User blog:Golfpecks256/Wiki adopting tips

Hello everyone,

I wanted to write this blog as a guide for what and how to smoothly run a community after you adopt it successfully using an adoption request.

I have had the opportunity to adopt and run multiple wikis, which has greatly improved my community management and leadership skills over time. Therefore, I wanted to share some key components and factors which will be useful if any one reading wants advice on how to successfully adopt and run a wiki.

Introduction
When you adopt a wiki, in most cases, you'll be the only administrator on that wiki. There have been times where multiple users have adopted the same wiki (either a merged adoption request or one adoption request made and agreed by two users.) But when you find yourself being the only active administrator, leadership skills will be greatly nessecary in the process. Especially if the wiki you're adopting already has many active users.

How to get started
When you adopt a wiki, you'll find yourself in a situation where you want to either establish a firm set of rules or alter any current rules to keep the community running smoothly. With that also being said, if your community has or may have in the future lots of contributors, it's always a good idea to set up a discussion system so the community can propose any changes they may have. Community consensus is always key if you want to satisfy everyone. Remember, nobody owns a wiki per the ToU.

Next steps
Once the rules and discussions are all sorted, your next priority would probably be how the content is going to be formatted and how everything will look like. Your best bet is to make everything organized, neat and tidy as that'll attract more viewership which would be a great goal every wiki wants to achieve. After all, wikis are supposed to be used as a resource as well as a community.

Creating templates like infoboxes, tabs, and anything else would be a good place to start with. Let's take it from a random user's perspective. Would you rather edit a wiki with organized, well-formatted content or a wiki with poor, messy content. In my opinion, I'd go on with the well formatted content. It's always good to build on from a good wiki with well established templates and formation than one that has very poor dedication and very confusing ways of editing. That just shows that making everything simple and easy for someone to understand attracts contributors which would be every wiki adopter's main goal.

What happens if a user does anything that will have a negative impact?
Simply warn or block the user, depending on the severity. As a bureaucrat and admin, you have great responsibility to have great judgement when it comes to situations like these. While doing this however, be careful not to feed the trolls. When someone does something negative towards the wiki, it's usually to drag attention or for them to expect a response/reaction. While warning is okay, please make sure you keep things civil. Trolls expect an angry reaction and if you're found being the only admin on a developing wiki, you'll need to tackle the problem by yourself in the best way possible. So ignoring any backlash, or trolls would be the best initiative. Just ignore and warn/block. That's my best advice.

Spicing up things
Of course content is a big priority in wikis, but once everything gets stable, you may want to customize or design your wiki more to be more attractive to both viewers and potential contributors. This may include the main page, editing media wiki pages to customize, editing the theme designer, editing the background and wordmark and creating a logo for your wiki. I'm sure if you're not very experienced with this side, it's not mandatory and I'm sure your fellow FANDOM users would be happy to help you! By this stage, I'm positive some contributors would've started helping. But if not, there's still a solution....

Advertising
This is undoubtably the best way to attract users. Simply let them know the wiki exists. Bring it to their attention. Advertise it basically!

When advertising, be careful not to advertise forcefully. Remember, users have a choice of whether visiting your wiki or not. So always have a flexible mindset in the case where someone rejects the advert.

You can advertise it to individual users or to many users at once. Here at Community Central, you can advertise it by creating a blog post or likewise. That way many users will see it at once. Some good tips would be to be persuasive, point out what the wiki is about, mention any unique features it may have, and always be open to any feedback viewers may offer.

One other way I've found which has been really successful is social media. The Encyclopedia SpongeBobia (SpongeBob Wiki), the main wiki I contribute during my time at FANDOM has grown a lot and a good portion of its growth came from social media. ESB was also another successfully adopted community. All the steps mentioned here were followed once by AMK152 back in 2007 and now the wiki has over 13,000 contributors and nearly 17,000 articles! That just goes to show how a tiny community can turn into a massive database! That took a lot of time however but following these steps, over time, any wiki can grow to be any size. ESB got its first social media piece, a twitter account in 2014. That alone has 730+ followers as of today which shows that it's already decently popular on twitter. Because of its success on twitter, ESB has social media platforms on every website. About six social media accounts are owned by ESB. I, myself, as an administrator run the ESB Instagram which has attracted instagram users. Once again it's very small, only about nearly twenty followers. I'd assume that's how the ESB Twitter was back in 2014. But over time, that follower count will increase and as it increases, so will the wiki.

Basically to conclude my point, social media is an absolute great way of advertising and getting the wiki popular. It's by far been the most successful for ESB, so I'm sure it can for you too.

To conclude this blog post, I hope anyone reading gets the picture of how to successfully run a wiki in its early stages. If you keep working on it, you can accomplish a lot in the matter of years. So my best advice: keep going and never give up!