User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Tips for attracting readers and editors/@comment-244709-20130523011043

These are some very useful and informative tips. Thanks for posting them! :)

There's something related to this that's been nagging me for a while, and I'd really appreciate any advice or input anyone has. In my wiki experience, I've seen a strong need for communities to socialize. I know features like the forums and user blogs help with this need, but I've seen them being used on different wikis in many different ways. My wiki, in particular, discourages using these tools (and others) merely for socializing because it doesn't do anything to improve the wiki's articles.

(We also find it frustrating that it has the potential to flood the Recent Activity list if a subject becomes popular enough with the community, but it's secondary to the former reason on wiki content. We're aware of how to use the full Recent Changes list to filter the namespaces, but as far as attracting potential new editors, we really treasure the Recent Activity list and want to keep it clean of chit-chat.)

Even still, socializing became such a large need in our community that we had to work out a "truce" of sorts in allowing user blogs for social activities. And, as we predicted, the problem of users coming to the wiki only to socialize quickly arose.

I, of course, know the importance and benefits of community members effectively communicating with one another, which is why I haven't simply disabled the features yet. But what concerns me is that the wiki's communication tools (forums, blogs, talk pages, etc.) are wanting to be used instead to talk about the wiki's subject rather than how to build content. It's hard to tell if this is benefiting the wiki, or if it's possibly hurting the wiki because there's more focus (for example) on what a character's OTP is and less on that character's article.

In case I failed to make my thoughts coherent (or if there are some who had the case of "tl;dr"), here's the bottom line: Is community socializing also a good way to attract contributors? Should it be a priority and/or concern for a wiki?