User talk:John Avery Whitaker

Um, well, what is the wiki about? Perhaps you could provide a link to it?

Anyway, one of the first things to do is to write a good set of rules. I don't know how it is nowadays when you create a wiki; if there is already a page with rules/policies, but if there isn't, then create a page named [the name of the site]: Site rules, or something like that. Then decide what rules you want. The most basic rules would be: no vanlizing, no spamming, no trolling, watch you language, be kind to each other, etc. If there is already a page with the "default" rules, then I'd suggest that you read through it carefully, and then you can do any changes which you find necessary.

After that, you should take a look at the main page. Make sure that there is at least one link to the rules, and maybe the community portal as well. That should be the most important thing to do when setting up the wiki.

Next step is to promote the wiki. As I said, I don't know what the wiki is about, but I suppose that you could tell people you know about it, or if you are active on any forums that are related to the topic of the wiki, you could tell people about it there. Make sure that people know about the wiki.

After a while, if/when the wiki has grown so big that you can't patrol all of the activity, it might be time to promote a few users to admins. You should select the most trusted users, and ask them if they are interested in becoming administrators. If they are, you can promote them with this tool: Special:UserRights. (You won't be able to use it on this wiki, but just go to the same page on your own wiki, and you should be able to use it, since you are, or should be, in the bureaucrat user group.

I hope that helped. -  M ata N ui    Talk  16:24, March 28, 2011 (UTC)