User blog comment:ShawnCognitionCP/Why the Roleplaying Board Should Not be Removed/@comment-4565203-20140910003059/@comment-4565203-20140910201221

Shawn & Harlod, while I use the wiki quite a bit, I haven't been around much in the community so I didn't know about the previous rp wiki. What happened? Folks just didn't utilize it? How well was it linked from this wiki? Banner on the front page? Links in the forums? Anything? Realistically speaking, having multiple wikis open at the same time shouldn't pose any problems. I'm currently in two chats, and have this wiki, fallout wiki and cc open right now. It's not really an either/or proposition. The actual url of the specific tab you have your rp board open on is incidental to the url you have the wiki open to lore pages on another tab. You'd still have two tabs open. You'd access both those from the same account, logged in on the same session. I'm just trying to understand the position that rping on a dedicated sister wiki would force people to decide which one to use. They can obviously be involved in both, and easily, if they desire. The url of the open tabs is semantical.

I can speak to this to a certain degree of experience, having been very active at Nukapedia (I was formerly a bureaucrat. I recently "retired"). All the rp is done at a sister wiki and most of the folks there also edit the main wiki (at least to some extent. Some comment on blogs, while some add content, too) They use the main wiki chat for general conversation, and go over to the rp chat to rp. On it's face, it seems a very workable situation that leaves the focus of the content wiki on adding content, yet doesn't fracture the community by forcing those who desire to rp to find someplace completely segregated to do so.

The key here is to utilize wikia's community features as much as you can to create a large, vibrant community, which then helps to populate the wiki with editors who create and maintain mainspace content. Again, you want both, if you can, but those portions of the community have to have a synergy. The priority has to be mainspace content. It's a wiki after all. No, or poor, mainspace content and no one comes to your wiki. But the chat, blogs and forums all support the community that breeds editors, so it helps when those also attract new users.

From an outsider's perspective, one with experience of a similar situation, it seems the logical solution is to create a well supported and advertised sister wiki dedicated to rp. The side benefit of this would be a ton more control the rp forum admins would have over content. Without a special user class for forum mods (and good luck getting Wikia to approve that), you have to rely on mainspace admins to delete pages and block trolls. Your rp wiki bcs and admins could handle all that themselves.