User blog:Tagaziel/Your Wikia experience and CVs

It has toccured to me lately, as I've been writing my 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 needs to contain all your job experience that might be relevant to the job you're applying for. If you've been contributing 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.

The basic question is: where to place the appropriate heading? Simple. Unless you are a paid Wikia employee (and I'm sure you'd know that you are), 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.

Here comes the hard part. Summarizing your experience and key skills you've learned and are practicing under Responsibilities. It is tempting to just put in "Website Management" and be done with it, but trust me, that will just 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 thing 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.

There are two important things to remember. One, 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...!". Two, always be ready to explain what exactly your responsibilities were. 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.

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)

Regards, تغازل