Help:Start a new Wikia
Wikia - creating communities
You can apply to start a new Wikia by filling out a request form. Please read this page before applying for a new wiki.
Please note that your proposal might be revised before your wiki is created.
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[edit] Check whether your wiki fits the policy
A wiki must have a large potential audience and be likely to attract enough editors to maintain the wiki. Personal wikis and wikis for very small groups or individual schools are not generally permitted a separate wiki, but Scratchpad Wiki Labs welcomes all content. If your proposal is narrow in scope, you are advised to broaden it, add your idea as a sub-section of a larger Wikia, or to use Scratchpad instead.
Check that your idea is not already covered by an existing Wikia.
Check if your idea could not become part of an existing Wikimedia project.
See Wikia creation policy for further details.
Make sure you agree to abide by all Wikia policies before you start a wiki. For example, if you want a wiki where you can lock down editing only to administrators, Wikia is not the best place for your wiki. You will not be able to protect pages unless they are license texts or heavily vandalized. :)
[edit] Plan your project
Decide what the aims of your wiki will be. Draft a mission statement.
You will need to decide a title and name for the wiki. In your request form, you also need to give a description of the wiki, and you can choose to give additional information.
You should also find interested participants who will be able to help with the creation of content on the wiki.
As an optional step, you can have your plan evaluated by others. Discuss and refine the plan for your wiki on the proposed wikis forum or even create a few test pages on the scratchpad wiki at scratchpad.wikia.com.
[edit] Request creation of the wiki
You can create a "Mini-Wiki" instantly at the Scratchpad Wiki Lab. Later this can be transferred to a separate Wikia.
You can start a new Wikia by creating an account and filling out the wiki Request Form. All fields on the request form must be filled in. Your application may be rejected if you do not give enough information about the proposed wiki. If you're not sure, you can discuss your proposal first at proposed wikis.
A member of Wikia's Community Team will review your request and add a note to the top explaining whether it was accepted or rejected. Alternatively, staff or users may ask you questions about your request before a decision is made.
[edit] Join the mailing lists
All Wikia sites come with a free mailing list. You are encouraged to sign up to the mailing list for the wiki you requested, and also to the central Wikia mailing, which seldom has more than a few messages a day and may contain vital information such as planned downtime.
[edit] Create your home page
The default location of your home page is at "Main Page", or a translation of this for wikis where the default language is not English. You can leave it like that: it will work. But at any time you may move (i.e. rename) it. When you have renamed your home page, you have to change MediaWiki:Mainpage. You can do this only when you have sysop rights at (your) Wikia. This change is important to avoid redirects because that is the page where you come when you type "yourwikia.wikia.com" or when you click on your logo.
[edit] Improving your Wikia
Please see Help:Improving your Wikia for details beyond these first steps. Improving your Wikia includes changing your logo.
See also Wiki tips and promotion.
[edit] Help for completing the request form
[edit] Name for the wiki
The name for the wiki differs from the title for the wiki in that the name is what will be used to determine the default url. For instance, the education Wikia is accessible as http://education.wikia.com/
The name should be short and easy to spell to avoid people typing the wrong URL when trying to find your wiki. It will be rendered in all lower case in the subdomain name, so avoid names that utilize CamelCase for clarity, eg HawaiiIsland would become hawaiiisland.wikia.com. Spaces should also be avoided for the same reason.
The name should be generic so that people can guess the location of your wiki. For example, people might guess the URL of music.wikia.com if they were looking for a wiki about music. Real words are therefore preferable to made up terms such as wikimusic or mymusicwiki.
Choose a name which will attract people to your wiki and explain to them what the wiki is about.
For convenience in typing the URL and to avoid complications, the name should only contain letters and numbers (no spaces, underscores, dashes).
The name can not be the same as a language code. See supported languages for a list of these. For example, "en" is reserved to mean an English language Wikia, and can not be used as the name for your wiki.
[edit] Title for the wiki
The title for the wiki will appear in the title bar of the browser window. Unlike the name for the wiki, the title of the wiki may contain spaces as well as letters and numbers.
The title for your wiki will be displayed in the variable {{SITENAME}}.
The title for the wiki will usually be the name of the project namespace on your wiki. For example, if the title is "Doom Wiki", project pages would be located at Doom Wiki:Page title ("Project:Page title" is automatically renamed to that). For this reason, you should keep the title short but descriptive. If you really want the title and project namespace to be different from each other, please state this when you make your wiki request.
The project namespace for your wiki will be displayed in the variable {{ns:project}}. For example, if you typed in {{ns:project}}, you would get Wikia.
[edit] Description of the wiki
The description for the wiki is used by Wikia to decide whether the wiki will be hosted or not. Please briefly explain the purpose of the wiki in this field. If you would like to give an extended explanation, you can do so on the proposed wikis page.