Talk:Submissions/Domain-Specific Wikis

From Wikimania 2014 • London, United Kingdom

So, where will the editors come from? It sounds like a walled garden type editing? Please explain? Geraldshields11 (talk) 01:02, 17 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As it is said in the description, a domain-specific wiki usually starts by having a community: in the case of a movie, it can be an imaginary community of people who liked it (let’s say, a fandom); in the case of a research field, it is a loosely defined set of people who tend to publish and read papers on a specific topic; in other cases it can be an already existing and firmly coordinated community that talks about a particular domain on an internet forum, in a FB group, a G+ community or any other platform — getting [some of] them to contribute to a wiki indeed turns out to be easier than creating a community from scratch. --Spider (talk) 12:52, 18 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
So is this a talk about what could be called the Wikia approach (wikis for each fandom)? See for instance how Wikia founder Angela explained it: [1]. --Nemo bis (talk) 13:49, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, pretty much - with several adjustments:
  • at the time of the interview, Angela was "trying to turn this into a business"; now Wikia is a mature successful company;
  • domain-specific wikis are not limited to Wikia and its competitors (Wikidot, Wikispaces, PBWorks, etc); in particular, you can decide to host it yourself;
  • the preference of domain-specific wikis over one big wiki-encyclopedia is related to another recent trend of using multiple git (or hg) repos instead of one svn (or cvs) server
Spider (talk) 14:09, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]