User blog:EarthlingnAkumi/Your First Users

Having your first few new users on your wiki can be exciting, however, you have to make sure that you keep it professional! This blog will go over some best practices for you gaining your first couple of users.

Greeting them
By default, there are message wall greetings that guide users as to what to do for their first time on the wiki. Take advantage of these! You can edit them to make them more personalized for your wiki in particular. It's best that you're there to answer questions, and to be a familiar face to them. If they make a mistake, don't scold them! Inform them, and make sure they know the correct way to do things. If they ask a question, try your best to answer it. If you don't know, direct them here to CC. It's better to get someone useful help instead of saying "uhm I THI NK you do this???", that looks unprofessional on your part and if you end up messing something up for them, they may not want to be on the wiki at all anymore.

Monitoring them
One good thing to do is to not freak out and automatically make them admin (or give them any rights, for that matter) -- you don't know how trustworthy they are. I've seen this happen before on other wikis and it usually doesn't end well, so be sure to check out their profile before making any decisions. A couple of people have actually done this to me before on certain wikis (I won't name any), one of which I'd barely even edited on! So make sure that you're very careful about who you choose. Even so, a user may not even want to have right, which is perfectly fine. So you automatically giving them a right is a bad idea. Instead, wait for them to ask and evaluate their edits before doing anything.

Growing your wiki
The more people on the wiki, the better! Encourage that one person, if possible, to spread the word about the wiki. Just one contributor can really help grow the wiki. Having more users means more pages, and more pages = a higher SEO. SEO is very important for more people to see your wiki on google and other search engine results.

Conclusion
All in all, you want to be a friendly face for new users entering your wiki. FANDOM is volunteer project. You want all hands-on-deck for the wiki, right? By following certain admin practices, you can get more and more people to come back and contribute to your wiki.