User blog:Meighan/Wiki Wisdom: Adding Wiki Experience to Your Resume

We see users offering help and support in a variety of ways all over Wikia &mdash; through editing, comments, forums, etc. Blogs are an especially great way to offer guidance to the community. It's always inspiring to stumble upon blogs where users have taken a moment to share their experience or knowledge so that other users can learn from them. What better way to acknowledge these blog posts than to highlight them in a guest blog series called "Wiki Wisdom" on Founder & Admin Central?

To kick off our very first installment, we're spotlighting a blog post by Tagaziel (The Vault, Command & Conquer wiki, S.T.A.L.K.E.R wiki, Prototype wiki), who wrote a very insightful and sharp piece about translating skills one learns and does on wikis to "Volunteer Experience" on your CV or resume. (You can see the original blog post here.)

Sannse originally called this blog to my attention and it struck a personal note; I started fiddling around online in 2005 and have since turned that into a career. I did exactly what Tagaziel highlights here &mdash; I added the many skills I learned along the way and put them on a resume.

Read below to learn about Tagaziel's advice on how to translate your experience online into professional experience in the workplace:

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Your Wikia Experience and CVs
It has occured to me lately, as I've been filling out job applications, that my experience in administrating Wikia wikis could be translated into an entry on my CV.

Question is, how would it be done?

A curriculum vitae (CV) or resume needs to contain all of your job experience that might be relevant to the job you're applying for. If you've been contributing to and administrating wikis for the past, say, four years, then you've surely accumulated a decent amount of experience and know-how.

Now, it's a question of translating all that into an entry on your CV/resume.

The basic question is: where to place the appropriate heading? Simple. All Wikia-related experience should be placed under the Volunteer Experience or Other Exprience headings.

Now, to formulate this experience: The company name is Wikia, Inc.. The Inc. is really, really important, as it designates the legal form in which Wikia operates.

Underneath, write the length of time you've been a Wikia contributor. At the present, your registration date is displayed on your user page or in Special:Preferences.

Now, forgive me for indulging myself, but I'll give you an example CV entry, using me, myself and I as subject:

OTHER EXPERIENCE Wikia, Inc. June 2007 - present Volunteer administrator Responsibilites: Content editing, copy editing and maintenance, community management, website management and maintenance (cnc.wikia.com, stalker.wikia.com)

Here comes the hard part. Summarizing your experience and the key skills you've learned and are practicing. This should fall under Responsibilities (see sample above). It is tempting to just put in "Website Management" and be done with it, but trust me, that could make your potential employer ignore that entry. You need to be specific and brief.

Are you primarily hunting grammatical errors and have accumulated several thousand edits worth of revisions and corrections? Consider writing that you are responsible for content management or content copy editing.

Or maybe you are the kind of contributor that spent thousands of edits worth of time creating missing pages and expanding stubs? Then content editing may fit your bill.

It may be that you specialize in images: creating high resolution graphics for your wiki, replacing old images with higher quality ones, categorizing them or all of the above. Then image management, image editing or graphics management.

Some find great joy in interacting with the community, spending a great deal of time helping new users get on their feet, policing comment threads for rules-violating content or simply glue the community together? Community management may be the right description to put under responsibilities.

Of course, there are many other responsibilites that may be mentioned, if applicable. For example, our venerable Porter21 can easily place website programming and CSS design and implementation under his responsiblities, as he has spent thousands of edits creating custom .css designs for The Vault and other wikis, on top of implementing complex, yet easy to use template systems.

Lastly, make sure you include the URLs to the wikis you are speaking of.

There are two important things to remember:


 * 1. Do not overstate or steal accomplishments; you might encounter an employer who himself is an avid Wikia contributor or knows one, and either of the above will lose you the job faster than you might say "I mistyped...!"


 * 2. Always be ready to explain what exactly your responsibilities were on the wiki. Again, be brief, but explain the nature of your Wikia work, what editing you do, point out any major revisions of yours that remain in use. Most importantly, be modest. A pinch of modesty may just be the spice needed for your potential employer to fully account for your Wikia experience.

Regards,

تغازل Have you been able to translate your skills you use here at Wikia to a resume? Or better yet, have you gotten a job or internship because of what you do on your wiki? Let us know in the comments below.
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Submit a blog post: Do you know of a good blog that someone on your wiki has written? Have you spotted a helpful post you think would be great for this feature, or have you written a post you'd like to share? Feel free to leave a comment (with a link) below or on my talk page!