October newsletter & editing chat

[fanloremod]

Better late than never, here is what the Wiki committee did in October:

From October 19 to October 26, the OTW held an amazingly successful membership drive! An incredible US$164,625.58 was raised, far outstripping the US$70,000 goal. You can read more about the drive at transformativeworks.org. Thank you to everyone who donated!

We held an editing chat on October 11, which had a great turnout! Some topics we discussed are summarized below:

• "Anchor links," links to a specific section of a Fanlore article, were not well explained on our Links help page. The help page was updated with more information and example code.
• You're welcome to add to Fanlore's Wish List, or remove wishes that have already been fulfilled.
• Fanlore's front page design hasn't changed much lately
  • We've been planning a general design update since the last software update, but were unsuccessful in recruiting a specialist. It's currently on the list of possible projects for next year.
  • We're also looking into other ideas that would spruce up the front page, such as a potential "Featured Article" section and a Twitter feed.
• How to balance fannish vernacular with readability? All fannish terms should get a Glossary page. Esoteric terms can be clarified within the article, but a wikilink or footnote should usually suffice.
• All the new editors from Tumblr in September was great. We would like to someday have a Fanlore Tumblr account to engage more with fandoms there.
• Memes on Fanlore: We had neither a memes category or a memes template, but now we do!
• We could use more content about cosplay and cosplayers - possible outreach ideas?
• We have very outdated lists of fanzines (e.g. List of Star Trek Fanzines), from the time before we had zine categories. We could redirect them to their corresponding categories, or if we keep them they should be clearly marked as out-of-date.

We also addressed our usual outside requests, including an identity protection case. In November, we will continue to work on finishing a request for Legal and are awaiting final confirmation about another exciting announcement. We are also beginning to plan some exciting projects for the new year and will continue to improve our internal documentation.