Tutorial writers needed!

[brownbetty]

I am looking for some help writing tutorials for a promotion we have planned in October. I'm looking for a series of very accessible entry level tutorials, covering:

1. Signing up as a wiki user!
2. Making your userpage!
3. Wiki links!
4. Your first article!
5. Templates, and making your first article pretty!

Of course, like everything else on the wiki, this is ideally suited to being done collaboratively, so even a little bit of help is very welcome.

If this is something you'd be interested in, let me know! I am planning to work on it, but doubting I can do it all myself. Would people be willing to help filling in some scaffolding?

Comments

[darkemeralds]

Whatever works for the community is fine with me.

A comment after having spent a concentrated two hours working with the wiki: it is really, really hard to understand.

The categories are hard to understand and there are a LOT of DO NOTS around them, making their use pretty scary. They aren't tags, but it's hard not to think of them as tags, because that's what I'm used to. I don't think I'm very unusual in this regard.

The way things tie together is hard to understand. Presumably it happens through categories. I found that there was no article on Simon Tam, so I wrote one using the Character template, but there are no categories in the template; the way an article like that gets tied back to the source fandom is hard to understand.

The difference between the content of fandom and fandom itself is a little slippery, too. Perhaps a better definition of "fannish enough" is in order.

The difference between a user and a person is hard to understand. I came away with the certainty that I'm the one and not the other.

The article-writing code, I get. I mean, I get how to learn it. But the structure of Fanlore and its intentions--both of which seemed pretty clear to me when I dug in--got murkier the more I tried to to contribute.

I'm afraid I don't have any brilliant suggestions for you, but I did think you ought to know that as a dedicated fan, a supporter-in-principle of what Fanlore is trying to do, and a professional in information technology, I found the experience pretty scary. I believe Fanlore really does value my little mite of fandom, but there's a real barrier to my making the contribution.

[wickedwords]

Hiya!

It sounds like we have some real language barriers that make working on the wiki feel very intimidating, even for people with a tech background. Do you think making things sound less formal might help? For example, I don't think there's any problem with thinking of categories as tags, since that's the familiar construct. We've got an open bug on the bug sheet ( http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Bug_Tracking) to set up all of the categories with the breadcrumbs, so editor's won't have to remember to do that. We do need to fix templates that doen't have categories, but I don't think we have a comprehensive list of them. What I'd really love is if people would start logging those sorts of problems (this template is missing categories) when they find them.

Any thoughts on how to help with that?

[darkemeralds]

In an ideal world, I'd go to Fanlore's portal page and be welcomed (so far, so good), then in addition to the "Browse" function, I'd see a clearer "Contribute" option.

In reality, I see that I'm welcome to contribute to the wiki, which is cool, but once I'm logged in and back at the main page, I don't see how. There are Shortcuts for Editors, but nothing under there that just says "Start a new article" or repeats the terminology used in the body, "Create a page."

Once I click on "Create a Page" I guess I'd expect to see the blank wiki page, with its toolbar and its helpful links--I KNOW I've been to that page, but I can't for the life of me find it again. Maybe a prompting question like, "Would you like to use a template?" I honestly think I could take it from there, especially if templates included categories.

A terminology note: Under the personal menu on the left sidebar in the main page, the term "contributions" appears, but in the main body on that page we see "begin editing and adding pages". On the Portal page, we see the terms "New Editor" and "Power Editor".

So, there's some sense that [Editing, Contributing, or Creating] a [Page, Wiki, Contribution] are a whole host of different things. I'm still not sure they are. It seems to me that a person can either originate something, or else edit something already there. The nature of the "something" is determined by its categories. That's my impression, but I only arrived at it after a whole lot of thought and attention, and I'm still not sure it's correct.

Does that help at all?

[wickedwords]

I think so. I added two bugs from this discussion to the bug tracking page, one to add a "start a new page" option and the other about making our terms consistent. So we'll talk about it at our next meeting, and see where we can take it from there.