User blog:Nobody Cares/Manage Your Wiki!


 * Notice: Most of the guides are for big wikis, there are also some guides for small wikis but most of these are for big wikis.

While most wiki advice are interface customization, this blog is about managing and organizing your wiki! Find the most common and uncommon tips on organizing and managing your wiki in this blog post. The tips are divided into sections.

Promotions New Admins
One great event on a wiki's history are promotions. When promoting an admin, you shouldn't just promote the admin because you feel like it, you should promote them because you know that they can take responsibilities as an admin. Meets all the requirements? Not a democratic wiki? Promote he or she! If the wiki is democratic, then there must be a community consensus with more people agreeing than disagreeing.
 * Requirements I Recommend
 * He/she should have made many helpful contributions
 * He/she must be focused on the wiki's neatness and improvement
 * He/she must have the community's (not just yours) trust.
 * He/she should be fimilar with css and javascript and how they work.
 * He/she must be good at wiki coding.
 * He/she needs to be in the wiki for more than one month.
 * He/she needs to be active in the wiki.
 * He/she must be aware of the wiki's topic and know about it.
 * The wiki must be in need of admins or not have too many active admins.
 * The current admins must agree with he/she being promoted.

Policies
Every wiki big or small needs a policy. If not, many users will not have a complete idea on what to do and not to do on a wiki and might do some things you don't like them to.

If your wiki has a policy, it should not be just on one page, it should be divided to subpages or other project pages, examples of these policies are on Songpedia and Call of Duty Wiki. And the subpages/project pages should be detailed and the content should be why it should be followed and should contain the punishments for breaking it. Also, if your wiki has badges, you must have a policy regarding badge abuse (i.e. when people add pages to categories that the page doesn't belong to just to earn more badges).

Policies should not be composed entirely of 'NO!'s, if it is, it should be separated from the policies that doesn't use 'NO!'s.

Guidelines
There are many types of guidelines, but the most commonly used guideline type is the "Manual of Style" that is used by thousands and millions of wiki websites. The Manual of Style should contain what people should put on articles for each type of them and what is considered a stub. Some guidelines also contain grammar corrections which are very helpful too. Or if some article types on a wiki contains complex layouts, there should be a guideline about it unique to the wiki

Task Lists
Every wiki has tasks on improving, and making the wiki even better. Always remember that every good user on the wiki wants to help on these tasks but they can't do it if they don't know what these tasks are. "How do I make users be aware of these tasks and make them help????" The answer is very simple! You need to create a page called "Task List", "Check List", "To-Do List", or whatever you want to call it based on the wiki's topic.

Community Discussions
It is always good for the community to discuss about the wiki
 * Blog posts - Discuss about the matter being discussed
 * Live Discussion - Wikia-Chat, ShoutBox, Xat, and IRC
 * Talk Pages - For discussing improvements on one article, use the article's talk page!
 * Forums - Wikia Forums or any external forums you can make.

New Features
Don't enable or request every new feature that wikia releases on to your wiki. Only enable it if it's good for the wiki or much of the community asked for it. If newbies messes up pages with RTE, then don't enable the new Visual Mode. If many users flood discussions or blog comments, then don't enable commenting on article. If the users on the wiki cheats to get awards, then disable badges (if there are).

Power The The People!
The community must be privilleged to vote for promotions, redesignes, etc..

Trouble Makers
Before blocking a user you must check the contributions of the user, if the user caused nothing but trouble and damage to the wiki, give it an indefenite block as the user didn't help anything to improve the wiki. Also, after blocking, try hard to "shut up" about the user as giving the user attention is what the user really wants, if you don't shut up about it, there is a high chance that the user will continue to cause trouble as an IP or another account.

Have I Missed Anything?
Leave them below on the comments. Happy Editing! -- 09:51, June 29, 2011 (UTC)