Chat session 14 September

[espresso_addict]

A chat session was held on 14 September at 19:00 UTC. Eight editors were able to make it, including several Committee members. Topics from the wide-ranging discussion included proposals for a New Articles Month, Weekly Featured Article section and an on-wiki central discussion forum, as well as discussion of Stub September, Committee communications, help pages, and more...

New proposals
New Articles Month
•possibly for May or June (after April Showers)

Weekly Featured Article section
•highlight a different one each week on Fanlore main page
•suggest well-developed articles of general interest eg A/B/O
•forum for suggestions perhaps on talk page of a "Fanlore:Featured Article" page
•advertise on the dreamwidth community

Discussion forum
•Committee update on Fanlore Forums: a requirement to be expandable to OTW-wide forums has hindered progress
•an on-wiki place where editors, especially newbies, could raise general questions was proposed
•could link to interesting discussions elsewhere on Fanlore
---could tweet active talk pages and include the twitter feed on the main page
---template could be designed to add the active talk page to special category

Other topics

Stub September
•fleshing out existing stubs versus "cheating" by creating stubs for important gaps like Duncan MacLeod
•you can find stubs in a category by searching eg "stub incategory:Harry_Potter" (doesn't search any subcategories); see Wikipedia's Help:Searching:Parameters for other parameters that work
•participants were working on characters from eg Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Person of Interest
•upcoming theme is Relationships: pairings, threesomes & moresomes, gen relationships
---things to include: brief summary of their canon relationship, common fic tropes, popular fic, how fans treat the relationship, links to pairing comms (see What content should I add)
---good example: Larry Stylinson

Committee
•currently has eight members, Doro, jsparc, Sierra, Emma, willowcabins, Emufarmers, Phoenix and Tiyire; plus two liaisons, Eylul from Board and Rachel from Comms
•Fanlore Wiki Committee page updated live
•communication from the Committee is important; must be to spaces Fanlore editors read!
•frequent brief reports are better than silence in reassuring editors that the Committee work is ongoing

TV Tropes
•some articles there would count as meta essays (eg Eight Deadly Words)
•articles there should generally be linked in External Links, not the infobox

Help pages
•help pages need updating/clarifying, especially RPF, disambiguation
•new help pages needed for fan art
•gardeners encouraged to edit the help pages

Notability
•Fanlore has no notability requirements
•it's fine to add any relevant fanwork to lists of "Notable Examples"
•no current policy on pages on fans/their works being created by the fan themself

Fan art
•no category for fan art but there is a template currently used on a handful of pages: Template:Fanart
•pages on specific artworks are welcome and don't need to include a file of the artwork itself
•a help page and a category for fan art are needed

Quoting fanfiction
•brief quotations are encouraged in articles about the fanfiction
•guidance in help would be useful but needs input from Legal

Note this is not an official committee report, so apologies if I've misunderstood or misrepresented anything. Discussion in comments is very welcome!

Comments

[morgandawn]

Thank you for this concise write up.

[espresso_addict]

Glad it was helpful; I thought I was being a bit verbose!

[aethel]

I updated the disambiguation help page, but I wasn't sure that we had actually agreed on rules for what to include on a disambiguation page. I think we discussed it on a talk page somewhere.

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Disambiguation_Pages