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:
- 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.
- 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 an 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. There are also plenty of Wikia wikis that have 200 or less articles that look like they 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 since it has had some publicity and has 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)
- The best thing would be focus on one particular topic area for a couple of months (e.g. political wikis), and support them with press releases, personal contact with appropriate print and online publications, etc.
- advertising
- Google adwords or similar internet advertising
- small ads in support of particular Wikia wikis in appropriate print publications
- legitimate search engine optimization techniques
- wiki admin bootcamp
- an area within Wikia Central for the support and training of Wikia wiki creators and administrators
- should include the creation of a series of policy templates so that the Wikia wikis don't cut-and-paste Wikipedia policy pages (that are often left with Wikipedia-specific info
- For example, see my advice at w:c:nascar:User talk:D-Day# Thanks for the welcome
- an area within Wikia Central for the support and training of Wikia wiki creators and administrators
- Wikia support for 'real world' events
- e.g. support for booths at Star Trek, Star War, and science fiction conventions to support Wookieepedia, Memory Alpha, etc.
Suggestions for new Wikia wikis[]
- Recruiting existing wikis
- one problem for most non-Wikia wikis is that they are using older versions of MediaWiki software with few or no extensions. Moving to Wikia would mean that they wouldn't have to worry about maintenance and software updates.
- most active open source software programs have wikis. Some are very well run, but others need the sort of help that Wikia could provide.
- 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, article seeding, etc.
- There have been a few high profile wiki disasters when an organization has started a wiki without adequate planning and oversight (e.g. LA Times, UK govt. environment policy dept. [name?])
- Other wiki experiments, such as CNET's Take Back the Web wiki [1] have been not well thought out and were poorly implemented, which means that they were basically ignored. Some help from Wikia for administration and seeding of the wikis could have helped.
- Provide offsite management of other wikis, including internal corporate wikis
- software updates, installment of extensions, help with the formulation of policies and procedures, etc.
A suggestion for Wikia-wide operation[]
I had made the following suggestion at Wiki NASCAR:
- Here's a suggestion that I think all the Wikia wikis should adopt. Where you have a redlink, such as for Scottish Rite on the Main Page, it is almost too easy to create an interwiki link to the appropriate Wikipedia article at w:c:nascar:Wikipedia:Scottish Rite. Unfortunately, the link looks like an internal Wiki NASCAR link. You should create a template for the Wikipedia links that makes them show up in green (or some color other than blue, purple, or red) so people will know that they aren't a link to a Wiki NASCAR article (e.g. Scottish Rite).
Instead, I think that Wikia should change the MediaWiki software to that all interwiki links are in green (or maybe orange), instead of having the same blue that internal wikilinks have.