---
title: Running a wiki
tags: [Running]
---

Anyone signed in can ask for a wiki. The site admin looks at every request; once it's approved, whoever asked becomes the wiki's **owner**.

## Settings

Owners and admins change these under **Settings**:

- **Identity:** the wiki's name, a one-line tagline, and a logo (also its favicon).
- **Theme:** a brand colour and a neutral, or an **advanced theme** with your own colours for light and dark mode (or only one of them), named colours for components, and a background image, plus the **page width**: standard, wide (more room for tables and galleries on big screens), or full width. Buttons use a deeper shade of the brand colour where they need one, so the text on them stays easy to read.
- **Sidebar:** groups of links to pages, dragged into order.
- **Home page:** an article shown as the home page; without one, the home page lists every article by tag.
- **Editing:** who can edit and how (see [[Editing and moderation]]).
- **Discovery and rating:** whether the wiki is listed in the directory and open to search engines, and whether it's rated general or mature.

## A good first week

- Set the theme and logo, so the wiki looks like itself from day one.
- Write the main page and the few pages everything else links to.
- Make an infobox and a navbox for the wiki's main kinds of page ([[Writing components]]), and put facts used on many pages in [[Wiki Data]].
- Upload the images you'll need in one go (**Files → Upload several**).
- Give your regular editors the trusted role, so they can review new editors and write components.
- Keep an eye on **To-dos** for broken links and missing pictures.

## Leaving

Communities own their work. A wiki's text is CC BY-SA 4.0 and can be exported whole, so a community can always take it elsewhere.