Wikia - creating communities

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At GuildWiki, one of our philosophies is that red links are good. It doesn't mean we go about creating random red links everywhere, but rather we encourage the use of red links to show that an article is needed but has not been created.

If within the content of an article, a term that should have its own article is mentioned, but the article does not exist yet, it is our common practice to wikify it regardless, even if the person wikifying it isn't going to create the missing article anytime soon. Having a red link ready means other users can easily create the article. There are many users who lack familiarity with MediaWiki to know how to create a new article (or to produce the red link which allows them to create new articles when clicked-on). A red link instead of black text also sends out a signal that "we need an article on this subject!" and attract contributors to help out.

Our admins routinely delete "stub" articles that have absolutely no content (other than the stub template). We believe that having contentless stub articles is actually worse than leaving red links in articles. For readers, having a blue links gives them the expectation that they can click on it to read more stuff, and a content-less stub article betrays their expectation. For contributors, having a blue link may send the wrong signal that "we already have an article on this subject", potentially causing them to just pass it by, never checking it out to find that the article actually has absolutely no content at all and needs major help.

Red links are good.