User:BlankVerse/Sandbox

I just done one of my irregular look-overs of Wikia/Wikicities. It's something that I have been doing occasionally for a couple of reasons:


 * 1) As a regular editor of the Wikipedia who thinks that there is room for improvement in its policies and procedures, I've ocassionally looked at various other wikis to see how they do things. There are things that I've found done differently, but I've yet to find anything that I think was really done better.
 * 2) I have a few ideas for wikis, but I'd rather not try to build up any of them from the ground up. I'd much rather find a wiki that was doing something similar, and then convince the wiki to expand their wiki to include my ideas. Unfortunately, I really haven't found any wikis that were close enough to perform such a idea 'graft'.

As for the various wikis on Wikia, it looks like there are only a few that are very popular (<10,000 articles). As far as I could tell, there are actually fewer wikis that have 1,000-10,000 articles. And there are plenty of wikis that have 200 or less articles that are basically on life support. (See BV's list of some Wikia political wikis and BV's list of some of the more popular Wikia wikis).

It is interesting to compare some of the Wikia political wikis, to some non-Wikia political wikis. The Campaigns wiki appears to be the most popular Wikia political wiki at 665 pages, This is not surprising in that it has had some publicity and has had the support of Jimbo Wales. On the other hand, there are several non-Wikia political wikis that have over 1,000 articles. dKosopedia, for example, has 7,343 pages, and SourceWatch has 13,445 pages.

Suggestions for existing Wiki wikis

 * Wikia evangelists (borrowing the idea from Apple Computer's Mac evangelists)
 * Google adwords
 * legitimate search engine optimization techniques
 * wiki admin bootcamp

Suggestions for new Wikia wikis

 * Recruiting existing wikis
 * most non-Wikia wikis are using older versions of MediaWiki software with few or no extensions
 * most active open source software programs have wikis
 * Recruiting new wikis
 * find existing, active communities that don't yet have a wiki

Other ideas for expansion for Wikia

 * Providing turnkey public wiki solutions to businesses and govt. organizations including admins, templates, etc.
 * There have been a few high profile wiki disasters when an organization has started a wiki without adequate planning (e.g. LA Times, UK govt. environment policy (name?)
 * Provide offsite management of other wikis
 * software updates, installment of extensions, etc.