Practicum 2 - Kasi

Since my first blog post about a week ago, I haven’t made any contributions or edits to the wiki, but I’ve spent a couple hours looking at the different features and capabilities of Wikia. I started out by connecting my wiki activity to my Facebook. Like other apps, it requested for permission to access my basic information and to post to my wall. I also become a fan of the Glee wiki on Facebook. It was interesting to see that the wiki had its own page, athough it had a much smaller following than the main Glee fan page (approximately 900 followers compared to almost 8 million).

While browsing through the various tabs and pages, I started to notice a pattern in the names of contributors, including many self-labeled “gleeks” and other names that included references to characters on the show. I looked at a couple of these user profiles to see what wikis they had contributed to, and not surprisingly, they had only participated in the Glee wiki.

SappsterGleek          Artieandtinaforeva          Gleeluv4ever

Justanothergleek      Glee+me+Kurt=love      Ms. Artie Abrams

LilaHummel               Gleekquinn

Wikia has a cool feature that involves earning badges for your participation on a specific wiki. For setting up a profile, I earned points, and it gave me a corresponding ranking. This is an interesting way to be rewarded for becoming involved in the community and to encourage some friendly competition. I’m sure many users strive to be the #1 fan! Members who made references to Glee in their user name tended to be positioned higher in the rankings. Under your ranking, it also showed what you could do to earn more badges. This feature seems helpful in giving some direction to new users on how to get started.