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

[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?