21 February chat summary

[jsparc]

Earlier today(/yesterday) we had an editing chat in the Fanlore chat room. The chat was in part held to answer questions about volunteering for the Wiki committee; if you were unable to make it to the chat but have questions about volunteering, feel free to contact the committee.

Below is a brief summary of some of the topics we discussed:

Fanlore Challenges/Events

• Our next event will be April Showers. We brainstormed a bit about potential fandoms to be featured, and discussed what types of fandoms were underrepresented on Fanlore (see below).


• Our latest event was Stub September, which was at lot of fun, especially since we had a big influx of new editors.
  • Right now, we have 72 active users (i.e., users who have edited Fanlore in the past month).


• There are tentative plans for a new challenge in the same vein as Stub September but for creating new pages. This would probably be in or around June.
  
  • Editors liked the themes from Stub September, so we'd do a similar thing for the new pages month. Some editors found more specific themes more fun or inspiring, such as the women characters challenge a while back. The idea of having two more specific themes instead of one general theme was proposed.

Fanlore Content Suggestions

• The Tumblr article could use some updating about the recent takedowns. MeeDee collected some links and resources on its talk page.


• Fanlore is particularly lacking in content for fandoms with younger demographics, as well as content for video game fandoms and cosplay.


• We have very few articles about specific pieces of fanart.
  • Why? Possibly because (detailed) art commentary can be very hard to find, plus many artworks are untitled and it's difficult to figure out a page name.
  • Is it feasible to write an article on a piece of fanart without including the art itself? Yes, but it can be challenging to describe a piece of visual art in words, and not including a picture of what's being discussed might make the discussion hard to follow/readers lose interest. (But included images must abide by the Image Policy.)
  • Content ideas for fanart pages: Is the art used for icons or other graphics? When/how often/were they authorized by the artist? What kind of art is it/how was it created? When/where was it posted? How was it received? A fanart help page would be helpful for this kind of info.

Other News

• The Wiki committee is recruiting until February 23rd.


• A Fanlore forum is not a possibility in the near future, but we want to find more ways to communicate with other editors.
  • One way to do this is to make more use of the chat room outside of scheduled chats. Some of us resolved to hang out in there more while we were editing or doing other stuff. It would also be nice to display on Fanlore how many people are currently in the chat room; the committee will look into it.
  • The committee tries to hold monthly chats. The times when the most people can attend are Saturdays between 14 and 22 UTC, but we also want to accommodate people in other timezones/who can't make those times. We discussed holding additional chats or coming up with a system to regularly change chat times.


• Possibility of a Fanlore Tumblr? We could cross-post from Twitter but we're currently short-staffed so it may be too much work.


• The committee will continue to try to post monthly newsletters, though they've fallen a bit behind.

Thank you to everyone who came! :)

Comments

[soyalex]

I wanted to attend the chat, but had other prior commitments, so thanks for the recap! I'm really excited about the editing challenges this year XD They will be my first!