Writing tutorials geared specifically toward making edits for each project would be great, too
Yes, that's what I mean!
And yeah, the chatroom :) It would be awesome to have someone in there all the time, and/or to have a way to check right from Fanlore whether or not someone's there to chat with. I stopped clicking the link when I didn't find anyone in the chatroom after my first couple of tries. That's why I suggested something more obviously embedded in the wiki for some reason - because that way people can immediately see if the doctor is in, so to speak, instead of clicking on a link a few times and then never going there again because they feel it never gets results anyway. The current chatroom would be a lot more useful if there was a way to tell from the wiki if someone's in there. (Planning chats by posting to the DW community doesn't sound like something new people would feel comfortable doing, I fear...)
When I said that talk pages were out of sight, I meant that the discussion isn't in the same location as the content that it's about, and that's not very obvious for new people. Not nearly as obvious as, say, the comments section right under every Wikia article. Even if people notice the Discussion tab, there's still no way for them to see if there is any discussion - nothing "comment count"-like - until they click through to the page and see a lot of nothing. The issue is a bit similar to having the chatroom on a different location where people have no idea if anything is happening until they click through and see nothing. I feel like entering or getting to know a community is really hard if there's no way to monitor where activity is going on, unless you click a bunch of separate links to other pages.
You could argue that it's just a few damn clicks and people can afford to do that, but in terms of mental transaction costs, a few clicks make a huge difference. (I very much suspect this is one of the reason why the OTW volunteer forums aren't very active. There's no way to monitor activity there without actually going to the site, logging in, and clicking through to the forum. Those few steps all take a few seconds max. But they *feel* like a lot of work, especially compared to how frictionless it is to monitor activity on many other community sites.) If it's in any way non-obvious how to find where the action is going on and keep up with discussions, building community is much harder.
Of course Mediawiki is Mediawiki, and I have the exact same difficulties "finding" the community on Wikipedia. My personal experience (emphasis on that bit) is that "finding" and keeping up with the community on these sorts of wikis is hard. I don't mean to harp on Fanlore in specific, at all. I'm just musing about the limitations built into this platform that need to be kept in mind if we're going to make an Anime & Manga project thingie.
I'm really looking forward to having forums for Fanlore! Those could become a more centralized an newbie-accessible water cooler place of sorts.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Re: very disjointed; past bedtime
Yes, that's what I mean!
And yeah, the chatroom :) It would be awesome to have someone in there all the time, and/or to have a way to check right from Fanlore whether or not someone's there to chat with. I stopped clicking the link when I didn't find anyone in the chatroom after my first couple of tries. That's why I suggested something more obviously embedded in the wiki for some reason - because that way people can immediately see if the doctor is in, so to speak, instead of clicking on a link a few times and then never going there again because they feel it never gets results anyway. The current chatroom would be a lot more useful if there was a way to tell from the wiki if someone's in there. (Planning chats by posting to the DW community doesn't sound like something new people would feel comfortable doing, I fear...)
When I said that talk pages were out of sight, I meant that the discussion isn't in the same location as the content that it's about, and that's not very obvious for new people. Not nearly as obvious as, say, the comments section right under every Wikia article. Even if people notice the Discussion tab, there's still no way for them to see if there is any discussion - nothing "comment count"-like - until they click through to the page and see a lot of nothing. The issue is a bit similar to having the chatroom on a different location where people have no idea if anything is happening until they click through and see nothing. I feel like entering or getting to know a community is really hard if there's no way to monitor where activity is going on, unless you click a bunch of separate links to other pages.
You could argue that it's just a few damn clicks and people can afford to do that, but in terms of mental transaction costs, a few clicks make a huge difference. (I very much suspect this is one of the reason why the OTW volunteer forums aren't very active. There's no way to monitor activity there without actually going to the site, logging in, and clicking through to the forum. Those few steps all take a few seconds max. But they *feel* like a lot of work, especially compared to how frictionless it is to monitor activity on many other community sites.) If it's in any way non-obvious how to find where the action is going on and keep up with discussions, building community is much harder.
Of course Mediawiki is Mediawiki, and I have the exact same difficulties "finding" the community on Wikipedia. My personal experience (emphasis on that bit) is that "finding" and keeping up with the community on these sorts of wikis is hard. I don't mean to harp on Fanlore in specific, at all. I'm just musing about the limitations built into this platform that need to be kept in mind if we're going to make an Anime & Manga project thingie.
I'm really looking forward to having forums for Fanlore! Those could become a more centralized an newbie-accessible water cooler place of sorts.