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Here at Wikia we're all about community, which is why we have
not one but two teams devoted to it! Previously in A Day in the
Life, we covered the Community Support team and how they assist you
with any questions that you may have about your wiki. Today I'm
proud to introduce the Community Development team (or ComDev), who
works hard in serving the community from a different angle. The Community Development team is primarily based out of San
Francisco. They work on taking requests to help improv… Hello Wikia community! I am Marc-Philipp (also known as MtaÄ). I
have been editing on Wikia since 2008 and a member of the
International Volunteer Team (IVT) since 2009. Today, I wanted to
give you a little more insight into what "working on International
Wikia" means and introduce the international team. Wikia is around the world and has a vibrant international
community of readers and editors. The IVT is a team of helpers on
Wikia that work on international communities, with a special
emphasis… As Dan discussed yesterday in a post about the big picture of
search development, we are now investing in improvements to search
at Wikia. Search is more than just a way to navigate to a specific
page -- it’s also a way to discover new content, browse related
articles, and explore a wiki. Hi everyone, My name is Dan Baran, and I’m the Director of what we call the
“Platform Team” here at Wikia. We focus on systems that support
multiple front end features -- one of which is search. The recent
improvements we’ve made represent many months of hard work and
careful decision making. As with many foundational systems, it was
necessary to weigh the options of integrating an external search
service, versus developing our own (based on a Solr/Lucene core,
for you tech types). It was not an…
Read more > 
Read more > 
Our goal with improving search over the next couple of months is to
bring Wikia’s search not only up to industry standards, but also to
a place where our communities get the most benefit out of it on
both a lo…
More posts...
As Dan discussed yesterday in a post about the big picture of
search development, we are now investing in improvements to search
at Wikia. Search is more than just a way to navigate to a specific
page -- it’s also a way to discover new content, browse related
articles, and explore a wiki. Hi everyone, My name is Dan Baran, and I’m the Director of what we call the
“Platform Team” here at Wikia. We focus on systems that support
multiple front end features -- one of which is search. The recent
improvements we’ve made represent many months of hard work and
careful decision making. As with many foundational systems, it was
necessary to weigh the options of integrating an external search
service, versus developing our own (based on a Solr/Lucene core,
for you tech types). It was not an… Last spring, we released chat for wikis and so far over 12,000
communities have started using it! With so many active communities
using chat on a daily basis, we have gotten a lot of great feedback
and requests for improvements. Starting this Wednesday, we will be releasing an update to chat
on all English wikis. It's already live on a couple of select
communities as well as Community Test (so feel free to test it out
there). We've changed the way users are banned from chat to make it more
like b… If you have an iPhone or Android mobile device, you may have
noticed that the mobile version of Wikia has been getting a lot
more attractive and interesting lately. Since we released our new
mobile site back in December, we’ve been rolling out improvements
to it nearly every week! Our mobile traffic has doubled in the last
year (with some wikis getting nearly 20% of their traffic from
mobile devices), and we’re working hard to keep up with that
growth! Here are some of the changes you might hav…
Our goal with improving search over the next couple of months is to
bring Wikia’s search not only up to industry standards, but also to
a place where our communities get the most benefit out of it on
both a lo…
Read more >
More posts...
Everyday we have new users joining Wikia who are excited to
share their knowledge and get involved in the many communities we
have here — which is awesome! But let's face it, if you aren't
already familiar with wiki editing — building a wiki can be a
little daunting for your everyday newbie. We'd like to make
building and creating wikis less difficult for new users. As the Community Manager of Founder Experience, I spend a lot of
time thinking about how we can help newbie founders and make
their… I have some great news for you: Today we’ve removed the fixed
light or dark theme on both the Admin Dashboard and the Editor. It's important and necessary for you as communities to have your
own look and feel. You have all worked really hard to define and
make your wikis unique. And one good way to do this is through your
own local color theming. So as of this morning, you'll see your
Admin Dashboard and Editor pull in your wiki's customized
colors. For those of you who are new on the scene, here… 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 on… 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 ou…
More posts...
Founder & Admin Central Guides
Once you have founded a wiki or are appointed to being an admin or bureaucrat on a wiki, there are a few key places on your wiki that you should familiarize yourself with. These places help admins and founders manage, monitor and edit. They are by far the most used areas for admins:
- Rich Text Editor
- Wiki Activity and Recent Changes
- Special:SpecialPages
- Admin Dashboard
Within this Guide, we'll walk through the Admin Dashboard and how to use it.
Founder & Admin Central Guides
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 can be customized to fit the need of your wiki.
Founder & Admin Central Guides
Recent Changes — or as it's sometimes referred to as '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't have a lot of activity on your wiki yet? That's ok too. Recent Changes is also really helpful to look back and find something you did, uploaded or added. It's a quick short cut to seeing what's happening on your wiki and all of the wikis you are stopping by to check out.
Let's go over what all these numbers, characters and information mean. As you can see there is a lot of info and if you have no idea what you are reading -- it can be a little confusing and daunting.
Founder & Admin Central Guides
Wikis by nature have a lot of activity on them. Once a wiki starts to attract a community, whether that's two or three people or hundreds of people, a lot of action can happen over any period of time. Editing, uploading an image, writing a blog post, leaving a comment, adding a new page, asking a question in a forum—so much can happen! Because anyone can come and edit (and add any of the above contributions and more) it’s useful to be able to find all of that activity in one place.
As a good admin, it's important to monitor the activity on your wiki for a number of reasons. The main reason is to see what is being added and edited. This is your space, your community—it's important to see what exactly is being edited and by whom. Two tools used to keep track of wiki changes are Wiki Activity and Recent Changes. Both of these features are useful tools for this task.
Founder & Admin Central Guides
When editing, leaving comments or posting on wikis you'll need to know the basics of wikitext. It's true we have our awesome editor that helps with editing, but there are times where you'll need to edit using wiki text. Such situations can occur when leaving comments on blogs or article pages or when a page is only editable in source mode.
Wikipedia defines wiki text or wiki markup as a lightweight markup language used to write pages in wiki websites. It is a simplified alternative/intermediate to HTML. Its ultimate purpose is to be converted by wiki software into HTML, which in turn is served to web browsers.
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Come check out Founder & Admin Central! You'll find blog posts, forums and getting started guides — all geared specifically for admins and founders. Come on over for help or to help out!