A mini-introduction and a call for brainstorming!

[cin1607]

Hey all!

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Cin and I’m new on the wiki committee this year. *waves* I see that back in September, ratcreature made a brilliant suggestion that we post themed challenges to this comm to stir up more regular waves of activity and enthusiasm and updates to the wiki. Plus, it would give us good excuses to go poke our fannish friends and say, “Hey! They’re talking about X on fanlore this week. Do you remember that? Let’s create/update a page for that on the wiki!” I love the idea! I intend to grab that ball and run with it!

If you check out the original thread, you’ll see a lot of good suggestions already, but I’d like to spend a little time before I throw out the first official challenge and do some brainstorming. What would you like to see? What would work? What might not? At this point, I’ve seen:

What was your first fandom?

What was your first fandom community?

Focus on conventions.

Focus on holiday exchanges.

Did you come into fandom between (pick a span of dates)? Which fandom? Do you remember X event from then? (“It was May, 1999. Ricky Martin was at the top of the music charts, and The Phantom Menace ate fandom!”)

Focus on specific fandoms, or specific fandom events. (“Hey X-Files slash fans, do you remember the “Kiss heard ‘round the world?”)

I think we can have a lot of fun with this! Start lobbing ideas. I’ll take notes and if we get a bundle, I’ll do a poll and we can hopefully get the first up and running next week. :)

Comments

[hermitsoul]

A few things I personally want to work on this year:

a) The newest 'insert movie/book/manga/whatever' is coming out soon - let's get the wiki page caught up!

b) Newsletters - how and when did your fandom's come about? What are the mods up to now and what are their plans for the future?

c) I love the Merlin Communities Subpage - people could grab a group and create a page for their favorite fandoms.

d) Update our User:name pages - quick, easy, and helps people find others who might share the same interests/project ideas.

e) Fandom tropes

f) Fannish terminology - sparkly, headers, Magical Healing Cock . . .

*g* I think I'm going to start on a couple of these sooner rather than later!

[cin1607]

These are awesome! And I want to devote an entire page to the Magical Healing Cock. *g* Or emotive hair! How many fandoms have emotive hair? Due South and Sentinel certainly did. :)

[arduinna]

Magical Healing Cock. *g* It could definitely use some, er, expansion, though!

[cin1607]

Yeah, I was checking comments at work earlier and I was not about to go searching for Magical Healing Cock on a State computer. :D

[ratcreature]

If the wiki committee is taking a more active interest, maybe they could finally give an answer about the image policy? Or rather the lack thereof? That has been first raised in the first week of beta (as can be seen on the fanlore:issues page) and has come up multiple times on talk pages, and we still have no guidelines how to handle potentially disturbing images that are on topic for an article.

Obviously most fannish images are fairly harmless, at most not-worksafe, so there have been no real problems so far, but I still think we need clearer rules for expansion, because frankly I've come across plenty of disturbing images in fandom. I've seen fanart that was gory, and upsetting with violence and non-con and such, also with really young characters (which on top of everything else may have legal problems for visitors to see and have on their computers, even if it is drawn rather than photos, depending on where they live, not to mention that also laws wrt violence in porn differ between regions).

It's one thing to consider the whole wiki adult/not-worksafe, so that you have to expect to some penis on any page, but it gets rather more tricky if someone for example gives examples for say Deatheater art, with a torture porn orgy involving say Fenrir/Draco rape, which would neatly combine violence, bestiality, and underage child rape with muggle hunting going on in the background. IMO there should be some image policy ensuring that you don't come across truly shocking images without some warning or an extra click, even if the image fit the topic of the article, like I wouldn't want to see mutilated bodies to illustrate torture fic, or violent sexual fanart to illustrate the rapefic article, etc. because I wouldn't necessarily expect pictures, even if I intentionally go to that kind of page.

[meri_oddities]

The wiki committee is definitely taking a more active interest in everything about the wiki. As you know, there's a lot that needs to be done and we can't do everything at once. But the content policy is on our list of things we need to discuss and make a decision about. We will get to it. That might sound like we're putting you off, but we're not.

[ratcreature]

I'm sorry if I came across as snarky, I don't mean to harp on the new people or anything, it's just that this issue has been frustrating me, because it's been since 2008 so this is not "at once", and despite asking several times nobody ever heard anything back except that the committee was "discussing it" or talking with other OTW projects and so on.

[meri_oddities]

I understand your frustration. And We will address this shortly. We'll announce it here and on the News page when we get something written up and ready for comment.

[aethel]

Something that's easier to advertise and explain, and might be appealing to lots of people, like your suggestion of particular fannish events, might be a good way to get started. I've noticed that entries like SurveyFail can get written pretty quickly once people get interested in documenting the topic. Are there other events that haven't been written up yet?

