User:Mgrinshpon/Guide:Wikis
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Note: Under construction |
Welcome to Mgrinshpon's guide to the wondrous world of wikis! Forget everything you thought you knew about wikis and enter this magical land of drama and ideological conflicts. This land split between the informed and the uninformed with some sitting squarely in the middle. You will be the former. A great guru of Guild Wars Wiki and many more! For this guide, we will use a fictional wiki to be known as "Widget Wiki", a wiki all about a type of widget. It's brand new and just started out. It will grow alongside this guide as an example.
So, what's a wiki anyway?[edit]
A wiki at its very base is a community editable repository of information about a particular topic or with one set goal in mind. Anyone can edit information and add anything they want. If many people care about a particular topic then the wiki will grow faster! Likewise, if no one cares about a topic, then the wiki won't grow very much if at all.
Let's take Widget Wiki. Widgets are a fictional product that's been the hottest selling product for over a half year now but there's a problem: hundreds of companies produce these widgets with all sorts of differences! One of Widget Wiki's aims will be to alleviate this confusion. Because they're so popular and there's so much need to get knowledge, Widget Wiki will grow at an astonishing rate. User numbers will grow out of control and Widget Wiki will no longer be able to manage itself with it's lack of policies, content is all over the place and vandals are running rampant. Consistent disagreement threatens to kill the wiki just as it has begun. This brings us to...
Power Structure[edit]
Power structures will dictate almost everything about a wiki and are thus critically important to nail down correctly the first time around as they are near impossible to change afterwards.
An efficient power structure is needed to keep Widget Wiki together. Widget Wiki is now a large wiki with many users hailing from all sorts of different backgrounds. Let's see the many possibilities Widget Wiki can employ to maintain a grip on its content!
Democracy[edit]
A democratic wiki is a wiki in which everyone has an equal say. The policies are almost always decided upon by majority voting and general consensus. There are no real administrators or authority figures but usually just empowered users who perform maintenance (e.g. deleting unwanted content for example). Democratic wikis are meant for extremely small communities of several close friends (15 people at most).
Widget wiki is large. Much larger than 15 people. A democratic power structure is similar to what Widget Wiki uses now and it's been nothing but problems for Widget wiki. Everyone has disagreements and nothing gets accomplished. Quite simply, Widget wiki is in a state of chaos.
