User blog:Atarumaster88/Wikia's New Feature

Direct Engagement Rating Proposal
Wikia is announcing their newest feature, coming soon to communities near you. They've done a bunch of research on popular web platforms and used focus groups to figure out why their communities are largely populated by isolationist individual users instead of connected communities. The overall health of a wiki drastically improves when users feel connected to each other, and Wikia is committed to finding ways to encourage such interaction in a healthy, positive, user-friendly environment.

One thing that was found to be missing was a visceral means of expressing interest or appreciation for the works that other people were doing. To remedy this, Wikia turned to a popular method for showing that appreciation or involvement, a simple measure that among the users tested, proved to make a big difference. It's called the Direct Engagement Rating Proposal

What is it?

Simple: a "like" button, similar to the one commonly employed on popular social media platforms. This feature will allow users to express their appreciation or fondness for the works of others with a simple button press. It only works for registered users, encouraging visitors to stay and engage with the community rather than just keep moving on. This button will appear on all pages in the article mainspace to help users promote their content.

Here's an example of what it looks like in the default Wikia skin:



And here's an example of the new feature on the Monobook skin (note that this feature is not optimized for Monobook):



So get excited&mdash;there will soon be a newer, more user-friendly means of showing off how awesome and well-recognized your pages are. For particularly notable users, it'll be possible to see directly how many of your wiki's VIPs appreciate your contributions. And when that happens, you might even get one of these:



Wikia's Direct Engagement Rating Proposal, coming soon to wikis near you!