Wikis work on the principle that most people are good and want to help a project rather than harm it. The success of wikis on Fandom shows this to be true – we could not have a thriving and growing network of communities without most people involved cooperating with each other to build an astounding resource.

However, as with any social system there are those who prefer to try to impede and disrupt the community rather than be part of it. The Trust and Safety Team exists to help Fandom communities to stay healthy and productive. We do this with direct intervention on-site, by providing training for the Fandom community, and by monitoring high risk activities.

This report provides an overview of the Trust and Safety team and our initiatives to improve the Fandom environment.

The following document encompasses our Trust & Safety actions for the 2024 calendar year. View our previous report, for the calendar year 2023. In addition to our primary Transparency Report, this year we are releasing a secondary report to meet the legal requirements of the European Commission’s Digital Safety Act. This focuses on moderation and the tools we use to moderate. View the DSA report.

Brand Safety

JavaScript review

JavaScript edits totaled 1662 this year, and rejected edits remain low. March was the outlier with 6 submissions rejected, this was due to an advanced coder trying out some complicated code. Overall, the low number of rejections shows the skills and the good intent of our JavaScript writers.

Fandom Brands Moderation

Along with wikis, where most staff moderation is found, we also have user-generated content on Fandom Brands. Specifically we, along with user moderators, maintain forums, editable user pages, lists, wikis, and walkthroughs, on Game FAQs, GameSpot, Giant Bomb and Comic Vine.

Global Blocks

We had two massive waves of spammers in May and November using a wide range of IPs from India. This dominates this year’s chart of global blocks, with over 130,000 in May and 125,000 in November. SOAP (the Spam Obliteration And Prevention Team) did their magic, and kept this spam out of the sight of the rest of us with their amazing skills and manual and automatic tools.

Thankfully other bans remain relatively few. With more than 350 million monthly users on Fandom, the number we block is relatively tiny. Showing again that annoying as the bad actors are, most people on Fandom are good.

The high variation in numbers makes the graph hard to read. It’s easier to parse as a table:

Image Review

Did you know that all images uploaded to Fandom go through checks to filter out the offensive ones? The first level is a machine learning AI which scores images on multiple factors. Anything that is identified as clearly offensive and outside our Terms of Use is deleted quickly after upload. Of course, the AI can’t be sure of every image (although it’s learning!) so ambiguous ones are shown to human reviewers. Images flagged there go on to get a last check from a member of the Trust and Safety team before being deleted or allowed to remain.

Your eyes are still the best tool though, If you find bad images and there’s no admin around, you can always report them to SOAP or to staff.

User Education

We offer voluntary educational programs to help users enhance their platform experience. These programs, accessible through our Community Programs Hub, include:

Admin+: This program helps administrators develop the skills needed to grow and manage their communities.
Fandom Compass: This program focuses on community growth and teaches SEO principles.

Interventions

Users at Risk

It’s very common for people experiencing distress to reach out to others. And an anonymous website may feel like a safe place to do that. So we try to direct people expressing suicidality to places where they can get the help they need, whether that’s by reaching out with support resources or, in rare cases, passing details to relevant authorities.

If you are ever in need, or want to point a friend in the right direction, check out our suicide prevention resources.

Toxic Communities

It’s always impressive to see a wiki community working smoothly with the support and guidance of their admin team. But sometimes things go wrong and a toxic culture develops. If that happens, the Trust and Safety Team may need to step in, often working with our Community Managers. But this is the last thing we want to do. So we encourage wikis to work through their problems and let the community moderate themselves first.

Abuse Filter

This year we took a firmer stance on racial, homophobic and other slurs on Fandom. To help enforce this, we added new restrictions via our blocking tool. We want you to express yourself, but we also want a site that’s welcoming to all. So now, if you try to use one of the banned slurs, your edit simply won’t go through. See our blog on this for more information.

Closing Wikis

Making a wiki is easy, just a few clicks and you have a site ready to be edited! But growing a wiki can be hard, and sometimes people just can’t get going. In extreme cases, we automatically close wikis with almost no content or activity. We keep the number we remove low, but this pruning gives the wikis with potential room to grow.

As well as the auto closures, we regularly manually remove wikis that don’t fit Fandom. For example, we don’t allow medical wikis, and will also close “anything” wikis that are really just an attempt to out wiki Wikipedia. We want you to do that by creating depth in a particular topic, not by trying to be a general Wikipedia-clone.

By far the most commonly closed are wikis created as spam. For example, a wiki might be created that just contains a single page advertising a company or site. Our good SEO juice is tempting to people looking for free publicity, and they might get better search results just from that wiki. But it provides no benefit to Fandom and the Fandom community, in fact it might even lower our own ratings! So those are removed to let the real wikis shine.

Accessibility

Measures to Support Accessibility

Fandom takes the following measures to ensure accessibility of our sites:

Include accessibility throughout our internal policies.
Consider accessible practices during Product designs.
Include warning notices for colour contrast when users are designing wiki themes.
Promote accessible best practices to the community.

Conformance Status

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Fandom.com is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 level AA. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

Compatibility with Browsers and Assistive Technology

Fandom sites are designed to be compatible with assistive technologies in conjunction with supported browsers on desktop and mobile devices. Browsers that are not listed and those not up to date may not be fully supported.

Accessibility of Fandom sites relies on the following technologies to work with your web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your device:

HTML
CSS
JavaScript

These technologies are relied upon for conformance with WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards.

Limitations and Alternatives

Despite our best efforts to ensure accessibility of Fandom sites, there may be some limitations.

Fandom is proud to host wikis run by fans for fans. This means some aspects of wikis consist of user generated content controlled by users, while other areas are controlled by Fandom. Content controlled by users may not be accessible, as we cannot control all content additions and design choices by users. To help make this content more accessible, we promote accessibility best practices and encourage community members to make their wikis more accessible. Please read our Customization Policy to find who controls which areas of Fandom wikis.

Below is a description of some known limitations relating to areas that Fandom controls. Please contact us if you observe an issue not listed below.

Some areas cannot be navigated exclusively using keyboard inputs
Some areas may not meet colour contrast requirements
Links open in a new tab with a warning when they should not
Images not marked as decorative may be missing alt text
Accesskey is used on our sites
Some buttons may be missing names and labels

Fandom Transparency Report 2024