Help talk:Attracting Contributors

Wikia - creating communities

Contents 1 Promotion 2 Promotion within Wikia 3 Webrings 3.1 New webring 3.2 Links on other wikis

[edit] Promotion

I very much disagree with the spirit of the article in its current form, as typified by this early sentence: "The simple truth is that unless you promote your Wikia in some way, it will have no visitors; nor will it gain regular contributors."

While I agree that active promotion can be helpful, it's not the only way to draw visitors to your wiki. I wrote about this on Will Wikis Work?, in the section Awareness increases organically. Now that Tom's created this page and linked it to WWW?, it seems like I should move that section over here -- but I'm not sure how, because it essentially contradicts what seems like the basic point of this page. Does anyone have an idea how to resolve this, and merge the two? -- Danny (talk) 23:43, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Hmmmm... its tricky. Awareness does increase organically, but promotion does work as well. We could copy that section over I guess. By the way, I just found this article and the 4th article on improving your wiki, and collected them together with your article on building communities. Mostly Zen (talk) 11:17, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I'll change this to read fewer visitors, and less contributors - because obviously there will be some people that find the Wiki randomly Mostly Zen (talk) 19:47, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I guess what I'm saying is that people finding the wiki through a search engine isn't "random"; it may be the single most important way to attract people. My wiki started out with a core group of people from a couple of Muppet fan websites -- but after that initial group, pretty much everybody else who's come to the wiki found us through search engines.

Thinking about attracting contributors as an organic, unpredictable process is a different way -- and, I would argue, a more powerful way -- to think about building your base of wiki contributors. For one thing, you avoid the possibility of over-promoting your wiki, and alienating potential communities by looking too much like a "salesman".

Contributors want to join wikis that look healthy and active; they don't want to join wikis that look desperate and anemic. I would suggest that the best thing for somebody who runs a wiki is to stop wasting time trying to "promote" their wiki, and to spend that time digging in and getting to work. When your wiki is strong enough and cool enough, people will be asking to join you, rather than the other way around. -- Danny (talk) 20:26, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi Danny, thanks for the help on our main page today :)

You are right that finding a wiki on a search engine isn't random. People search for things they are interested in, like muppets, starwars, psychology etc... the thing is though, how do they find YOUR muppets site, as opposed to other muppet related sites out there? I suspect that, because you had a core group from a couple of muppet sites already, those sites linked the new Wiki. And this would dramatically raise its google rating, making you appear really high up in any google search (and other engines too).

You are right about not wanting to over promote yourself in the early stages though, you've got to have a health y and viable looking community before people will want to join. Getting the balance between not over promoting yourself at too early a stage, and not promoting yourself at all is tricky. If you do to little, how will anyone know you exist? You need to have links from other websites to even appear anywhere sensible in google rankings nowadays.

You guys are No.1 for 'Muppet Wiki' (as you'd hope really!) but what about people who don't search for Wiki because they are new to the idea? I couldn't find you in the top 30 for just 'muppets', but when I looked at the other pages for 'Muppet Wiki' I found you have about 30 pages linking your site from outside.

This is the kind of promotion I like: http://www.mindhacks.com 3rd article for July 31 2006.

Good ideas, keep them coming :) Mostly Zen (talk) 11:50, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I wouldn't expect that we would come up when you look for "Muppets" -- there's too many other sites that have been around for longer. The cool thing is that we now come up as #3 for pages like "Fozzie Bear" and "Michael K. Frith", and #8 for "Sesame Street News Flash". If people just put "muppets" into a search engine, then yeah, they're not going to get great results. But when they get more specific -- looking for a specific character, performer or sketch -- then we're going to appear in those results, because we have content that you can't find anywhere else on the web. Somebody looking for "Fozzie Bear" and finding our page, that's a meaningful click, and they're going to find what they're looking for on our site. That's the person who's likely to become a reader and a contributor.

