Board Thread:New on Doctor Who Fanon/@comment-4189499-20140119130637/@comment-188432-20140120000218

And neither should you just ignore history or experience. We've tried this very thing before at Tardis. For well over two years, we linked to this very wiki. It didn't work. The only thing that works to create a wiki is six months to a year of damned hard work locally.

If you want to grow this wiki, then you need to do things that will reach people who are actually interested in fan fiction.

It would be wise if you tried to appeal to the already large DW fan fiction communities at livejournal and whofic rather than spending time creating alliances with wikis that aren't really related to your particular area of interest. DW Collectors really has nothing to do with DW Fanon — they don't accept entries about fanon, so you've got as much in common with them as you do Wookieepedia.

What you need is to create alliances with the other fanon wikis on Wikia, not the other Doctor Who wikis. You will more likely find editors who share your interest if you connect to w:c:starwarsfanon or w:c:avatar (which has a large fan fiction area) than if you try to connect to w:c:drwho.answers.

The lesson I learned from the multi-year experiment in creating a link between Tardis and DWF is this. Your topic is not Doctor Who. Your topic is fan fiction. And if you link to other fan fiction wikis, you will probably gain more editors than if you link to wikis that don't even allow discussions about things happening on this wiki.

I hope you don't misunderstand anything I've written. I'm not rejecting this wiki. I've had a longstanding interest in seeing this place liven up. I'm most encouraged by the last six weeks of activity. But I want you to succeed at actually growing the wiki and attracting a permanent community. You can't do that by wasting valuable real estate on your main page linking to the wrong wikis.