Board Thread:Wiki discussions and announcements/@comment-171752-20150806155555

We’re reaching out to a few of our top communities, hoping to get you on board with the migration to the new infobox markup. And we have tools to help!

Why we’re doing this

Simply put, most current infobox structure translates very poorly to mobile experiences and any device that doesn’t use desktop-style displays. On desktops and laptops, they often look amazing. The problem is that Wikia’s traffic is trending mobile. There is an important graph on our recent forum post about infoboxes that illustrates this trend.

Mobile is the future, not just for Wikia, but for the web as a whole. Take a look at the recent trends and future growth predictions for mobile traffic. It's staggering.

We partnered with the Wikia community to create this new markup to make sure that your hard work can be easily displayed on mobile devices (as well as any future technologies) without any new coding conventions. It’ll take some effort up front, but we’re here to help, and the work you put in now will pay for itself tenfold in the future.

Tools we’ve designed to ease the process

We’ve enabled two new features on your community. One is a tool for migrating the “old” infobox code to the new markup. It identifies templates on your community that look like infobox templates and places a box on the right rail of the template page. When you click the “Generate draft markup” button in this box, it opens a new tab containing a draft of your infobox using the new markup. You can read more about the migration tool at Help:InfoboxMigration.

The second is a new feature on Special:Insights that will highlight which infoboxes on your community have not been migrated to the new infobox markup. You can click on the infobox title link itself to see the old markup, or simply click the “Convert!” button on the right, which performs the same action as the “Generate draft markup” button mentioned above.

This is our help page for the new markup, which goes into detail and includes multiple examples. I look forward to your feedback and answering any questions you have. 