Thinking of getting your wiki a spotlight? Remember to always make sure you follow the best practices before leaving a request for the staff. To make sure you adhere to them, you can follow these simple steps:
- Are you an admin? If so, move onto the next step. If not, seek permission to get a spotlight from an active admin on the site.
- Find out how many pages your wiki has. This can be found in the left sidebar on any content page, or at the top of your mainpage. Is it more than 200? If so, move onto the next step. If not, try to build up your number of content pages!
- Divide the number of pages your wiki has (found from step 1) by 5. This will tell you how many stub pages you are allowed. ie, if your wiki has 300 pages, then you are allowed 60 stub pages.
- Go to special:shortpages (on your wiki). Scroll through the list until you find the first page bigger than 300kb. Is the number next to it lower than the number of allowed stub pages? If so, move onto the next step. If not, try to build up the content of your stub pages! If you have a template for highlighting stub pages, make sure none of the pages with that template are "hiding" stubs by making their size larger than 300kb.
- Go to your main page. Does it have a picture? Does it have links to your important content? If so, move on. If not, add those things in!
- If you are an admin, click "protect" or "unprotect" on your main page, and make sure that the page is not set to only allow admins to edit it. If you're not an admin, make sure you can edit the main page.
- Go to special:uncategorizedpages (on your wiki), and make sure the list is empty. If it's not, then go to the pages on the list and add a relevant category to the pages.
- Go to MediaWiki:Welcome-user (on your wiki), and make sure it says @latest, @sysop, or the name of an admin. If it doesn't, change it or get an admin to change it.
- Go to MediaWiki:Community-corner (on your wiki), and make sure the message says something other than "Welcome to My Home! This page helps you stay up to date with what's happening on the wiki....". If it says that, change it or get an admin to change it.
- Make sure your wiki has a customised skin (ie, not the default colours). If it doesn't, go to Special:ThemeDesigner (on your wiki) to play around with the theme (if you can't access that page, get an admin to do it).
- Make sure your wiki does not contain any inappropriate images or offensive language.
- Make sure the wiki is not going through major changes or in the middle of choosing new admins.
Once you've done all those steps, then you can post a request on Community_Central_talk:Spotlights. After that, there shouldn't be anything stopping the staff from approving your spotlight and getting more visitors to your wiki!