Forum:October 14th IRC meeting summary

Wikia - creating communities

Hey all,

Sunday October 14th was the first Gaming IRC chat, at #wikia-gaming, Freenode. It was attended by over 30 wikia gamers ranging from large wikis like Halopedia and Runescape Wiki to freshly starting ones such as Legacy of Wiki-Dragons. We covered alot of ground and lots of great ideas came out of this, including this sub-forum and a featured gaming wiki process that is being fleshed out.

Summary of topics covered this past Sunday:

• General gamers don't know about the respective wiki's existence
• Set up sub-forum on central for Gaming
• Attract wiki visitors via forums
• Admins often not know special stuff (existence/how-to-use)
  • Logo/favicon
  • CSS
  • mailing list
• Templates
  • Frequently used ones
    • Spoiler
    • Stub
    •  !
    • Era
    • Talkheader
    • stub
    • disambig
    • delete
    • ban
    • merge
    • move
    • Character
  • Offer a repository of infoboxes/templates for individual wikis to adapt from
  • It'd be nice if Wikia could provide a template guru to take on template requests
  • Tutorials on how to use/modify the more advanced templates
• How large wikis can help small/inactive wikis
  • On large wikis, create a "Other Games" sub-forum to talk about completely un-related games, potentially finding enough like-minded friends to revitalize some inactive gaming wikis together (who might otherwise be individually discouraged by the inactivity)
  • Right now only a few wikis have access to post to the Wikia gaming blog. They can help smaller wikis by posting blog entries for the smaller wikis. The blog's RSS feed can be made available on the Gaming hub via some extensions.
• RSS featured articles - would need standard format
• Featured Gaming Wikia
  • Similar rules to the now defunct Featured Wikia
  • Wikis already having blurbs on the hub cannot be featured
  • In addition to each user getting one vote, each gaming wiki also has a community vote (to promote discussion/awareness in each community)
• Generating more motivation to visit the hub
  • RSS feed of the blog
  • Stats on wikis
  • Stories of wiki users/founders, maybe interviews (btw, no one else in the chat seemed to read The Daily Edit...)
  • Polls or contests
  • approaching milestones

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The next IRC chat is being planned for this coming Sunday, October 21th,

California	New York	London
12 pm (noon)	3 pm	8pm

If you have anything topic you want to discuss, please suggest below. Hope to see you this Sunday! -PanSola 21:25, 15 October 2007 (UTC)