Wikia - creating communities

[edit] Know Your Audience(s)

When the majority of people you interact with go by pseudonyms and your only interaction with them is pixels on a page, it's a little hard to get into the minds of who your audience is. Why would you want to? Because they think, they breathe, they have feelings. And understanding those feelings are key to understanding how to make their experience more pleasurable at your wiki. And an understanding of those things should drive all the major improvements you make at your wiki. Take the time to find out who your audience is.

At the EQ2i wiki, we've thought about it a lot. Over and over. We've discussed it, argued about it, and generally talked ourselves hoarse about it because audiences are usually one of the first things we consider when we're thinking about implementing a new feature or making a large change. How will the change help the audiences?

As a general rule, we believe we have three major audience groups that we design towards, but it's not always the same three. For many discussions, we assume the following groups are part of our audience makeup:

• Editors - These audience members make a regular habit of going to the wiki and updating the information there. They frequently add new information we never knew about. They upload pictures to the databases and they point out what's missing when they find holes. These are the power users of our site, but they are also the *minority*.

• Viewers - These audience members frequently view the site in brief bursts. As ours is a gaming wiki, they frequently access information while they are playing the game. They don't typically edit as they view, though they may make some corrections as they do.

• Readers - These audience members are an emerging class of users who come to our wiki for entertainment. They may have no specific attachment to the game that provides our raison d’être (reason for being). They read our wiki for the joy of lore, for the interest they have in learning about wiki markup, or merely because a friend said "Hey, you should check this out."

But what about from a pure technology standard and not necessarily an information standard? Do we need to rethink this? We thought we did and we also came up with this audience categorization:

• Users with a little knowledge of wiki culture and editing but with general familiarity with computers. Some of these users have only basic familiarity with computers but some may be quite experienced. Few, however, have direct knowledge of more than basic wiki skills.
• Users with a good deal of wiki knowledge, who probably grasp most of the reasons why things are organized the way they are, but not necessarily some of the deeper aspects like templates and inclusion (other than in the sense of acknowledging their use).
• Users who "get it" and understand whether immediately or through practice and observation, what the deeper technical aspects of the wiki are all about. Show them a correction once to a page, or a spiff bit of wiki voodoo and they're off and running and creating their own templates in a flash (or begging you for changes). Recruit these people as janitors and admins!

So which of these categorizations of audiences is correct? Well, both. No one person visiting our wiki fits into exactly one of these groups! We know that and we design to that strength on each and every page. And we are also completely prepared to throw these groups out the window if necessary. The important point is that we keep them in mind for changes, no matter how small. Ultimately, our audiences are the ones we want to ensure have the best experience. They're the ones who determine if we're on the right track with our design, our organization, and our ability to make our wiki a truly outstanding information hub.