By my reckoning, we've got half a dozen fairly regular contributors to Arcanawiki, plus dozens of more casual users who have edited or created a few pages each, and we get about 500 "first visits" per day.
Despite that traffic, the "100 Top Entries" page shows me that no single page here has been rated "+" by more than two people, and only a mere 18 pages have that +2 total. Either we all have exceedingly different tastes, or only two of us are making use of those "rating" buttons in the upper right corner of the pages.
Anyone new coming to the site might conclude that anything beyond those 18 articles isn't worth taking the time to read, and they'd be wrong. They might also get the impression that the site is a lot less active than it actually is. There's over 3000 real articles here, and new ones added nearly every week. While some of our pages are just quick summaries, there's also quite a bit of gaming content here that just doesn't exist anywhere else on the net.
The best way to grow this community is to show off our best work, but right now there's not really much of anything to direct new readers to the good stuff. I'd love to fix that myself, but I've already given my personal "+1" to most of the entries in that top 100. If each returning visitor here were to rate their half dozen favorite pages, the ratings might actually become useful for directing people towards the pages that are well-written, comprehensive, clever, cover a unique topic you haven't seen elsewhere, or that are just plain useful for gaming.
So I reach out to my fellow arcanists as well as all the casual readers just dropping by…
In the upper right corner of nearly every page on the site is a series of little boxes labeled "rating".
- If you read a page, and you like it, click the "+" button so it gets acknowledged.
- If you create a page, and you're proud of it, don't be afraid to click the "+" button. We won't think you immodest.
- If there's no rating button at the top of the page, you can still rate it by using the "rate" link at the bottom of the page (near the "edit" link).*
- Don't worry about whether or not you've already rated that page. The system keeps track of it, and as long as you're logged in, it won't let you double-rate a page. The "X" button (to the right of the "+" button) will allow you to delete your rating if you change your mind.
*: Only pages that are several years old won't already have those rating buttons. They should appear automatically on all newer pages. If you're reading a page that you think is good enough to rate "+", but which doesn't have any "rating" buttons on the page, you can add those buttons easily. Edit the page, and paste this code at the very top of it:
[[>]]
[[module Rate]]
[[/>]]
Then save your changes, and the buttons should appear. Don't forget to click on "+" once you've done that.
Alternately, you can click on the "rate" link at the bottom of the page (just right of the "edit" link) to rate it. It works the same as the "+" button at the top of the page.