Hello, everyone! We have an exciting new beta feature to introduce today: the Community Page, found at Special:Community!
- What is the Community Page?
It's just what it sounds like - a place where any user can find more information about your community! This feature is accessible and open to all users (logged-in or logged-out).
As a new visitor to a community, you might wonder:
- who is part of this community?
- who is creating the pages?
- who manages this wiki?
- what can I do to help?
The Community Page will be able to answer these questions quickly and serve as a landing page for those who want to know more about the community before diving in. We believe this should also help make it clear that there are plenty of things that new members can do to start contributing to the community!
But that's not all. For experienced editors or admins of the community, the Community Page provides assorted summaries of recent activities across the community: who has been contributing actively, who joined the community recently, which pages need work, etc. We know many communities have created similar pages to meet these needs, but making this a standard feature of Wikia can help surface information that all types of community members want to see.
Communities that need special care or adoption can also benefit from Community Page. If the users who are interested in the topic of the lonely community can easily see what they can do to revive the community, it helps the community find new editors and admins quickly.
- How do you access and tweak it?
Currently, the Community Page can be accessed via a link at the top of the right rail, visible to logged-in users. Alternatively, simply point your browser to Special:Community.
We plan to test out ways to direct our users to this page after making their first edit on the community. We will also explore the best way to surface this page to readers to highlight that there is a community of editors behind the content they are enjoying.
For lots of information on how it works and how it can be modified, check out the help page: Help:Community Page.
- What's our future plans?
After doing some testing with this beta version and working on some more features, we'll most likely be releasing this to all communities in the near future.
However, development will still continue after that. We would love to know what you think of this beta version, and what additional information you think would be helpful for new users as well as experienced community members.
Check out your Community Page and let us know your thoughts in the comments below!