Navigating the Wilds of Adminship
There's some skill in being a good admin, and some pitfalls too. So how can you avoid those pitfalls, along with the crocodiles that are likely in the pit! Here's some thoughts on how to navigate around them, and find your way safely across the wiki landscape.
Wikis are accumulative. If things are working well, the smallest start can build into a beautiful article. All you need is for someone to make that first edit and then others to help build on that. Wikis are never finished, there's always something more to add, and even a little helps the wiki more forward. But sometimes admins insist that only complete articles are added to the wiki. The risk of that, is that you may end up with a lot less articles overall! So be tolerant of imperfec…
Guided Tour: Zombies
With over 72 million monthly visitors across over 320,000 wikis (and counting!), Wikia is a hotbed of passionate expertise on an incredibly diverse range of topics. With such a plethora of information to sift through, breaking into a new franchise or genre can seem a tad overwhelming. To help break the ice, we're going to be asking experts from various communities to tell us what it is about their area of expertise they find so captivating -- and the steps they recommend beginners take to set themselves on the path to geekery.
We're calling the series "Guided Tour," and our first topic is Zombies.
Basic zombies -- undead, re-animated creatures -- have been around for a long while, the earliest iterations harkening as far back as Norse Mythol…
A Day in the Life of a Remote Staff Member
This latest edition of our “Day in the Life” series will focus on what it’s like to be a remote staff member. Wikia has a couple of offices around the world and our main headquarters in San Francisco. What you may not have known though is that not all Wikia Staff members work in one of these offices. Most do, but there are a few of us—myself included—who work in various different parts of the world. I myself live in New Jersey, where I work from home.
On the Community Support team about half of our members also work remotely. In this blog you’ll hear from Sean, George, and Tim Q about what their days as a remote staff member are like.
- 1 A Typical Day
- 1.1 Sean
- 1.2 George
- 1.3 Tim Q
- 2 Life as Remote Staff
Hi there. I’m Sean, and my role here is as Commun…
Celebrating Anniversaries
Greetings, fellow Wikians, J Fan here. I'm an admin on the Pirates of the Caribbean Wiki and we recently celebrated a very special anniversary: 10 years since the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the first film in the popular Pirates franchise. In honor of this, we carried out a number of initiatives and I am writing here to tell you about them.
So what did we do?
- Started early. You know, the old saying "the early bird gets the worm"? Well, even though the actual anniversary date isn't for several months, you're never too early to celebrate. We got things started around New Year's, where several things were updated. These include, but are not limited to, the Main Page, our Wiki's background, and a blog post anno…
Understanding Trademark
Trademark is a kind of intellectual property right. It is similar in some ways to copyright, and the two tend to fall into the same blanket category but there are some important distinctions between them. While copyright protects artistic expression, trademark is designed to ensure that consumers are able to easily identify the source of a good or service. In the United States, a federal law called the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. ch. 22 ) largely governs trademark protection. It provides penalties for those who use trademarks in a deceptive or confusing way. At Wikia, I often get questions about trademark versus copyright, and so here is an overview of what constitutes a trademark as well as how it may impact your community.
A trademark can be a …
Re-introducing Wikia Book Club
Last year, we introduced the Wikia Book Club, and played around with the idea of bringing together Wikia's biggest book fans to read a book together that we could all then discuss. After a few experiments and learning from them, we're excited to announce the relaunch of Wikia Book Club !
Each month, we'll choose a new book selection. Some months we'll put it out to a vote - such as with this month's selection Mortal Instruments: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare from the Shadowhunters Chronicles series. But every other month, the Wikia Staff will handpick a selection, working with a publisher to get readers special access to a book author and cool giveaways.
So what are the other big changes? Instead of just chatting with you once during the mon…
How images are picked to represent articles
]] On most wikis, images and videos play an important part in helping to provide visuals to complement the written content. Several of the features on Wikia use these embedded images as a representation of that page in another setting.
Wikia's backend technology for selecting media from a page and modifying that media to fit various needs is called ImageServing. For example, Category galleries, Category exhibition, and Related pages (the "Read more" section at the bottom of article pages) all use ImageServing for selecting and displaying their thumbnails.
Today I am going to share with you an inside look to how ImageServing works. From time to time we like to highlight the technology we use to deliver your wiki to you and others quickly and e…
Updates to COPPA
Privacy is important, and despite how the online world seems sometimes it can exist on the internet. This post is going to overview recent updates to privacy laws and provide you with important information about how your wiki may be impacted.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is a United States federal law designed to limit the collection of personal information from people younger than 13 years of age. It was passed in 1998, and has been updated only once with a set of revisions that become effective July 1st, 2013. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversees the application and enforcement of the law. It applies to any website or service based in the U.S.
One popular misconception is that COPPA absolutely forbids anyone…
Wikia Community Podcast - Episode 5
The Wikia Community Podcast Episode 5 is live! This week on the show, we discuss Man of Steel, the True Blood Season 6 premier, This is the End, the latest Hobbit trailer, and the games of E3!
We also have special interview by our own Sarah Manley with Wikia and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales at the end of the show! He has a fantastic discussion about community building, collaboration, and more!
As always, we invite you to participate with the podcast by letting us know what's on your mind! Send all your thoughts, requests, and wiki-of-the-week suggestions to podcast@wikia-inc.com. Also, you can find links to relevant wikis and time stamps for each podcast segment in the show notes below!
How to use Wikia to organize around a special interest
Wikia is a great way for people to come together to share information on the things they love. And what do we love? Apparently video games,TV shows and cooking (and encyclopedias)! Who doesn’t?
My involvement in Wikia, though, came when I was struggling with a massive amount of San Francisco’s homeless resources, in printed form, and trying to digitize it into my vision for a new resource website. But my vision was stuck in the old school web and database formats that had been around for 10 years. I thought I needed thousands of dollars for fancy web design and log-in portals, not to mention money for future development and ongoing maintenance.
But then I heard how Wikia was a new way for constructing a web site. Wikia provided simple tools …