What the Wiki committee did in August

[fanloremod]

The Wiki committee has had a busy month working on the usual outside requests (we admit, we do still have a bit of a backlog!), our internal documentation, and some exciting new projects!

First, thank you to those who came to our July editing chat! Among other things, we discussed old school slash, ambitious pages, and Fanlore's own site graphics. (Did you know that we have no copy of Fanlore's original header from when the site was in beta? Fanlore's Fanlore article has been updated to include some of our historical graphics, but we would love to see more of Fanlore's own history preserved! If you were around during Fanlore's early days please do share your memories of the site, and if you happen to have any old images or screenshots we'd love those too!)

During the editing chat we also discovered a couple of old Fanlore-themed icons created by the wonderful kylara that had never been added to our graphics page. The page has now been updated to include them, and (as with all the graphics on that page) you are very welcome to use them!

In other news, we have received reports that some newly-created pages aren't being properly indexed by Fanlore's search engine. We're looking into this, and in the meantime you may want to use Google to supplement your Fanlore searches (see Fanlore's help page for more info).

What's to come?

Wiki has been busy planning Fanlore's annual Stub September challenge! See the the official announcement for more information, and stay tuned for the first of the weekly themes this weekend!

To celebrate Stub September and also provide an opportunity for new editors to ask questions, we will be holding an editing party on Saturday, September 12th at 17:00 UTC (what time is that in my timezone?) in the Fanlore chat room.

As of September 1st, 2015, Fanlore has 35,761 articles which have undergone 613,239 edits. We hope to see you on the Recent Changes page!

Stub September is Here Again!

[fanloremod]

Fans are welcome to edit Fanlore at any time of the year, but this month the Wiki Committee is organizing a special event. Stub September is a challenge for everyone, newcomers and seasoned Fanlore editors alike, to pick a stub and expand on it. A stub is an article on Fanlore that is under-developed and missing important information.

Right now, there are over 1900 existing pages on Fanlore that are already identified as stubs. You can use the list to find a page where you know something about the topic, and edit the page to add your new information. Simple!

In addition to these stubs, there are two other types of articles that need more information: Pages that need expansion and Examples wanted.

Pages that need expansion are pages that are too long to be considered stubs, but are still missing crucial information; e.g., there may be some empty placeholder sections that need filling in.

Examples wanted are pages that are missing specific examples to define or illustrate the topic. This category is much shorter and needs more specific information. If you know of any examples, please just add them to the page!

To help you decide what to work on, we will spotlight specific types of stubs during each week of the month. Don't worry! You are also welcome to work on any stub (or any other article) at any time. There will be new themes each week of September, so visit Fanlore's Dreamwidth account for more information.

Feel free to post links to the articles you work on and let others know about the project! You can tweet at the Fanlore twitter account to let us know how you're doing.

If you haven't tried writing something for Fanlore before, Stub September is a good time to add more information to existing Fanlore articles without having to start your own page from scratch.

To help newcomers get started, the Wiki Committee will be organizing an editing party on Saturday, September 12th at 17:00 UTC (what time is that in my timezone?) in the Fanlore chat room where you can come and ask questions or just work on entries alongside other people.

If you're unable to attend the editing party but have questions about Fanlore or how to get started, you can contact the Wiki Committee or leave a comment on the Dreamwidth community.