Data initiatives at Fandom

At Fandom we gather a lot of data. But it would be worthless if no one looked at it. And this does not only concern Data Scientists and Data Analysts. Without broader interest and shared understanding of the data we have, the information it gives us may be wasted or even worse - misused.

Becoming data driven company is a challenge and here we want to share some ideas on how we’re approaching it in Fandom. As you will see, it’s mostly about knowledge sharing. 

Data People community - is an internal company initiative, that any employee can participate at. It consists of a Slack channel that is the point of contact for any data related questions. It’s where you go with a “Where do we get our page views count?”. It’s also a place where interesting analyses, concepts and tools are shared. In addition, part of this initiative includes monthly meetings that are usually 30 mins presentations. The topics vary, from high level presentation of SEO data and results from Audience studies  to discussing tables structure in our data warehouse and Python libraries used for analysis. As a result, we are more aligned - we know what data is available and who has expertise in certain areas.

Analytics newsletter - each month group of Analysts at Fandom prepare an update or a full article on recently conducted analyses. It usually includes 3 articles monthly that answer various business questions, present exploratory data analyses or evaluate our actions with data. It gives anyone a chance to have a deeper dive into data projects run at the company. People then understand what Analysts actually do and also, what are Fandom data capabilities. An article can also spark some new questions from outside analytics team and also gives opportunities for others to give their insights that may be domain specific.

Ministry of Data - this very wiki. We created this place out of pure love for data - to get some fun insights about favourite Fandoms, to explore what data hides on wikis and also to share lessons learned on the way. Hopefully we will get the data to speak for itself and encourage everyone to think in a data-driven way. Here, we would like to encourage other Fandom users to take part in this project. As we do with Fandom employees with Data People and Analytics newsletter.