Wiki Editor Advice

We all know that wiki articles and other pages compose a wiki. The fundamental building blocks of a wiki, though, are its users and its content. Each community has its own tone and they commonly use guidelines and manuals of style to maintain a cohesive "voice". The traditional guiding principles of big wiki communities — such as Fandom, Gamepedia, and Wikipedia — have an open model where articles can be potentially edited by many people. Constructing articles must be a team effort, with no one "owner" and flexibility on what makes for an ideal article. Articles make up the bulk of what most communities supply on a day-to-day basis, more than blogs or images or video.

To attract an audience and more contributors, as a best practice, content…

Wikis are full of information, and organizing that information leads to a better experience for readers exploring your wiki. Categories are a part of our communities that add grouping and association to pages. They’re also a very wiki-centric concept; as such, there is less general research available under that term, and we rely on more of the data Fandom collects to determine the Best Practices. For research purposes in the non-wiki world, the Category is most akin to a web model called “topic clusters”, but categories also have elements typical of tags (aka labels) common in blog posts.

While there are many methods of moving between wiki pages, only a few show highly organized clusters of pages. The most common of those used for navigati…

Images, when they're available, should break up text on a page to make it more interesting. Thinking about how and why images are used is important, as all the imagery of your pages build reader impressions for your communities. Compelling images can also uniquely inspire and engage your readers to contribute useful information.

All pages have a purpose. Images should be applied carefully to support that purpose. Some pages are articles, but most that aren't should be for the purpose of linking or leading to articles.

1. Identify and prioritize all the messages of the page. What is the intention of the page you're editing? Is the page primarily meant to navigate or describe your community? Or is the page meant as an informative article?
2. Define ho…

It’s people!!! Yes, the internet consists of computers, servers, routers, modems and a gazillion bites - but in the end, that technology is only the infrastructure that connects billions of people across the globe.

The users are what makes the web so vast, so diverse, and often so mind-boggling. In this blog, we talk about why it is important to remind yourself that everything you encounter on a wiki and the web in general was created by someone, and for some purpose. You are always dealing with a person, not a script or robot, at the other end.

Have you ever been annoyed by someone refusing to follow the rules, ignoring your instructions, or being plain rude to you or others? Sometimes, they could very well do better, but don’t want to - we…

Last week we talked about the journey from reader to editor. The next step is building your skills, reputation, and relationships on your chosen wiki.

Our heavy contributors are the hearts and souls of our communities. They probably started as readers and have been sharpening their wiki skills for some time. Knowing the territory, rules, tools, and terrain of a community establish them as local guides. If you want to be an expert user, there are so many things you can do as a contributor that can improve the community!

The best way to get noticed and respected is to contribute quality edits. Making small improvements and "riffing" off someone else's contributions is good. You're building together, not replacing their work entirely with your …

This blog is for all you readers out there. You've looked around some of the 300,000 wikis on FANDOM, looked at some News and Stories, found some great reads on the wikis, and maybe even visited Discussions. So what's next for you?

Well, one thing you've probably noticed is the rich community on FANDOM. Each fandom is its own community, and then there is the overall community on Community Central and the other language versions of this wiki.

• 1 Building Your Identity
• 2 Making Your First Contribution
• 3 Discussions, Another Way to Join In.
• 4 Let's Talk!

To join a community, the first thing I would always suggest is to make an account. You can do some things on FANDOM without being logged, including reading, editing, and commenting on articles. But logg…

This is the fourth post in a series of six about admins on FANDOM, adapted from past posts written by Sannse.

I've given a lot of social advice to admins and to others on FANDOM, but today I want to give admins some more practical advice on pages to use and skills to learn. These are the top five areas that I'd suggest any admin learn.

Wiki Activity is a useful page for getting an overview of what's going on on a wiki, but it's not the full picture. The full details of what's happening on any community are on Recent Changes. This essential page lists every change on the wiki, including edits on pages that are less often changed, like templates.

For an admin, or for any keen contributor, this page is the starting point for understanding everyt…

Wikis are communities of people working together on a common project. It's almost inevitable that there will be disagreements and arguments as the community grows - that's just human nature. But when do disagreements become harassment or cyberbullying?

Harassment and bullying are more than just a mean comment or a nasty argument. In both cases, they involve repeated attacks over time. They might involve lewd texts, threats on social media and elsewhere, and even posting personal details and pictures. These are serious issues that may have "real-life" or even fatal consequences.

Some examples of harassment or cyberbullying on Fandom might be:

• Making repeated nasty comments, Chat messages, Wall messages, etc.
• Following a user to other communitie…

New users are something that every community needs, whether it's an established community or a brand new one. New users bring more hands to do the daily work of building and improving the content, and can bring valuable new ideas too.

The problem is that many people make their first edit and then disappear back into the Internets. Reaching out to talk to new users is one way to help bring them into the community.

All communities come with an automated welcome tool that leaves a message for each person when they make their first edit. This is a good start, but it's not the end of the welcoming. Each message is "signed" by an admin. That way, if a new user replies to a welcome message, there's an admin who's notified of that who can write back.…

Allow me to introduce to you User:Sanns sock. She's a pleasant enough sort of user, not very active on Wikia, but she's been around for a while. She's useful when something goes wrong and there's a need for some non-staff testing.

Then there's User:Sanns bot. She's retired now, but used to do some work around Wikia every now and then. Just routine spelling corrections and other simple changes.

There's also User:A user name with spaces, User:Sannsetestingagainandagain and, for some reason, User:APrettyPinkPotofPreciousPetunias.

As you might have guessed, these are just some of the accounts I've made on Wikia over the years, my "sockpuppets". Most of them were made to test various features and verify bugs. Although, as an old Uncyclopedian, the…