Personally, I'd love it if we could get people to add their memories of using and creating websites on GeoCities. I don't know that this would have broad appeal, though...

[cin1607]

I like both suggestions. GeoCities was a big part of fandom for a long time. And it seems like we've had a lot of X!Fail lately. Not a good thing, but it should be documented.

[elf]

I keep thinking I should write up something for Rule 6. Except I wasn't actually *at* that TimeCon; I had friends who were, and I remember the aftermath for the next few conventions (and to some extent, the still-existing aftermath; BayCon still has Rule 6 parties. They're cuddly.)

Would like more discussion of pre-internet-explosion fandom, to encourage filling in the history of fandom before ~1990 (or 1998 or so, when the WWW got big). Pre-WWW fandom is almost unmentioned at Fanlore, except for listings of zines.

[cin1607]

Yes, I'd like to see more info from the pre-internet area, too. I came into fandom around 1994 and my first fannish community was a usenet book group. Surely there was life in the Vampire Chronicles fandom before alt.books.anne-rice. *g*

As for Rule 6, I say start writing and put something up. Once there's a stub, it might be easier to attract people who could add to it. :)

[mrs_potatohead]

Some suggestions:

When you read your first fanfic, what did you think? Did you feel you'd found a lost world you'd been craving? Were you mystified? Did you fall in love right away or was it a slow warm-up?

Do you remember the first story you read? If you've gone back to read it, does it hold up?

If you read slash, did you stumble across it? Seek it out? Were you immediately smitten? Or did it need to grow on you? (Were you like me, standing in the public library stacks with a copy of Textual Poachers, face bright red and yet, not quite sure what this slash thing was all about?)

How have your reading tastes changed?

If you write fanfic, was there a certain story you read that made you decide to pick up a pencil or tap at a keyboard?

If you write: think back to the typewriter. How have spellcheck, being able to cut and paste, search/replace, correct mistakes changed the way you write?

Do you read fanfic 1. on a screen only 2. in zines only 3. stories printed off the internet 4. combo of all?

Mrs. Potato Head

P.S. Welcome Cin. :-)

[cesperanza]

I find I edit more and better if I'm collaborating--if what someone else has written sparks my memory. So I'm trying to brainstorm how to bring out cohorts--maybe a particular week can be "sponsored" by a community? (Sponsored by but not limited to? Ask mods to sign up for a 2 week period in which they'll pimp the challenge to their fandom and hopefully get others pumped to play?)

But also--there are so many underwritten about area--fandoms, vocabulary, lists & institutions, challenges, etc etc. Or even a "put your favorite five stories/vids/pieces of fanart in" or whatever!

[msilverstar]

frankly, those are all great. we just need to choose one and DO IT!

[cin1607]

We are! I'm going to let people continue to noodle over this for another couple of days. We've got a committee meeting on Monday, and then I'll post the first challenge Tuesday. I'll try to do them on a two week cycle, so if one isn't to your liking, there'll be another one up fairly soon. :)

[cesperanza]

Why not all of these? Do it like a flashfic community--"Genderfuck stories in Harry Potter" (link to section/stub) or "Five characters whose pages need work" choosing random fandoms for variety, or "Add to the pages of five of your fannish friends or favorite fans"--like challenges!

[cesperanza]

Replying to myself--I think whatever it is, it needs to be fairly frequent. As a challenge mod, I found that once a week is best to start, moving to once every two weeks--once a month is too long and people lose interest. Or maybe there could even be a daily challenge going on as well: a single new page/stub thrown up every single day, so there'd be seven a week. If you looked at the fanlore comm, you'd see seven options and the community would be active.

[cin1607]

I can't stack my replies appropriately when you reply to yourself! *g*

Anyway, yes, I'm planning to post them frequently. I'd been thinking every two weeks, just to give everyone a good chance to work on whatever was up, but I'll bow to your flashfic expertise on timing. There's no reason we can't do one a week.

I know that sherrold made some excellent points about all of the work we still have to do with regards to sorting out policy questions and generally getting organized, as we're new. But I don't think everything needs to come to a standstill while we work that out.

[cesperanza]

You know, in DS, I ran a recs community for a while and what I did was, I gathered together 7 people to take a day a week (M, T, W etc) for a month--they were responsible for posting four Monday recs, e.g., the next person had to post for the four tuesdays. I wonder if we could get 7 people together to post a stub a day to this comm--like, even, what they were working on and ask for help--four times? I would volunteer, fwiw, to take a day...

[cin1607]

If no one's raised a red flag on any suggestions so far with reasons why we shouldn't do one, they're all going on the list. Now I just have to pick an order. *g*