User:Philralph/sandbox

Help:Promoting a wikia within Wikia

Forum:Attracting Contributors gives advice about promoting a wiki, and quite reasonably focuses on the almost always necessary process of external promotion. To complement that, this article aims to collect together ideas about internal promotion - promoting a wikia within Wikia - anything which might counteract the feeling that an inidividual wikia can easily seem lost in a sea of 3,000 plus others.

Description, categories and hubs

 * Wikia description page - does this gives others an up to date idea of what the wikia is about?
 * Categories - is the wikia listed in all appropriate categories? If an appropriate category does not exist, you can create one, or discuss the idea first via central wikia's forums.
 * Hubs - is the wikia listed within an appropriate hub? If an appropriate hub does not exist, you can create one, or discuss the idea first via central wikia's forums, where you can also ask for help (to create a hub) if you might need it.

Wikia - wide or populist options
These include Wikia news box, Featured Wikia and Collaboration of the month

Criticism
The following is not argument against populist options, but argument against reyling only on populist options.

A simple consideration of numbers would suggest that the above populist options will not be particlualry helpful or serious options for the majority of Wikia. For example with a new featured wikia each month, if the wikia you're wanting to promote is in the middle of the range of most likely to get featured (around 1,500 out of 3,000 plus), it'll be over a hundred years before it gets featured.

Wikia on different topics will naturally have different development paths. Some may grow quickly but not last, whilst others grow slowly but later on flower in more spectacular ways. Even Wikipedia might have appeared slow growing early on. What's popluar at one time is not a certain guide to what's popular over time.

There's an argument that populist options seem to operate counter-intuitively. For example do they tend to favour already bigger and more successful wika, when arguably those with the greater need for publicity are smaller ones?

Unlike more traditional forms of publishing, often seduced by popularism, Wikia could be said to be outstandingly successful at encouraging a diversity of voices. Doesn't it make it even better if we can find ways to promote and sustain not just the populist tip, but the bulk of this diversity?

More focused options or cross wikia projects

 * Society Gardens is a cross wiki project especially for wikia about the more serious side of life. Such wikia may tend (although of course not always) to have more of a challenge in attracting contributors than some of the wikia about various aspects of popular culture. If appropriate include wikia in the Society Gardens listings, contribute news (see below also), and help devise other ways of encouraging collaboration.


 * Wikia Graphical Entertainment Project is a Wikia project dedicated to creating a network of Wikia about anime, manga, cartoons, and comics which all branch out and link back to a central set of wiki.


 * If you identify a need or an opportunity for a cross wiki project, you can start one or discuss the idea first, and help test out support for the idea, in central wikia's forums.


 * Taking the hubs idea further - there may be a variety of options to encourage people to participate on the hubs - polls, featured wikis, a discussion area, a news area.

News and conversations about wikia
Of course people are naturally concerned to follow the advice: "Be careful that your messages do not come across as spam." Apart from the above populist options, there may as yet seem to be few spaces where people can feel relaxed about promoting individual wikia with news and conversations that in the right circumstances, to the right audience are helpful and do not come across as spam. The central wikia has of course its own purposes and warnings about images and new pages may operate to discourage news and conversation of a more focused but not entirely unreasonable kind.

WikiSocial is a restarted and emerging wikia which might have the potential to help with something like this.

Suggested ideas for news and conversations which need not come across as spam
 * news of wikia that are restarting, or getting adopted
 * news of pages in a new language developing from an exisitng wikia
 * milestones reached - what's seen as siginficant may vary hugely, but having more of a conversation about this would help
 * finding ways to ask for help if a wikia is struggling to keep going before it becomes wholly inactive
 * within a neutral space, exploring possibilities for cross-wiki collobaration. For some wikia developing in a fairly self-contained way may suit that community fine, but for others cross wiki conversations and explorations could be helpful. Whilst direct merger proprosals might be seen as threatening, there can be advantages to being part of a wider-topic perhaps more active wikia (although of course, full intergration isn't the only option):


 * 1) more people to patrol pages and guard against vandalism and spam
 * 2) easier linking and better integration with similar topics, and perhaps most importantly
 * 3) a much greater chance of reaching a critical mass of contributors so that together it becomes a self-sustaining community