools we have recently brought to our communities is the Portable Infobox.

Simply put, most current infobox structure translates very poorly to mobile experiences and any device that doesn’t use desktop-style displays. On desktops and laptops, they often look amazing. The problem is that Wikia’s traffic is trending mobile. There is an important graph on our recent forum post about infoboxes that illustrates this trend. ​ Mobile is the future, not just for Wikia, but for the web as a whole. Take a look at the recent trends and future growth predictions for mobile traffic. It's staggering.

We partnered with the Wikia community to create this new markup to make sure that your hard work can be displayed on mobile devices (as well as any future technologies) easily and without any new coding conventions. It’ll take some effort up front, to be sure, but we’re here to help, and the work you put in now will pay for itself tenfold in the future.


 * Tools we’ve designed to ease the process

We’ve enabled two new features on your community. One is a tool for migrating the “old” infobox code to the new markup. It identifies templates on your wikia that look like infobox templates and places a box on the right rail of the template page. When you click the “Generate draft markup” button in this box, it opens a new tab containing a draft of your infobox using the new markup.

The second is a new feature on Special:Insights that will highlight which infoboxes on your wikia have not been migrated to the new infobox markup. It’s fairly intuitive - you can click on the infobox title link itself to see the old markup, or simply click the “Convert!” button on the right, which performs the same action as the “Generate draft markup” button.

This is our help page for the new markup.

If your community would like to see how the new Portable Infobox looks on other communities that are already using it, I would be happy to post a few links for you. Portable Infoboxes can be themed or styled with a bit of CSS so you might notice a bit of variety in what you see. If you would prefer, we would be willing to provide a converted draft of one of your community's current infoboxes and show you what it would look like using a copy of an actual article.

Please discuss it in this thread so we can reply back to any questions or concerns this community might have. We would be happy to discuss them with you. 