Bringing down the banhammer: Best practices for blocking
I’ve been an admin on Star Wars Fanon for almost five years now, long before I started working for Wikia. In that time, I’ve blocked my share of users. It took awhile for me to figure out best practices for this, but now I feel that I know what I should and shouldn’t do when it comes to blocking. In this post I am going to share the practices I follow and my advice for blocking on your wiki.
Sometimes the instinct is to come down hard on a user who has broken a rule, but the right thing to do is to find a good balance between helping that user learn how to be better and enforcing policies. There are three stages, in my view, that someone should go through when it comes to blocking. Those stages are: helping, warning, and then blocking the use…
Make yourself a Wikia-MacGyver: Adding custom scripts
Hi, everyone. If you don't know me already, I'm Grunny and I can often be found creating JavaScript tools to make tasks easier for the community. One of the most powerful (and fun!) aspects of MediaWiki is the fact that users can customise their own interface using CSS and JavaScript. Many people may not have any knowledge or experience with coding, but fear not, many tools are already available for you to use just by adding one or two lines to your user subpage.
One of the best places to have a look at for user scripts is the Wikia Developers Wiki where many helpful users have shared useful scripts they have created. I'm going to highlight a few of them here and let you know how you can install them for your own use.
A quick couple of terms …
Showcasing Cool Wiki Activities
Simply put, you guys are awesome. You come up with amazing and interesting things all the time. Your wikis are an inspiration to other wikis, other users, and Wikia staff. You should be proud of the amazing things you create, and you should share them with the world!
We're proud of the things you do on wikis, and we often share links with one another from our favorite finds. Today, we've collected a sampling of the cool stuff communities have done below. This isn't all of them, and we're sure we've missed a bunch, so feel free to add your own finds in the comments below!
- Featuring content on the main page helps your community find their way around. Check out the interesting treatment for a Featured Article/Featured Image on Songpedia.
- Sliders…
Wiki Wisdom: Reacting to Trolls and Vandalism
Last month we kicked off a series called Wiki Wisdom. It's a series where we share and highlight great user blog posts we read on Wikia. As a community, Wikia collects so much knowledge — our goal is to give shout-outs to well written, informative, and thoughtful blog posts.
In today's post, we're highlighting RRabbit42's help page Dealing with Vandalism and Spam. It was written on the Phineas and Ferb Wiki, but has a boatload of helpful and valuable tips for dealing with trolls or vandals.
At one point or another in our Internet lives, we all come into contact with a troll or a vandal. RRabbit42 offers calm and helpful advice. The post gives a few definitions, explains why people troll and vandalize, and then details how to handle yourself …
Work and Play on Your Wiki
"I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun."
Thomas A. Edison
I think Mr. Edison would have been a Wikian. It's true that we're working hard to create amazing encyclopedias of knowledge about everything we love; from The Avengers to Zelda, and millions of topics in between; but we're also having a lot of fun in the process.
There's joy to be had simply by editing your wiki: adding photos and videos, cleaning up spam (yes, we know that can be hard work, too), beefing up pages, etc. We've heard from plenty of Wikians who've spent hours working to make their community the best possible resource for one topic.
Traditional editing isn't the only way to work on wikis; there are tons of other engaging opportunities, especially if you're jus…
Wiki Wisdom: Adding Wiki Experience to Your Resume
We see users offering help and support in a variety of ways all over Wikia — through editing, comments, forums, etc. Blogs are an especially great way to offer guidance to the community. It's always inspiring to stumble upon blogs where users have taken a moment to share their experience or knowledge so that other users can learn from them. What better way to acknowledge these blog posts than to highlight them in a guest blog series called "Wiki Wisdom" on Founder & Admin Central?
To kick off our very first installment, we're spotlighting a blog post by Tagaziel (The Vault, Command & Conquer wiki, S.T.A.L.K.E.R wiki, Prototype wiki), who wrote a very insightful and sharp piece about translating skills one learns and does on wikis to "Volunt…
Achievements Unlocked
When I first started editing the My Little Pony Wiki, I was thrilled to earn my first achievement badge! Day after day I would edit on MLP a little here and a little there. Each day, I'd scan the list of top contributors on the leaderboard (Special:Leaderboard) to see my name slowly start to rise. It was thrilling and exciting. I felt like I was helping the community to a better place by adding categories and editing articles. Some people pride themselves on edit counts which is great, but I try to focus on specific goals -- that's why I love achievements.
Achievements are a great way to customize your wiki while also encouraging editors to contribute more. Each achievement is awarded based on of a variety of things. And each achievement ca…
Converting Conflict to Calm
Wikis are all about groups of people coming together to build something. They grow best when people can work well together, agreeing on what the site should be and how to best build it. Wikis work because most people are good, and most edits are a positive addition to the project. Otherwise, we’d all be drowning in spam and vandalism, not building awesome sites!
But every group will have its conflicts: disagreements over how things should be, arguments when participants can't get along, or someone causing a stir simply because they can.
Each situation is different, but there are some general tips that can help everyone get through the difficulties.
One of the earliest wiki principles was "Assume Good Faith". When we're disagreeing, it's easy …
Tracking Contributions: Recent Activity
In my last blog post Tracking Contributions: Wiki Activity, I mentioned that wikis by their very nature have a lot of activity and changes happening. Activity on a wiki is kind of like footprints of the editors, leaving tracks as they edit. And it's important to monitor this activity taking place.
Now that you are armed with knowledge of how Wiki Activity works let's get a little more detailed and technical with Recent Changes.
Recent Changes, or as it's sometimes referred to 'RC', is much like Wiki Activity -- they both track contributions on a wiki. But Recent Changes records all of the activity. It's more of a technical feed of everything that's taking place on a wiki. With Recent Changes you can actually see everything that is happening. Don…
Introducing Wikia Webinars
Today, we're excited to announce a new community support initiative that Wikia will be offering all of our users: webinars!
Beginning October 4, we'll be hosting a monthly webinar series on the first Tuesday of each month. In these hour-long sessions, we will introduce new tools, offer tips on editing, and discuss best practices. The Community Support team, as well as guest presenters from the Product, Engineering, and Content Marketing teams, will be your webinar hosts.
Here are the dates and topics for our upcoming webinars:
- October 4 - Admin Tools & Tips
- November 1 - New Product Updates & Best Practices
- December 6 - Tips for Designing & Promoting Your Wiki
You can also find the full schedule, including presenter names and registration informatio…