First, I think we can do more with the main page. It has no graphics, no flair, and nothing to indicate that the site it heralds is growing and flourishing except a single number that changes in the middle of the page. Most of the information on the main page is found under the fold, and that's not where it should be for people to stick around and actually use it. So if we can find a way to make the main page pop more, be more dynamic, and more useful, I think more people will recognize the work we put in every day.
Second, I have been looking at some other projects here on wikia, and they have thriving communities that use different plugins to add fun things to their uses' experience. Halopedia, for example, gives points to users for edits, and then gives military ranks for them. There's an actual userbox application that can be added for more functionality than the one we have now, which is just a manually designed template. They also use Awards for participating, recruiting, and editing seemingly to good effect. At the same time, their User pages look like poorly designed MySpace pages and I don't think we want that.
So what wikimedia extension would help us build a sense of community here? What is going too far? What can we do without changing any of the functionality, but rather the look and feel of what we already have? Can we be using twitter, facebook, mass text message spamming to better effect? I feel like we're on a cusp, and I'd love to see our editing community expanding as much as our readership (assuming the 60% growth isn't a fabrication from the admins at Wikia Gaming.).
So let's bounce some ideas around and see what happens!
I don't care for the concepts of points or complex User Page layouts. The former tends to breed negative competition and poor work, while the latter interferes with the only page on the project reserved for a user to elaborate on oneself. That said, some sort of rewards system does hold promise; the best implementation of such I've seen involved adding them to a project as additional userboxes. While working on the image I'm using in my CSII Userbox the thought occurred to me that it might be interesting to award dice for achievements within the project, and allowing users to complete their own dice sets throughout their time here. We could also use other elements common to the game, such as magic items, familiars, spells, etc.
I don't have a lot to say about the front page right now, but I'll give it some thought and chime in later.