Create a wiki project

Creating your own wiki-project, it is important to understand what the main purpose of its creation, how it will continue to develop and what principles will be its basis. Currently, there are a large number of wiki projects that were created and then abandoned or gradually lost any activity - this was due to the fact that the creators of such projects themselves often did not know why they were creating it and what they planned to achieve - and created only in order to have a completely self-controlled project, which did not lead to anything good.

The success of the new wiki project depends mainly on the following components:

Hosting

Here, the project creator has a choice - use either wiki hosting , providing the client with an already installed and configured engine with some extensions or installing the site on its own server.

You can use free wiki-hosting in those cases if the author of the site does not have sufficient knowledge in server management and engine settings. On the other hand, such hosting has a number of drawbacks - usually it is a domain of the third level only, the lack of direct access to the database and server configuration, the absence of some important extensions, and the untimely update of the wiki software. Also, such wikis are often vulnerable to attacks made to disrupt normal project activities. The most famous wiki hosting is Wikia .
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If you plan a large project, or need rare and non-standard extensions or configuration of rights, it is better to use your own server. In this case, it should be taken into account that as the project grows, it will require more and more server resources, and, accordingly, there will be more financial costs, and you will need to monitor the server state, correct any errors that occur (if the project is often unavailable , it will greatly reduce its popularity).

Theme

When choosing a project topic, you must first see if there are already projects on a similar or similar topic. You can start a project only if there are sufficient resources available to compete with existing projects - you need more people willing to spend time on the project, as well as original ideas - if the site just copies the existing one in the previously created wiki project, most likely find it just a clone. Original proposals will attract new participants to the project, including those who might not like the already existing sites on this topic.

Content

It is also important that in a wiki project as soon as possible there is a sufficient number of normal-sized articles — you should not immediately announce the creation of the engine immediately after installing the engine, because there is a high probability that an empty project will be of no interest to anyone. The right step will be to close for a while, and to make the project accessible to everyone only after the project has been filled with some number of pages, the technical part has been adjusted, and platforms for discussions have been arranged.

Throughout the life of the project, it is important to maintain activity at the proper level, to attract new participants to the project and write new articles so that readers do not lose interest. It is important not to try to create (with the help of automatic programs) a lot of half-empty articles (“ nedabos ”), but to write articles of normal quality - a large number of low-content articles leads only to littering the wiki project and reducing its quality.

The authors

A wiki project is valuable for its team of authors, which allows the wiki project to self-develop with minimal intervention by the founders. In order to recruit and replenish a group of authors, a separate already promoted forum, website or organization of like-minded people is useful to the wiki project. Persons interested in the subject of the project can be grouped around this external resource. On an auxiliary external resource, one should periodically urge to go to supplement the articles and advertise the project materials. In this case, the wiki project and the external resource will eventually feed each other in both directions.

The obvious advantage of having such a resource is that you can assign already known and trusted users as administrators or grant them other additional rights, which will ensure its better protection and maintenance.

Control

A wiki project needs a well-organized management system. It is important not to set unnecessarily strict rules, and not to allow the project to slip into anarchy. It is advisable to use the powers of the founders only in extreme cases, since a wiki project with a sufficient number of participants is a self-regulating community. It is important to show that the founders also contribute to the common cause, follow the project regularly and make regular changes to the articles.

As the project grows, the role of its founders gradually changes, because first of all they are the official representatives of the project and to promote the project they need to visit other sites, edit there, answer the participants' questions that arise. For this, it will be useful to have a project blog where you can ask your site administration question.

All of the above applies primarily to projects in which widespread participation is planned - another solution would be to create a mono-project, in which, however, the availability of exceptionally original materials and research is particularly important.

The post was written by me in collaboration with John_Locke , who still does not have enough karma to publish topics.