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

[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*