six degrees of help pages

[aethel]

Point the first:
I created a mashup fandom template the other day for fandoms with multiple source texts selected based on the actors (bandmembers?) they have in common. Today I was tweaking it and looking at talk pages to see what other fandoms the template might be used on when I belatedly realized that I should have called it a "6 degrees" template. There's a 6 Degrees of Canada, 6 Degrees of SGA (still redlinked), and even a 6 Degrees of Pete Wentz. (And Kiefer/Lou.) On the Harrison Ford talk page, someone mentioned they were having trouble finding an appropriate fandom category to tag him with... So, are there enough of these fandoms to justify a "6 degrees" category (or some other term, I don't know what)? In any event, I'd love to see a wiki entry about this kind of fandom if anyone is knowledgeable enough to write one.

Point the second:
After my last post, I started five help pages before I ran out of steam. Check 'em out (and edit them):

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Fanworks
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Pairing_pages
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:People_pages
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Glossary
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Character_pages

Along the way I realized no one had added any character or pairing pages for RPF fandoms. Although now I see that isn't entirely true: see Monaboyd. There's a brief discussion here on how to organize RPF character and pairing pages that needs more input from RPF fans.

Comments

[viklikesfic]

Oh wow, yeah, I'll definitely get involved as I can on that. *waves RPF banner*

[lian]

I love what you're doing with the help pages! Very nice & concise.

[aethel]

Thanks!

[meri_oddities]

Wow, this is great. Thank you so much for doing it. It's going to be a big help for people to have this. You Rock!!

[aethel]

hey, thanks :)

BTW, I noticed that there are three Fanlore pages explaining the user page:

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:User_Page
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:User_page
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Tutorial/Edit_Userpage

Is there a reason for putting an extra page in the "Fanlore" namespace? I can't edit the page, but I would like to see the Fanlore page folded into Help:User_page.

[meri_oddities]

I unprotected it so that you can merge it with the other pages. Thanks. I think this might have been a policy page and not updateable, but we need to have one page rather than two or threee.

[aethel]

Okay, we're down to two pages now. I'm not sure what to do with the Tutorial page. The tutorial pages were abandoned while still incomplete. They contain redundant information, but are more concise than the rest of the Help section, so I'm hesitant to fold them into the longer pages.

[meri_oddities]

I hate to leave it languishing out there. What would it take to finish up the tutorial for users pages? Are all the rest of the tutorials wips as well?

[aethel]

I think the user page tutorial should be reviewed for clarity and possibly reorganized as a list of instructions, but all the content is there.

There are only 5 tutorial pages. Two were already filled in, I filled in the Wikilinks one, one is still a stub, and one should probably be rewritten as step-by-step instructions. But the main problem with the tutorial is that no one knows it's there, so we can't judge how helpful it would be.

[meri_oddities]

I agree about the step-by-step instructions. Those are much easier to follow than a block of text.

And yeah, maybe we should add the tutorials to the side bar. Or into the getting started page. Which needs work, I think, too.

[aethel]

...and I just restructured the user page tutorial. Does it look okay?

[meri_oddities]

Excellent. The only thing I would add is a link to the list of user pages so that they can click on their name in red. But man, having the pages you've done is so helpful. Thank you again for doing it!!