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Hey everyone!

Fandom Stars recently joined with members of Fandom’s User Generated Content’s cross-functional team, Marcin Kostrzewski, Senior Software Engineer, and Antonio Castro, Product Support Lead, in a roundtable to discuss Structured Quotes!

If you’ve been keeping up with the latest detailed Technical Updates announcements, you’ll see that we’ve discussed the User Generated Content Team’s plans with the Structured Quotes tool, and thanks to the community's feedback, improvements have been made to the tool. Structured Quotes are a new way to capture and utilize information within quotes. This tool creates content integration and cross-referencing opportunities by allowing Fandom to understand and store the context and meaning behind the words.

This summary highlights key takeaways, including actionable insights and answers to questions raised by Stars before and during the roundtable. Marcin and Antonio provided detailed responses and encouraged Stars to embrace Structured Quotes, even offering examples from early-adopter wikis. This resource ensures that even those unable to attend the live event can stay informed and engaged. Dive in below to learn more about Structured Quotes!

What have you learned from initial testing that will help when the feature gets implemented for other types of data?

Marcin: As for the question, for me personally as a dev who had to step into the feature design kind of shoes, definitely reaching out to you as often as possible has had a huge impact on the way we did some of the stuff. We're definitely looking forward for doing the same with next projects, we highly encourage yall to become early adopters of our new goodies and be active around conversing with us. It's basically a given that we will make some mistakes here and there, but we can greatly reduce that risk by just asking you for feedback beforehand

Antonio: I have to confess that I always wanted to use Semantic MediaWiki to organize the content in my own wiki, but as you know it can be really complex haha, so having the chance to use Structured Quotes is a way to reach my dreams. The UGC created something intuitive to use (if you know how to use wikitext) and I think the initial testing was the confirmation that there was margin to improve but we were in the right direction. They have been adding more options and making it more flexible, so I'm proud of Marcin and the rest of the team understood the community needs and translated it to something more helpful for the users

Marcin: Thanks Antonio!!!! Structured Quotes also laid some ground works for us to understand how to design tools around wikitext in general, which we have been guilty of not doing in the past, so hopefully we'll all get to see that trend continuing.

If a wiki wishes to implement Structured Quotes, will it require a lot of manual changes?

Marcin: We're doing active research to see if an automated tool to convert existing quotes is something we can do, but I unfortunately cannot promise anything at this point

I think, the main change and a limitation of Structured Quotes compared to just regular templates is that each entity involved in a quotation (speaker, receiver, source, etc) has to be a link, either link to another page or to some external source, which may add some extra effort on your side.

Antonio: Well, we have created a new help page to make it easier, explaining how it works, giving examples, etc. It isn't hard to take the original templates and convert them to the new system using the new markup. To be honest, the hard work will come in changing the specific quotes in the articles because they have to use a unique ID, change the links as Marcin said...

How has the response matched initial expectations? Did any significant changes arise from the initial conception?

Antonio: For me, my main worry was the flexibility, I didn't know if the users would find it useful in their daily work. I mean, when you create a new tool, you have a clear idea about how it should be used, but when the users start to use it and you see how they explore new ways to use it and they create something bigger than you thought, it's when you are confirming if the tool is good or not, and I think the Structured Quotes are giving to us a lot of info about how other kind of structured content will work and how flexible we will have to do it to make it useful for our users. I suspect the major changes are coming from that side, giving that flexibility to the tool, but probably Marcin will have a better idea about this because he has been working on the tech side hehe

Marcin: I definitely expected way more negative feedback honestly! But turns out some of you have actually been satisfied from the get-go!

Once everything about the Structured Quotes is done, what are the following projects to structure the wikis more and more? Are there any projects you're particularly excited about?

Marcin: One of the next steps for structured content is most likely going to be to structure categories (still a work in progress), which aims to solve some of the issues with widgets like popular pages, or any browsing suggestions we show around the article. We would like to know exactly that, for example, if you're browsing a levitation charm from Hogwarts Legacy in a Harry Potter wiki, you'd most likely be interested in other spells too, not some random character from one of the books or a movie

We were also discussing structuring relationships between pages, so for example, you'd be able to define how certain characters are related to one another, or in which episode a character has first appeared in, etc. Sort of like 'structured links' where you can specify extra context around wikitext links to other pages. Bear in mind this is just in the 'ideas' bucket, of course.

In terms of views and indexation, what are your expectations of SQ? Do you have any other?

Marcin: I think we aren't expecting any direct impact on things like pageviews, but rather to have more understanding around the data that is embedded deep within wiki articles, so we can design new features around them in the future. Like for example, the mentioned improvements to browsing recommendations thanks to structured categories. Structured Quotes give us some insight as to how characters interact with one another. And the obvious expectation is of course, better housekeeping and organization tools for your wikis so you can create content of higher quality easier.

Are the template and its effects the same for non-EN wikis? Is there a plan to localize it?

Marcin: So to make it easier for new wikis to adopt the tool we're creating a default template that I believe does not require any localization as it's just using the text you pass via the new parser function. This template, however can be edited by anyone just like any other. It also will come with a default documentation that will briefly explain how to use it and it will be fully localized

As for the template invocation and its parameters, no, it will not be localized and will use english names, that was unfortunately a technical limitation around MediaWiki itself.

Would a panel/dashboard for administrators to check and understand the connections between the articles made by the Structured Quotes be available one day?

Marcin: No, unfortunately, we don't have anything like that planned for the near future

But, you definitely can use the querying capabilities of it to reason about / reuse that data

Antonio: Yes, and we can see if any quote is changed listing the quotes in certain pages, that's a way to check if they are changed.

Defining relationships between characters seems like it would fit into the structured framework very well. Is the plan to work on these one at a time and how will it be determined?

Marcin: Given how long it took Structured Quotes to mature enough for a bigger release, yes, definitely one at a time. I would love to know that too, but it's still a little to early to judge

Perhaps we'll do another roundtable to brainstorm around it. We did that at the beginning of structured quotes and got some good ideas out of it!

Antonio and Marcin were kind enough to share examples from Five Nights at Freddy's Wiki, who were early adopters of the Structured Quotes tool throughout the roundtable. Flexibility was undoubtedly a requirement from the start; it was very important for the UGC team that editors could tailor the tool to their needs, and they explained that to us throughout the conversation. See the examples below!

An screenshot example of a Structured Quote used on the Five Nights at Freddy's Wiki to reference Bonnie The Bunny with a black background and purple text used

An example of a Structured Quote used on the Five Nights at Freddy's Wiki to reference Bonnie The Bunny


Overall, the roundtable was informative and an excellent way for Stars to dive deeply into Structured Quotes and learn more about the UGC team's plans for structured content. We look forward to reconnecting with the team in a few weeks to share our progress with the tool and plans for the future!

Learn more about Structured Quotes: Check out the Structured Quotes help page to learn more about the tool and create Structured Quotes on your wiki!

If you enjoyed this summary and want to engage in future roundtable discussions with Fandom Staff, learn more about the Fandom Stars program and apply here!