User blog:TheBlueRogue/Monster Hunter Wiki Redesign Pt. 1 - Game & Monster Pages

Hello Monster Hunter wiki community!

Those who track the Activity Feed might have been noticing me editing some new drafts for various articles pages related Monster Hunter: World! I have been talking with Kogath about updating the general design and flow of the wiki and have begun to experiment with new article looks to help modernize this awesome community!

As many of you know, the Monster Hunter wiki has been around since 2007 and has a ton of incredible content across the series. But the way some of that information has been organized is a bit on the rough side. Over the last few years, mobile traffic has begun to eclipse desktop traffic across FANDOM wikis and a large portion of the Monster Hunter wiki has templates or article layouts that display poorly on mobile. This can result in visitors exiting pages very quickly or look to other sites for their content asks. Not to mention, this can deter new editors from joining the community! Here are a few examples to showcase what I mean:

These are just a few examples. Over the last few weeks, I have been talking and meeting with other FANDOM staff about the Monster Hunter wiki - from other Community Development/Community Technical users as well as advice from our SEO team, and they have helped organize some of the biggest areas of concern. And I’d like to help layout my progress as well as a to-do list so this process is as transparent as possible. Of course, we would love any help from active users in this endeavor as well!

There are so many articles and templates that I wish to update so going forward we can have a more modern, unified look of the entire wiki but this is a very large undertaking. With the upcoming release of Monster Hunter: World for PC on August 9th, I’ve made it my goal to establish new designs and quality standards on Monster Hunter World articles that can be used as framework going forward (and eventually backward!)

Without further ado, let me lay out some of these upcoming changes.

Game Pages
Ex: Monster Hunter: World

The first thing I looked at was game pages for Monster Hunter games. These pages have a lot of information but it's laid out in an unoptimized way. The image navigation as shown in the above section displays poorly on mobile, the video galleries are a long string that inflates the size of the article instead of using a traditional gallery. The bulleted lists have great information but ideally, these lists can be repurposed into full-length paragraphs that read better.

The links from the visual image navigation can be moved within the infobox, and while they are less prominent, can be easily found and will display cleanly on mobile. I also pulled in other game-related information to the game page itself (this information can still live on other pages, but it's good form to include all the elements of the game as a summary approach).

You can see my redesign of this page type at Monster Hunter: World/Draft.

Monster Pages
Ex. Anjanath

The big baddies of Monster Hunter are definitely the highlight of this series and I have been looking at different ways to reorganize these monster pages to display more in-depth information and include relevant sub-information. For you're a longtime player of the series, you'll note that many monsters appear across multiple games and that can make it difficult to organize information in a succinct way. For starters, I used the Anjanath as an example of a monster that has only appeared in one game so far. There are several newly introduced monsters in Monster Hunter: World, and while they may eventually appear on other games, this is my approach monster pages for one-time appearance monsters.

You can see my redesign of this page type at Anjanath/Draft.


 * Pulling in monster materials and equipment information, instead of visiting the topics section (which doesn't display on mobile at all)
 * Pulling the render image into the infobox instead of it the top article section
 * I've pulled in more information to the first paragraph, this is good SEO practice and will help with search ranking to have a more cohesive opener.
 * I've removed the game appearances template and the in-game description template (will expand on this below)
 * I've moved Monster notes into the above section, this is good information and almost always can be pulled into the Physiology or Behavior/Abilities section
 * I have combined the Behavior and Abilities sections and removed any other subheadings that have less than four sentences.
 * I have pulled the gallery to the monster page itself. Gallery subpages are considered dead weight by SEO standards.

I want to leave the Topics navigation for now, the Equipment and Ecology sections are heplful but eventually, we will look to remove them or repurpose them in a different way. That can be saved for after a bulk of these pages have been redesigned.

Monsters that appear in multiple games
So, now the big undertaking of how do we redesign monster pages for monsters that have appeared in multiple games. After consulting with FANDOM's SEO and ComTech team, we've decided that using a subpage system labeled after different games is the way to go. The current Rathalos page has a hodgepodge of different information across different games, including breakable parts from MH4U. Hosting specific game content on their subpages will make it easier for users to find specific game information about monsters on a google search!

Subpages can allow the infoboxes to represent accurate pictures of the monster from those games. Moving galleries from it's /Photo gallery page to a gallery section on subpages is a good move as well. Moving the Ecology sections to these Monster "hub" pages would be a good idea in my mind to flesh out more information. We want these types of Monster pages to be easy to branch off to find info on specific games while still detailing a bit about the common details about these monsters.

Basically, each subpage will be laid out with details similiar to the way the Anjanath draft was laid out above. While each monster page will act as general overview and hub to these specific subpages.

You can see my redesign of this page type at Rathalos/Draft..

NOTE: Not this is still a work in progress and will be fleshed out within the next few days.

Next Steps
Next steps for article and template redesigns can be fleshed out after the core of these monster and game pages are done. If you are interested in chipping into these process, feel free to reach out to me or Kogath and we can discuss specifics.

I will continue to craft draft pages for monsters over the next two days and will begin to pull these changes into the main articles starting Sunday August 4th/Monday August 5th.

Please leave a comment with any concerns, questions or clarifications if we have them. Of course, this extensive redesign means that I will be an active force here from now until who knows! So if we haven't been formally introduced, please reach out to my message wall. I'd love to get to know you, editors and game players, alike.

Along with this, me and other ComDev associates (Pinkachu and Raylan13 are chipping in content related to World (such as armor pages and Palico equipment). We hope to fill in all of the remaining gaps here in the next few days!

Thanks so much and happy hunting!

TheBlueRogue •(profile)•(talk)•(doug@fandom.com) 20:19, July 31, 2018 (UTC)