Project Time!

[briar_pipe]

I have a dream... a dream that we could build collaborative, shared project pages on Fanlore that would allow multiple people to share a goal (or group of goals). You know - a Wikiproject.

I've been working on pages in the general Anime & Manga category for the past few weeks. After talking with frogspace, I think what I'm looking for is a pony a page on Fanlore that could be collaboratively edited (and if a forum is set up, a topic for the project, if it's busy enough to warrant one). In my mind, the goals of such a page would be something like:

1. Make getting started easier for new editors who're interested specifically in this topic (and old hands who want somewhere to direct new editors),
   
2. Make it easier to review what's already been contributed to the topic and find places to add more material,
   
3. Facilitate discussion among editors and collect discussion links, so conversations aren't fragmented and people don't miss things they wanted to be a part of,
   
4. Provide a place to cheer other editors on, request review of your work, and generally support one another.

For content, I'm thinking an introduction to the project itself (including goals), a section for new editors so they could have an Animanga-focused introduction to Fanlore (which may encourage them to stick around), a list of resources or instructions somewhat modified from the one I posted on the wishlist, an explanation of the structure of related categories, links to relevent past conversations/decisions about the categories, etc.

For naming, I have no idea.

So, if you're interested in the Animanga side of fandom (and frankly, at this point I'll throw in the kitchen sink and say "anything on East Asia", because we can make sister projects to limit the amount of reinventing the wheel any one person has to do), please weigh in. What would you like to see on such a project page? What would you call such a page?

And if you're interested in the idea of projects, whether or not you have any Animanga background, what kinds of things would be useful on project pages in general? What kind of consistent naming scheme could we work towards?

[Note for mods: Tried adding a 'projects' tag but couldn't.]

Comments

very disjointed; past bedtime

[aethel]

We already have a chat room that is open all the time that any editor can hang out in while editing. It has been my dream to have it staffed at least part of the time, like office hours, but that hasn't happened yet. The emptiness of the room feeds on itself; it's empty, so no one bothers to go in. Changing the format and acquiring yet another chat tool won't change that. The Fanlore chat room is linked from the sidebar under "Shortcuts for Editors", and there is a link on the main page, and if we create project pages, we can include a direct link there as well.

Theoretically, anyone could post to the dreamwidth community and invite people to join them in chat a) right then or b) at a specific time.

The talk page for the project page itself is another place to discuss the project.

What sort of tutorial do you mean? We have a tutorial for basic editing. Writing tutorials geared specifically toward making edits for each project would be great, too. Maybe use subpages, like

Fanlore:Doujin Fandom project
Fanlore:Doujin Fandom project/Tutorial

The talk pages are not out of sight when you visit the Recent Changes page. That is where you see all the activity happening on the wiki. You can even look at just talk page edits

Re: very disjointed; past bedtime

[unjapanologist]

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.