Newsletter/201101


 * Introduction

Over the past few months, the AWA has grown to beautiful accomplishments. We've sprouted a new admin on our wiki, Anno1404, and have partnered with the Monaco Wiki and it's WikiLiberation project. We have helped to document attacks from Wikia's staff and we've enlisted many new users. You, our contributors, have made us beautiful.

ShoutWiki, now with Monaco
On the 21st of December ShoutWiki announced that they have enabled Monaco on all wikis (announcement here) The skin will be freely available for all users on all wikis until 1 July 2011, after which it’ll be made an ordinary premium (paid) feature. Monaco currently has the following themes:
 * Sapphire — The “standard” white and blue Monaco.
 * Beach — A theme using light blue and brown
 * Brick — A theme using brown and darkred
 * Carbon — This theme uses dark grey and black.
 * Forest — A theme inspired by nature using, among others, different colors of green
 * Gaming — This theme uses dark blue and yellow
 * Jade — Using the normal white, but with green instead of blue.
 * Moonlight — Using light and darker colors of blue, together with a star and moonlight background.
 * Obsession — This theme uses colors such as black and dark red, giving this theme a darker look and feel.
 * Pink — A nice, bright and pink theme.
 * Ruby — Using white the normal white, but red instead of blue.
 * Sky — Using the normal white for the content area, with light blue instead of blue and a light blue background.
 * Slate — This theme uses light grey and yellow.
 * Smoke — Using the normal white, with yellow instead of blue
 * Spring — A theme using light green and light pink.

Post-move checklist

 * This draft draws only on experience moving one wiki. Hands-on howtos, more different perspectives, better writing, and a better page title are needed. "Speed it up" is advice from the Club Penguin Wiki.

After setting up your new wiki, the real work promoting it begins. Some pitfalls are:


 * Spreading the word
 * Announce the move to your wiki users. Seek out the various subcommunities - never underestimate how important marketing is.


 * Getting links
 * Almost everybody finds new places by Google, and backlinks are the only way to rank well. The wikia.com domain is especially hard to beat.
 * The most visible places, such as wikis, forums, and social media, will often use rel="nofollow" links, which are worthless. On wikis, the easiest way around this is to ask to be added to their interwiki map, and to add the other moved wikis to your interwiki map. See Talk:Moved_wikis.
 * You really need to trawl the internet for links to your old site, and politely ask the site owners to update. This works best if you provide a complete list of stale links, and custom-tailor the request for each site. Yahoo site explorer and recent changes on Google help find stale backlinks. SEOmoz explains how to request links.


 * Make it easy to login
 * Some spamtraps (40+3=, type the blurred text in the box) turn away anybody who doesn't know your website's content already. Every wiki needs a constant influx of new editors because the old editors will eventually lose interest. Waiting (e.g. for approval), unclear instructions, or unfindable "passphrases" are especially bad for the future of your wiki.


 * Speed it up
 * For SEO reasons, you should be using a fast host and optimized CSS and JavaScript. GTmetrix can help you in this.
 * Speed examples:
 * Club Penguin Wiki Network: moved images to non-*.clubpenguinwiki.info domain (img-cpwn.tropicalwikis.com) and non-essential services under a different user (seems DreamHost throttle by user on their shared servers?)
 * clubpenguin.wikia.com vs clubpenguinwiki.info: http://gtmetrix.com/compare/ykuAsUg6/wciMTxsa
 * Comparison of major wiki farms on our wiki list: http://gtmetrix.com/compare/emTimGoK/h5kGGhFm/qkoHRti2