Fanlore end-of-term 2012 update

[tiyire]

Dear Fanlore readers, editors, and gardeners,

The 2012 OTW term has officially ended, and we wanted to take the opportunity to say THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to Fanlore this year, talked about it with friends, offered encouragement, and made this site great. Fanlore has over 22,000 articles today; that's over 6,000 more than in July 2011, from when we have comparison data. You are all fantastic. Please go and take a look at all the great content our editors added this year!

Some things the Wiki committee did this year to help:

• upgraded MediaWiki


• fought spambots


• created new categories, templates, and infoboxes


• dealt with identity protection and fair use concerns

Before some of us go on holidays, a few updates on things:

• MediaWiki upgrade: You might have noticed some changes since we had to revert back to the default skin after the upgrade to another version of MediaWiki. We hope to be able to come closer to our old design, but with term break and the holidays coming it's difficult to say when that will be. We are confident that the current design of Fanlore is good enough for now, but please tell us if you encounter any problems and we'll try to fix it.


• Forums: We were planning to open a Fanlore forum this term – we already have the basic set-up – but the question of how, and who, to moderate it has delayed the process considerably. We will tackle this question again next term, hopefully with more success.


• Categories: We are aware that there are several open proposals regarding categories at the moment. We are sorry that we didn't have the energy to follow up on all of them. We definitely haven't overlooked them, and these are also on next term's agenda.


• Surveys: We don't know yet when we'll receive the results of the surveys from the Survey committee and from the Strategic Planning committee, but we will of course make them public when possible.

We are sorry to say that aethel, our Chair, will leave the committee next term. We are grateful for all her work and happy that she's staying on as a gardener and editor of Fanlore. Tiyire will take over as Chair of the committee.

As you can see, we already have several open projects to finish for next term. With the help of Volunteers & Recruiting we will also revise our recruitment process, our training for newcomers, and our internal documentation and procedures. This might take some time, but it is very important to ensure that Wiki can keep up with the work, and we hope that you will be patient with us while we sort out these internal matters. That said, we are optimistic that we will become even more efficient next term as a result.

If you're interested in helping us keep Fanlore running and expanding, please consider volunteering for Wiki next term! We will post more detailed explanations before recruiting opens again.

In short: THANK YOU for making Fanlore as fantastic as it is! <3

Comments

[morgandawn]

Thank you to the Wiki Committee (and aethel for the hard work this year). And thanks for the update tiyire.