News on front page

[lian]

I wondered if it wouldn't make sense to promote major policy changes to the news blurb on the front page -- the fanworks renaming policy has quite an impact on the wiki (okay, mainly on gardener clean-up, heh), but old-format articles are being created all the time because except for this community, I've not seen the change advertised anywhere. What do you think -- what should News be used for?

Comments

[franzeska]

Yes please! On Wikipedia (which is where I and probably a ton of other people using Fanlore figured out how to use wikis), I usually just find an article that looks similar to what I want to do and copy things from it since I can never remember:

Naming policies
Where to find templates or figure out what templates exist
Formatting

And if people are doing that on Fanlore, they're automatically going to perpetuate outdated standards for ages.

[morgandawn]

great idea. I am finding that someone had gone into the Due South fanzine page and set up placeholders for zines (without adding any data) using author names in titles - and so I had to work with what they had put in place or else run into problems with other zines with the same name. I am also finding a lot of legacy author names in Star Wars and Sentinel zines so perhaps add something to the announcement about how to mark a legacy page for gardener attention?

[aethel]

That's a great idea!

Somewhat off-topic: I've been wondering why we don't see wiki status updates included in the OTW's main blog/newsletter. Not that the wiki committee isn't working hard, but no one will know and appreciate them if they don't report on their progress...

more OT

[aethel]

Or, rather, there is a Wiki section in the newsletter, but it rarely contains anything illuminating. I'd rather see "the wiki committee is currently considering issues X, Y, and Z" than nothing.

[meg_r]

Yes, I agree!

I also think it might be good to have a Help Wanted section/page somewhere, where people could nominate pages that have been started but need more work, and rotate them every so often or something so there's a good selection. But not too many! Or else it just gets overwhelming. The Stubs page is completely useless for that reason.

[arduinna]

There's a Random Page link in the sidebar that I use fairly often, because sometimes that's exactly what I want - just to see what's there that I don't know about, and maybe I can add something to. It's usually not a lot, but I'll do things like google for archives or communities, or add links to epguides or something. Or even just fix some typos. *g* Very no-pressure, and it can be really interesting.

(That's how I once wound up with 40-odd tabs open for Robin of Sherwood, which I figured was a tiny fandom that had probably faded away so I could just google for a few links, only to find out that... not so much with the fading away or the lack of activity. Which was really cool!)

[meg_r]

Honestly, every time I try the random page link, I get a zine. Currently they seem to make up about 80% of the wiki.

(looks up Robin of Sherwood. huh.)

[arduinna]

Oh, I know, I generally have to hit it a few times to get past the zines (although sometimes I can help out there with formatting and whatnot, too). Still, you can hit some interesting stuff!

[(Anonymous)]

I think zines *are* interesting. :-(

Mrs. Potato Head

[arduinna]

Hey, if I didn't like zines, I wouldn't have bought several hundred of them over the years. *g* But most of the zine pages right now don't offer a lot of room to work on for people who don't own that particular zine; the information is useful and really valuable, but unless someone's in the mood to format the tables of contents, there's not much they can add. Hopefully eventually people who own the zines will start chiming in on all those pages to provide more context for the contents and what place the zine had in the fandom, expanding on the framework you're setting up for them!

Meanwhile, though, most wiki editors are going to be looking for other pages to read and edit, where they might have information they can add, or where they can go looking for information to add.

(BTW, if you log in to your Dreamwidth account, you can post comments that are more easily identified as yours, and you can also get emailed about any replies.)

[franzeska]

And, on the same note, do you want/need a Dreamwidth invite?