Rachel, fwiw, I think that the committee needn't even moderate ALL the forums -- from what I'm seeing, you already have a dedicated core user base who might be interested in helping out. I'm not even talking of gardeners; gardening is about a different impulse than moderating (well, to me :P), but both are about being helpful. And creating more diverse roles for Fanlore users to get active would definitely not be detrimental to more involvement (since people who aren't into geeking out about rules minutiae but are still dedicated about Fanlore would have another opportunity to help out!)
I cannot stress how much I second the idea of a forum for community-building. My feeling is that the OTW's organisational structure and precedent wrt (not) trusting external people with responsibility (I mean, the entire staffer/volunteer model) really doesn't map well onto Fanlore.
I have a rather clear case study of why a forum would be good idea, actually :) basically it's just mirroring extempore's story from another angle.
extempore is a friend of mine and Frogspace, and she got involed with Fanlore after recent discussions about OTW and anime/manga representation. What happened was basically that Frogspace and me (to a smaller extent) walked her through editing and what Fanlore is /isn't, etiquette, etc. As you may have seen, it's not that she's incapable of learning/doing so herself; she's neither timid nor clueless. She took to it quickly and in short time created some amazing pages.
However. She still needed one-on-one mentoring and encouragement and help to get started. This one-on-one mentoring is not sustainable if we want to recruit many new people at a time; not to mention that not everyone has a dedicated Fanlore editor in their circle!
A central gathering place with non-chronological/stable/long-term topics, where people could establish presences for their projects and recruit collaborators could help alleviate that. People interested in the same areas could gather there and plan their projects *before* they moved to the actual wiki and its talk pages. I know, that sounds like outsourcing central wiki functions elsewhere. But. Of course I know a couple of ways to recruit people to work on a page with me (recent changes, talk pages, mostly) but they're limited, and they *presuppose* not only a working knowledge of how Fanlore functions, but being comfortable with these unfamiliar venues. (I love wikis, I edited wikis before, but the one thing I've learned [from managing our work place one] is that one cannot assume a low enough threshold when it comes to encouraging "newbies" to get involved.)
SO -- the paradox of Fanlore editing for new people is that the wiki is about community, but editing itself is a lonely affair.
That's like... people are long gone out of "loneliness" before they acquire that working knowledge, especially if they don't belong to a fandom that has an active editor pool already (atm, that's mainly zines?).
Venue-wise, this DW community is a) rather isolated (I love Dreamwidth, but it's both tiny and relatively unknown) and the journal-model isn't conducive to long-term discussions anyway. (DW/LJ entries are accessed from people's reading lists, mostly, and the lifespan is generally very, very short. Idk about you, but I hesitate to add to "dead" [over a week old] entries.) Nevermind that I would *really* not be interested in being flooded by Zine discussion entries on my reading list; on a forum, each area would be contained; say, I could search out the gaming/anime/manga areas especially.
okay, whoa, I'll stop here because tl;dr, so let me end by saying that I will totally help argue and back you up [like, ask my committee to consider writing a statement of support, although that may be overkill, haha] in case you decide to seriously consider this & take this up to the Board, and help out as much as my time permits!
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Forums: how to staff?
I cannot stress how much I second the idea of a forum for community-building. My feeling is that the OTW's organisational structure and precedent wrt (not) trusting external people with responsibility (I mean, the entire staffer/volunteer model) really doesn't map well onto Fanlore.
I have a rather clear case study of why a forum would be good idea, actually :) basically it's just mirroring
However. She still needed one-on-one mentoring and encouragement and help to get started. This one-on-one mentoring is not sustainable if we want to recruit many new people at a time; not to mention that not everyone has a dedicated Fanlore
editor in their circle!
A central gathering place with non-chronological/stable/long-term topics, where people could establish presences for their projects and recruit collaborators could help alleviate that. People interested in the same areas could gather there and plan their projects *before* they moved to the actual wiki and its talk pages. I know, that sounds like outsourcing central wiki functions elsewhere. But. Of course I know a couple of ways to recruit people to work on a page with me (recent changes, talk pages, mostly) but they're limited, and they *presuppose* not only a working knowledge of how Fanlore functions, but being comfortable with these unfamiliar venues. (I love wikis, I edited wikis before, but the one thing I've learned [from managing our work place one] is that one cannot assume a low enough threshold when it comes to encouraging "newbies" to get involved.)
SO -- the paradox of Fanlore editing for new people is that the wiki is about community, but editing itself is a lonely affair.
That's like... people are long gone out of "loneliness" before they acquire that working knowledge, especially if they don't belong to a fandom that has an active editor pool already (atm, that's mainly zines?).
Venue-wise, this DW community is a) rather isolated (I love Dreamwidth, but it's both tiny and relatively unknown) and the journal-model isn't conducive to long-term discussions anyway. (DW/LJ entries are accessed from people's reading lists, mostly, and the lifespan is generally very, very short. Idk about you, but I hesitate to add to "dead" [over a week old] entries.) Nevermind that I would *really* not be interested in being flooded by Zine discussion entries on my reading list; on a forum, each area would be contained; say, I could search out the gaming/anime/manga areas especially.
okay, whoa, I'll stop here because tl;dr, so let me end by saying that I will totally help argue and back you up [like, ask my committee to consider writing a statement of support, although that may be overkill, haha] in case you decide to seriously consider this & take this up to the Board, and help out as much as my time permits!