User talk:Sarah Manley

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Welcome
Hello, I am a community Manager here at Wikia. Please add new messages to the bottom, thanks :)

If you're looking for help, you can leave a message for me here or visit our help page.

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Familypedia / "Genealogy"
Our community has been fairly small since its inception in 2006, but that may change. It's a popular market segment, as evidenced by competitor sites like ancestry.com that charge $24/month and advertise on Discovery and History channels. As far as I am concerned, their days are as numbered as those of Encyclopedia Britannica when Wikipedia began. Our recent efforts since last spring have been to make it easier for novices to enter family histories. Once that work is complete, I shall be importing large amounts of information from Wikipedia biographies via "pywikipedia" bots. We may get a good spike in activity after that is complete, but otoh it may flop entirely. Who knows- at least something will be learned about how not to apply Semantic wiki concepts on Wikipedia, commons and other wikis. I'm a retired software jock, kind of slogging through the technical stuff while raising my own family (we have 4 kids and are adopting 2 more from Africa). I personally am much less interested in the genealogy side of who begat whom, and more in getting contributors to recover stories about their ancestors. It gives more credit in history to individuals who made it, deconstructing the popular fantasy that history is about the dead white guys who through their singular genius caused everything to happen the way it did. It follows along the line that Zinn started in the 1980s with his series of books that began with "A People's History of the United States". Such fine grained history is material that does not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements, but each story is extremely notable for the micro audience of their descendants. Were it not for each of these forgotten ancestors, we would have not been born. Anyway, in a few months when everything is in place you may like to take a look at it.

I hope you enjoy your new position. Regards, 19:13, October 19, 2009 (UTC)

Administrator rights
Hi, I'm looking for a way to get administrator rights for the Shield wiki but couldn't find a specific page that explained how to do it. I've been contributing to that wiki for a couple of months now and, even though only one other editor has stepped in, I'd like to keep on working on it and perhaps elevate it to the status of other more complete, more visited wikis. Let me know what's the process I should follow. Thanks. Thief12 16:43, October 21, 2009 (UTC)

Just felt like adding that I'm a frequent contributor on the 24 Wiki as well, just in case you want to check my trajectory or something like that :-D Thief12 16:45, October 21, 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the message Thief12, I have responded to your similar inquiry to community@wikia, so you should have a message about this. Thanks for all your great edits! Cheers Sarah (talk 20:26, October 21, 2009 (UTC)