Best Behavior and Management Practices for Chat
Greeting all! I'm sure many of you may recognize me from Chat here on Community Central. Over the past few weeks, Brandon has been providing great advice for admins be a great administrator and tips for becoming an admin. In addition to that, I thought it would be helpful to touch upon what the best behavior for chat is and how to manage chat/be a good chat mod.
Chat is a great place to hang out with other Wikians. While chat is typically a relaxed and fun environment, sometimes guidelines need to be put in place in order to keep it that way. Here at Community Central, we have our own set of Chat Guidelines to help make our chat a friendly and welcoming place. Your wiki is free to craft its own guidelines. For example, My Little Pony Wiki has…
Tips for becoming an admin
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about a few things that can help you be a great administrator. That’s helpful advice if you’re already an admin, but those who aren’t admins may be asking themselves an important question: how do I become one?
First, let’s briefly recap some of those tips for being a great admin.
Admins are no different than non-admins, they only have a few extra editing buttons that the community entrusts them with to carry out certain maintenance tasks (deletion, protection, blocking, etc). Admins should exist to serve the community and act as guides within a community, not rulers. After all, it’s the community that should be making most of the decisions. All admins are equal to non-admins, but they still play an important r…
Get in the Holiday Spirit
'Tis the Season to deck out your wiki in Holiday awesomeness. Why should your house get all the attention? I mean, I probably spend more time on Wikis than I do in my house, and decorating a wiki is way less dangerous than decorating IRL!
There are so many great times of year to dress up a wiki - from holidays, to seasons, to topic specific events (new season, game, etc). Back in October we hosted a Halloween Costume Contest,and I've seen wikis getting decked out in hearts for Valentine's Day, or going green for St. Patrick's Day. Having a fun design that goes with the season is a nice way to celebrate, get people excited, and offer something fun to the folks visiting your wiki.
So, how can you carry this out on your wiki? I have a few sugge…
A Wiki Citizen's Guide to Communities
We often talk of wikis as "communities", but I don't know that we stop and think about what that means.
A community originally meant a group of people living and working together in the same area. But Wikia certainly isn't that, there are people from all over the world here, and you are probably more likely to come across people from the other side of the world than you are your hometown.
Communities are more than just people connected by a common location, they are also people linked by a common interest, or occupation, or belief. We are a community because we care about wikis, and using wikis to create awesome sites about things that matter to us.
And within the wider Wikia community, there are many smaller communities. From Adventure Time …
New ways to showcase Video
Back in September we announced that we are working hard to offer and integrate more videos into Wikia. Having videos on your wiki is a nice way to highlight content and give people the chance to really experience your wiki's topic. There are a couple of interesting ways we've been working on to display videos, and we wanted to share them with you.
We wanted to be able to show more than one video on a main page without taking up too much space, so we started experimenting with a randomizer. This code lets you feature 1 main video, with 3 smaller videos displayed below. When the page is refreshed, the 3 smaller videos are also refreshed, offering 3 new and interesting videos.
Check it out in action below, and find the code for doing it yoursel…
Tips for being a great admin
Long before I ever worked for Wikia, I was an administrator on the Star Wars Fanon wiki—and I still am. One of the most important things I’ve learned in my time there is what the ideal role of an admin is, or at least should be. I think this is a really important topic here on Wikia, and I wanted to share my thoughts on this with you.
Admins, as you know, are users with additional editing tools to help with more advanced wiki maintenance (such as deleting and protecting pages), as well as policy enforcement tools like the ability to block users. That gives admins a lot of power, but there’s often a question as to what the role of an admin should be and how that power should be used. Are admins meant to be the boss of a wiki, or are they meant…
Promote Your Wiki
One of the most common questions we get here at Wikia is, how do I promote my wiki? We know that wikis do better with more contributors, so today I am going to offer you a few ways you can get the word out about your wiki on Wikia. We know you'll have even more ideas, so please share them with us in the comments below.
The Wikia home page is a great way to get your community noticed by a wide range of people. From everyday editors, to newbies just finding Wikia. Any admin can go to Special:Promote on their wiki, fill out the sections, and have their wiki added to the growing list of communities being highlighted on Wikia.com.
For more information on how to do this visit the help page.
"Get promoted" in the Community section on hub pages. This…
Blocking Best Practices
Welcome to another installment of wiki advice. This time, one for admins: an overview of blocking.
First, a quick refresher on how to block.
The easiest way to block someone is via their contributions page. Go to their profile, and click the "contributions" tab. If you are an admin, you will see useful links the contributions page, including a link to the block page.
This will take you to the block page, with the username or IP already filled in. There you can choose the duration of the block, and the text that the user sees when they try to edit.
You can also select various options for the block. In general, it's best not to check "Prevent this user from editing their own talk page while blocked". Leaving the talk page open gives the user a wa…
Don't Feed the Trolls
Any time you have a community of diverse people, things are sometimes going to get difficult. There are lots of reasons for disputes and disruption on a wiki but today I'd like to talk about one specific type of problem: trolls and how to deal with them.
The first question is, what is a troll?
A troll is someone who is acting badly in order to get a reaction. Trolling is the Internet's equivalent of a practical joke. Trolls are the people gluing a virtual quarter to the virtual sidewalk. They're out for the the LOLs at your expense.
Most vandals are trolls. It's not just the vandalism itself that matters, it's knowing that the people on the wiki are getting annoyed. And if there is visible proof of that annoyance, then all the better! From a v…
Screenshots: Tips & Tricks
Every wiki grows with each tiny contribution. Whether its correcting spelling on an article, starting a new blog post or updating a page with the latest information. A great way to help contribute to a wiki is to add screenshots. Screenshots may be from your favorite episode, of an awesome item from a game or a multitude of other places.
- Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard. The Print Screen key should be located in the upper lefthand side of your keyboard. This will copy the image to the clipboard. Please note that this will capture an image of your entire screen.
- Hold Alt and press Print Screen to take an image of a single window. This will capture your active window on to the clipboard.
- Once you have the image on your clipboard, open up a…