If anyone has ever had a five-minute conversation with me, they're pretty much guaranteed to know two things about me. First, I love working here at Wikia. Second, I'm a big NASCAR fan. Thus far in 2013, I've worked as a travelling photographer at twenty-five different races and know the sport inside and out.

Whether or not you're a fan of racing, just know races are ultra-competitive competitions. Teams spend hours of testing on the track, in wind tunnels, and poring over notes because the tiniest bit of extra speed goes a long way. 500-mile races often come down to tenths if not hundredths of a second.

As it turns out, Wikia is a place where split seconds matter as well. While our sysops and long-time users measure community health and act…

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Hey everyone! Michael here, from Wikia’s Community Development team. My name may be new to many of you -- I just joined Wikia in May of this year, and I am still getting to know everyone in the community!

As Director of Community Development, one of my pet projects is Wikia’s Admin Showcase - a visiting admin program that allows us to invite community admins to Wikia HQ in San Francisco for meetings, feedback, and conversation about how we can be of service to you.

We have met some amazing community members so far through this program, and we have received fantastic product and community insights. Those insights, thoughts, and suggestions from visiting admins make their way into our development pipeline, and help us deliver improvements that…

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Back when we announced Wikia Video we wanted to offer a solution to videos that get taken down due to Copyright issues from sites such as YouTube by providing 100% properly licensed, high quality videos for you to use on your communities.

Shortly after, we released another tool to streamline the process allowing you to replace non-licensed videos with our licensed videos –Licensed Video Swap (LVS). This new tool allowed admins to quickly swap videos from outside providers to the same (or very similar) video that exists in our library at Wikia Video.

We are happy to announce that last Wednesday we yet again updated Licensed Video Swap (LVS) with a few new features to further make the process even easier for you and your communities.

The update…

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With over 72 million monthly visitors across over 320,000 wikis (and counting!), Wikia is a hotbed of passionate expertise on an incredibly diverse range of topics. With such a plethora of information to sift through, breaking into a new franchise or genre can seem a tad overwhelming. To help break the ice, we're going to be asking experts from various communities to tell us what it is about their area of expertise they find so captivating -- and the steps they recommend beginners take to set themselves on the path to geekery.

We call this series "Guided Tour", and in honor of Halloween it's all about Horror Games.

Horror games have been around a lot longer than Resident Evil, but if there’s one title that almost single-handedly popularized t…

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It's been exciting to see all of the comments and feedback about VisualEditor, and encouraging to hear that so many of you think it will be beneficial for newer users on Wikia communities. Be assured that source editing will remain available to users who prefer it, and we're working hard to make sure that VisualEditor can serve the needs of a wide range of contributors. Today I'd like to highlight some of the challenges and achievements on the road to creating this update to the WYSIWYG editing experience on Wikia. We'll also touch upon the next steps of the beta release that we have coming up.

Wikia engineers Christian and Inez have been part of a long-term collaboration with the talented folks at the Wikimedia Foundation. Together they de…

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It's that time of year again...the leaves are turning red, there is a chill breeze in the air, and the Fall season has arrived. It's time to curl up next to the fire with a rich cup of cocoa, to mull hot apple cider on the stove with cloves and cinnamon sticks, and to pick up your favorite Pumpkin Spiced Latté in Starbucks' signature red cup.

This month's guided tour is all about drink trends for Fall. Ditch the hot chocolate packets and your boring cup of coffee for one of these seasonal drinks that are sure to make your tastebuds go wild.

We interviewed a few of Wikia's key drink wikia admins to get their insight on the hottest (literally and figuratively) drinks of the season.

You've seen the Pumpkin Spice Latté, the Eggnog Latté, and of …

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UPDATE!: We have a winner!

The grand prize winner is HARRY POTTER WIKI !

It was a VERY tough choice choosing from the nearly 60 wikias that participated in the contest this year, but we were wowed by the full integration of the theme - from skin to wordmark to content - on the Harry Potter community.

Our runner-up picks included:

Gravity Falls Wikia : Who told us their "changes were made (mostly based on the Summerween episode), with the character portal on front page featuring characters in their Summerween costumes. Image slider starts with image of the Summerween Trickster wishing everyone a Happy Halloween!

World Girl Wiki : New background, featuring characters in their Halloween costumes from the episode, Tobey's Tricks and Treats. Heading …

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With over 72 million monthly visitors across over 320,000 wikis (and counting!), Wikia is a hotbed of passionate expertise on an incredibly diverse range of topics. With such a plethora of information to sift through, breaking into a new franchise or genre can seem a tad overwhelming. To help break the ice, we're going to be asking experts from various communities to tell us what it is about their area of expertise they find so captivating -- and the steps they recommend beginners take to set themselves on the path to geekery.

We're calling the series "Guided Tour," and today we're taking a look at Young Adult Fantasy.

Continuing our running series on the various flavors of fantasy, we turn this week to Young Adult fantasy, a genre that, desp…

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The Wikia page. Hope to see you and your fellow community members again next year. Good-bye 2013 convention season!

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Greetings Wikians!

As some of you may know, members of Wikia's Community Development Team take part in a bi-weekly podcast called the Wikia Community Podcast. This podcast features an assortment of Wikia-related updates, chats about the latest Video Games and Entertainment news, highlights of our favorite Wikia communities, and conversations with special guests. Every other week we plan on bringing you discussions on a variety of subjects, in all the realms that encompass Wikia and it's communities!

This September, we recorded two exciting episodes full of great content, discussing news and interviewing Wikia admins on various communities!

Every month, we'll be posting recaps of our two most recent podcast episodes here on Community Central!

…

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