User blog comment:NOBODY/Popularizing the Nitrome Wiki/@comment-3060206-20121213014709

The wiki has grown substantially in terms of articles because of the time and effort users have been putting in to helping Nitrome Wiki look great. I agree with Takeshi, though. Most of a wiki's success does come from media and the like that have drawn a large fanbase.

While I'm fine with promoting the wiki in ways that are meant for wiki promotion, aka Wiki Spotlight, Special:Promote, I don't think we need to try so hard to get attention. It's not necessarily greed, but more of desperation, and that can often have the opposite effect as well.

If anything, social networking sites for Nitrome Wiki appeal more to the users who are already active on the wiki rather than reaching out to new users out there.

Another idea is to try promoting one of the sister wikis rather than just the main Nitrome Wiki itself. For instance, Nitrome Fanfiction Wiki focuses on creating and sharing Nitrome fanart. That could sound more enticing to users than perhaps being invited to help write an article about some hazard in a Nitrome game they couldn't care less about. If we can somehow improve the interlinking between the sister wikis so that they seem more like different areas within an entire Nitrome community, people would be able to easily switch between all sister wikis.

Or...a while back, I saw a wiki that was a request page for developing an iOS application based off a wiki. I've seen it done for Lyrics Wiki, and I can't remember where I saw it. Again, that would probably work best for large traffic wikis.

If anything, I think the most popular wikis are the ones where the users of the wiki feel more like a community than drones working at the hive. At least, those are the ones where you actually notice the substantial number of users.