Here at Wikia we're all about community, which is why we have not one but two teams devoted to it! Previously in A Day in the Life, we covered the Community Support team and how they assist you with any questions that you may have about your wiki. Today I'm proud to introduce the Community Development team (or ComDev), who works hard in serving the community from a different angle.

The Community Development team is primarily based out of San Francisco. They work on taking requests to help improve wikis by creating content and assisting with engagement. This could be anything from helping set up a Twitter account to creating a walkthrough for the latest game. You may recognize one of the following members of the team who may have put up a sk…

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Hello Wikia community! I am Marc-Philipp (also known as MtaÄ). I have been editing on Wikia since 2008 and a member of the International Volunteer Team (IVT) since 2009. Today, I wanted to give you a little more insight into what "working on International Wikia" means and introduce the international team.

Wikia is around the world and has a vibrant international community of readers and editors. The IVT is a team of helpers on Wikia that work on international communities, with a special emphasis on the German, Spanish, Italian, French, Polish and Russian communities.

Supporting our international communities means that we are supporting local communities by answering questions in our local community forums, writing help pages and translating …

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As Dan discussed yesterday in a post about the big picture of search development, we are now investing in improvements to search at Wikia. Search is more than just a way to navigate to a specific page -- it’s also a way to discover new content, browse related articles, and explore a wiki.

Our goal with improving search over the next couple of months is to bring Wikia’s search not only up to industry standards, but also to a place where our communities get the most benefit out of it on both a local and global scale. Today’s update is still part of the early stages, and we have more in the works coming soon.

Here’s what’s new right now:

We now have a global search with grouped results. Previously, if you searched for a wiki on the Wikia.com hom…

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Hi everyone,

My name is Dan Baran, and I’m the Director of what we call the “Platform Team” here at Wikia. We focus on systems that support multiple front end features -- one of which is search. The recent improvements we’ve made represent many months of hard work and careful decision making. As with many foundational systems, it was necessary to weigh the options of integrating an external search service, versus developing our own (based on a Solr/Lucene core, for you tech types). It was not an easy decision, but in the end, we decided that having fine-grained control over our search tool outweighed all other factors. Wikis, as documents, do things a little differently than other content systems, and the only way we’re going to be able to …

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Last spring, we released chat for wikis and so far over 12,000 communities have started using it! With so many active communities using chat on a daily basis, we have gotten a lot of great feedback and requests for improvements.

Starting this Wednesday, we will be releasing an update to chat on all English wikis. It's already live on a couple of select communities as well as Community Test (so feel free to test it out there).

We've changed the way users are banned from chat to make it more like blocking on a wiki. With this release, the "bannedfromchat" user right will no longer exist. The new blocking system will be as follows:

• Kick - We created a new action called "Kick" for admins and chatmods. Kick severs the offending user's connection f…

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It's time for another exciting installment of our Featured Wikian interviews! This time, we're talking with Cloudskye, a member of the Warriors Cats Wiki.

Wikia: Tell us a little bit about yourself...just some general information about you.

Cloudskye: Well, I'm fresh out of high school, and starting my first year in college. I'm an avid gamer, and love to read. I could sit and read books like Harry Potter or Inheritance all day, or play video games like Final Fantasy and Pokemon (yes, I'm a fan. =P). Although I try not to spend all my time screwing around, I do anyways. Well, that's when my time's not being taken up by college, where I plan on pursuing an earth science major.

Wikia: How did you first discover Wikia?

Cloudskye: I found Wikia back …

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Wiki search is more than just a quick way to get to a particular page -- it’s also a tool for exploring, browsing, and discovering content. We know that the search tool is a critical component for any wiki, so we’re working hard to raise the quality of our search experience this year. You can expect more updates in the coming months as we adjust our interface and improve the technology behind our search results.

To kick off this series of updates, we’re starting with two simple changes that may affect how you use the search field on your wiki:

1) Exact match searches will now go to search results pages instead of to article pages.

2) If an exact match article is available for a search, it will always be the top result on a search results page…

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]] Do you want your wiki to look awesome, but aren’t sure how to make it shine? At Wikia, we’re constantly trying to improve the experience of creating and managing a wiki. Part of that support is offering expert help to wikis. I’ve been working on wikis for nearly five years, and as Community Development Manager, I'm your go-to person for approving and fulfilling community requests.

In addition to helping with custom themes, logos and home page designs, we're now taking requests for help with general clean-up and organization of your wiki as well as help with content creation.

Before submitting a request, look over the best practices guidelines. To receive help, your wiki needs to have an active admin, a minimum of 50 articles and a clear c…

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Did you know that we have two major engineering teams here at Wikia? It’s true! We have one here in San Francisco and one in Poznan, Poland. In this installment of "A day in the life...", we are going to follow a day in the life of our engineering team in Poznan . There's about an 9 hour difference between the two offices, so at midnight on the West Coast when everyone is asleep, it's already 9am in Poland and the engineering staff there beings to shuffle in. As a result, we have more or less 24-hour coverage between the two offices.

The engineers help keep our site running by developing the latest features and improving upon old ones. They are constantly working to keep Wikia running and track down any bugs that may pop up.

9am - A few folk…

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Time for another exciting installment of our Featured Wikian interviews, this time we're talking with Happy65, a user who spends a lot of time waddling around in the Club Penguin wiki chat, helping new users and spreading the joy of penguins.

Wikia: Tell us a little bit about yourself...just some general information about you.

Happy65: I live in Northumberland, a county up in Northern England. It is my home county and I have always lived in Northumberland. I like Soccer (Football) Rugby and Cricket.

Wikia: How did you first discover Wikia?

Happy65: I first discovered Wikia when I wanted to find a site to edit about Club Penguin

Wikia: What do you think is great about Wikia?

Happy65: The chat is a great way to communicate on Wikia.

Wikia: Which wikis do…

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