Fandom Stars connected with a few members of Fandom’s News & Ratings team for a roundtable! The N&R team was able to delve into the makeup of the team, current initiatives, and discuss their impact at Fandom while sharing a bit about the acquired News & Ratings brands that include Metacritic, GameSpot, GameFAQs,TV Guide, Giant Bomb, and Comic Vine. During the Roundtable, they posed questions to Stars, inquiring how they felt when it comes to cross-linking widgets and how they consume entertainment content. Read on to learn more about Fandom’s News & Ratings team in this summary and sign up to participate in their cross-linking experiments!
News & Ratings might be the newest brands within Fandom’s portfolio, but they’re making a major impact on the fan experience as they provide access to N&R content like gaming stats, related articles, ratings and reviews, and more.. This collaborative team consists of 7 engineers, a designer, an analyst and a product manager. They are a small but mighty team that work very closely with other Fandom teams. Currently, the N&R team has been experimenting with gaming stats from sites like GameFAQs and has also been exploring new ways to serve the needs of editors on Fandom’s platform.
Our esteemed guests included Anna Oh, Staff Product Manager, Audrey Jardin, Principal Product Designer, Klaudia Siłakowska, Software Engineer, and Dylan Host, Community Manager, Safety. Fandom Stars submitted questions before the event and had wonderful questions throughout the event as well. Dive into the discussion below.
Question: What is cross-linking?
Anna: So, cross-linking is a project we're working on at Fandom where the goal is to link content across our sister sites in order to serve the interests of our users. Most recently, we rolled out an experiment where we presented gaming stats in a widget of Fandom Wikis. This widget contained data from one of our N&R sites, GameFAQs. We're continuing to brainstorm ways to improve the experience, especially on the Wikis. We are open to hearing your ideas!
Question: Many of these brands seem to be news sites or aggregated news sites. What is Fandom's plan for continuing to employ human writers, researchers, and editors in order to maintain editorial standards rather than outsourcing the journalistic work to generative AI?
Anna: Thanks for sharing this question. This is very important to us on the News & Ratings side especially for our content team who are writing the articles. I actually had a chance to chat with Chris, our editor from GameSpot, as well as Carlos, our VP of Content, to prepare these answers for you. Here are their responses for you that they wanted you to know:
Chris: "GameSpot content is all written and edited by humans, and the editorial staff is strongly committed to continuing to operate in that way to ensure accuracy and quality."
Carlos: "We do not outsource any content publishing to Gen AI at all. Our brands 100% of the time use real writers/people that are either full time employees or part of our pool of freelance writers we've been using for years."
I think that's the great benefit of having News & Ratings brands coming from the journalism industry. They are 100% behind continuing to employ human writers, researchers, and editors. And they've been killing it! We continue to have high traffic on GameSpot content especially.
Question: How will the N&R team ensure data reliability as presented in the cross widgets? For example, I recently saw a widget displaying a pie chart how users self-rated the difficulty for a related game. Are only users who have confirmed to have played the game allowed to vote?
Anna: We have dedicated Fandom community managers who are helping us check the reliability of the data. Sometimes, it's possible that the ratings won't be as representative of all users, but my hope is that if we see an increase in adoption of our widgets and people actually are interested in the content, then we can even work with our GameFAQs team who manage the user rules for voting.
Question: How will N&R ensure accuracy that the cross-linking widgets display on appropriate pages? We recently had a gaming widget display data from a game called "Dynasty Warriors 5" on the Warriors Wiki, a children's book series. Fortunately, our WR was able to take it down.
Anna: We are currently undergoing manual review and there is definitely a chance that we missed a few incorrectly matched ones. As this is an early version of our widget, unfortunately mismatches are sometimes unavoidable. When we decide to productize the widget, the quality of our data matches should become more reliable.
Stars enjoyed learning about the operations of news and ratings cross-linking and building a relationship with the team! We’re excited to learn more about the development of the experiment and invite you to join the fun. If you’re interested in learning more about cross-linking and would like to collaborate with the N&R team, sign up!