That's why I think the best promotion is just adding more information to your wiki and making it a better resource -- when you've got unique information, your wiki shows up for lots of interesting, content-specific searches.

I'm not saying that promotion in other ways is irrelevant; I just want to encourage people to think about wiki-building as an important part of promotion. -- Danny (talk) 15:02, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Promotion within Wikia

Many founders ask about it. My 2 cents is, seek your potential contributions, and notice that they are not always among the other wikia's wikis, but outside. Still, adding a section about how to promote your wiki through the central wikia or among the other wikias might be helpful. Anyone wants to try?--Rataube 17:11, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Webrings

I would like to explore promotion of the Protoscience wikicity by way of the webring system. Specifically, I would like to add the Protoscience wikicity to the Boundaries of science webring. This would require placing a small amount of code into a page at protoscience.wikicities.com. Here is the webring code:

<script language=javascript type="text/javascript" src="http://ss.webring.com/navbar?f=j;y=jwschmidt;u=10095928"> </script><noscript><center> <table bgcolor=gray cellspacing=0 border=2><tr> <td><table cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr><td align=center> <font face=arial size=-1>This site is a member of WebRing. <br>To browse visit <a href="http://ss.webring.com/navbar?f=l;y=jwschmidt;u=10095928"> Here</a>.</font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table> </center></noscript>

Is this a method of wikicity promotion that can be pursued? JWSchmidt 14:24, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, but for security and privacy reasons, you may not add JavaScript to Wikicities. Can you really trust ss.webring.com not to adapt their script to steal the password of anyone visiting your wiki? It's fine on a static site when there's little damage that can be done, but for a site with passwords that are used on over 330 different wikis, it's far too risky. Angela (talk) 07:47, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

There is also an HTML4.01 version that can be used:

<!-- Begin Boundaries of Science NavBar Code -->
<div id="science_nav_bar"
  style="border-top:#eee;border-left:#eee;border-right:#00c;border-bottom:#00c;
  background-color:black;color:#FFFF9C;text-align:center;font-size:1.12em;">

  <p><strong style="font-family:Copperplate Gothic Light, Arial;color:#94D6E7;size:1.25em;">
  Boundaries of Science
  </strong></p>

  <p style="font-weight:bold;">
  [ <a href="http;//M.webring.com/go?ring=scienceb&id=47&prev"
       title="The previous site." style="color:white;">...</a>
    <a href="http;//M.webring.com/go?ring=scienceb&id=47&prev5"
       title="The previous group of sites in this ring." style="color:white;">Back</a> |
    <a href="http;//M.webring.com/wrman?ring=scienceb&addsite"
       title="Add your site to this Webring." style="color:white;">Join Now</a> |
    <a href="http;//www.webring.com/forum?forum=scienceb"
       title="Post your questions or share your thoughts with others on the Boundaries of Science Message Board."
       style="color:white;">Forum</a> |
    <a href="http;//M.webring.com/hub?ring=scienceb"
       title="Featured Sites and a complete list of all the sites in Boundaries of Science."
       style="color:white;">Featured Sites</a> |
    <a href="http;//M.webring.com/go?ring=scienceb&id=47&next5"
       title="The next group of sites in this ring." style="color:white;">Forward</a>
    <a href="http;//M.webring.com/go?ring=scienceb&id=47&next"
       title="The next site." style="color:white;">...</a>
   ]
   </p><a href="http;//www.itzalist.com/science.html">Science and Education Directory</a>
</div>

[edit] New webring

The webring example from above has been finalized. I was able to link this protoscience wikicity page to the Spritual Experiences webring using the HTML code (no javascript) option. Vymat 19:30, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Links on other wikis

This section seems to have outdated information. The RecentChanges.info blog has not been updated since August 2006 and no-one seems to care about what is added to the WikiSpotlight page on WikiIndex. --Spankart 18:26, 13 January 2007 (UTC)