Fandom, a wiki hosting service and fan platform with over 300 million monthly active users and 250,000 wiki communities, has just announced its newest features and tools, Interactive Wiki Maps and Fandom Trivia.
Creators on Fandom have known about Interactive Wiki Maps and Fandom Trivia via the community blog for over a year as the features have been tested and perfected. Today is the first time the platform is announcing the features to the public.
Interactive Wiki Maps introduces a customizable mapping tool that has been long-requested by the creator community. Fandom Trivia, meanwhile, is a built-in wiki feature that enables creators to enhance a fan’s experience and test their knowledge of every detail of the imagined worlds they can’t get enough of. Now, creators across all Fandom communities can design their own maps and quizzes to further immerse fans into imagined worlds that provide them with information about their favorite games, TV shows, and movies.
The features finally rolled out last month after a period of testing, bug fixes, and receiving feedback from creators. The team is still working on evolving the maps tools and implementing new features such as custom map markers and more.
Some examples of published maps include the world of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and the planet Batuu from “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.”
Image Credits: Fandom
The Interactive Wiki Maps feature was created using the open-source Leaflet JavaScript library and is defined using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). It can be built as a wiki page in the Map namespace and is embeddable in other pages with template transclusion. Transclusion is the use of the template functionality of MediaWiki to incorporate identical content in many documents without the need to edit those documents separately. The JSON file is the source editor and the underlying code. The team also built a much more intuitive editor on top of that.
Then, to make the creation of Interactive Maps available to everyone, Fandom created a visual editor tool that would simplify the building experience. This tool is similar to the current Theme Designer and allows users to comfortably upload a map image, place custom markers on the map, add descriptions, and more without needing to work with the JSON source code. Users who are familiar with JSON can still edit the code in the source editor.
This isn’t the first time Fandom has tried to implement maps. There was an older Wikia Maps feature attempted back in 2014; however, there were fewer resources in Fandom’s arsenal to pull off something that had the right tools and would garner enough user adoption.
Gamepedia, which was a separate wiki platform that Fandom acquired in 2018, had IP-specific solutions for interactive maps but was never centralized into one tool. The development team was smaller than Fandom’s current team as well. This new unified, customizable mapping tool is fulfilling a promise to creators that took years to perfect.
Fandom Trivia has also gone through a series of tests, especially the location of quizzes on …read more