Board Thread:New on MARVEL Crossroads Wiki/@comment-24751588-20130508225010

Hey guys, I just wanted to let you guys know, I got a cool email from Wikia central concerning a new feature called WAM (or Wikia Activity Monitor). To learn more, you can read here. Be warned, it's long, but it's worth reading, I thought it was very interesting.

"WAM (Wikia Activity Monitor) is a new and unique analytics tool that addresses a few fundamental problems with "traditional" analytical metrics. The two traditional metrics Wikia has relied on in the past are pageviews and edits. Both are, of course, logical indicators of how well a wiki is doing, but those two metrics alone don't answer some important questions. Is the wiki truly growing? How is a wiki doing compared to other wikis of its same approximate age and size? If a wiki has a lot of pageviews but not a lot of edits, is it really a healthy wiki?

WAM begins to answer some of these contextual questions. We use a unique algorithm to combine both pageviews and edits over a short-term (one week) period and a longer-term (four weeks) period to give a more accurate picture of how active a wiki truly is. This means one wiki won't be "on top" of another wiki simply because it has X more pageviews this month if another wiki has Y more edits.

What are the goals of having this algorithm? First, it allows first-time Wikia visitors to discover our largest and most active communities, those that may have popular topics as well as a healthy, active editing community. WAM allows admins like yourself to see where your wiki stacks up compared to other large wikis and allows Wikia staff to discover smaller yet highly active wikis that are growing at a quick pace and engage them in productive way to equip them with some of the effects of rapid growth. We're very excited about WAM because it allows our biggest wikis to publicly showcase how productive they are while also allowing growing communities to get exposure when they otherwise may not.

Where can you check it out? It's live now on our WAM page. We'd also recommend you read Bert's blog on WAM for some extra information. We are interested in putting WAM in more places, including giving you a quick indicator of your WAM score actually on your wiki. We are at the early stages of beginning to think about that, so please feel free to reply to this email, leave a blog comment, or write into Special:Contact with any thoughts about if and where you think it should go on your wiki and what information you would like WAM to entail."

Basically, it's a new way to track how well a Wiki is doing. So, naturally, I checked how well we are doing, and we are in 1,905th place by popularity, out of over 300,000 wikis. So congratulations to the Crossroads, and thanks to all of you for getting us here. 