What the Wiki committee did in September

[fanloremod]

September has been a busy month for Wiki and Fanlore, as we celebrated Stub September. The month long challenge would not be as successful or productive without your contributions. We've seen great contributions to all sorts of fan communities and venues of fannish engagement. The fandoms and characters also benefited from your work with Harry Potter and Buffyverse getting a lot of attention.

We also held an editing party on September 12th, which was attended by ten editors, including some Gardeners and Wiki committee members. Below is a brief summary of some of the topics discussed, which included Stub September, other editing projects, and some new ideas:

• Fanlore's Fan Interview category has been growing! We have a lot of fun reading them all, especially the new Fanartivation and Slashcast interviews.


• It would be great to see more of...
  • Fanlore pages for individual pieces of fanart! One problem is that many individual art pieces don't have titles. What do you title the Fanlore article in those cases?
  • Info about video game fandom! Fanvids and let's plays and walkthroughs seem to face similar legal/copyright issues. What are the video game fan communities' perspectives?


• Several new pages were discussed and started during the chat!
  • Fan Age and Fandom, including recent discussions of ageism in fandom
  • John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular, and the Scalzi eBook war
  • Bibro: what is it, changing definitions, and fannish drift


• The Wiki Committee is still exploring the possibility of an official Tumblr, but in the meantime there is an unofficial Tumblr, unofficialfanlorenews, you can follow which reposts fanlore_news tweets and official Fanlore Dreamwidth posts!


• Can Fanlore's Special:Upload page be improved?
  • The dropdown menu for "Licensing" isn't actually used: include information about copyright/licensing in the "Summary" field instead. The ImageSummary template includes a "Copyright/Permission Status" field you should use.
  • Suggestion: getting the ImageSummary template to pre-fill in the "Summary" box. The Wiki Committee will look into this but doesn't know if it's currently feasible. We could reproduce the blank template on the Special:Upload page (not in the "Summary" box, but above it for copy-pasting), but there's already a link to it at the top upload page so there's not a significant benefit.


• Stub September \o/
  • Several of us tended to create new pages instead of working on existing stubs—it's easy to fall down wiki rabbitholes even if you start out intending to work on a stub! Lots of great new pages for Buffyverse characters had been recently created.
  • Search tips for finding stubs were discussed and then added to Stub September posts


• New ideas/suggestions
  • A kudos button for Fanlore pages/edits — The Wiki Committee will look into Wikipedia's "thank" function to see if it's something we could implement.
  • A general talk page/Community Portal-type page on Fanlore that could serve as a central location for discussion, especially for site-wide stuff like new categories.

As far as changes within the Wiki Committee itself go: our co-chair Tiyire is back from hiatus, ready to get back to work. Additionally, we also said goodbye to one of our staffers, squidgie. He will remain a Fanlore editor and we hope to see him around on the Recent Changes page.

What's to come?

To provide an opportunity for new and more experienced editors to ask questions and have fun while contributing to Fanlore, we will be holding an editing party on Saturday, October 18th at 17:00 UTC (what time is that in my timezone?) in the Fanlore chat room.

As of October 3rd, 2015, Fanlore has 36,211 articles which have undergone 622,212 edits. We hope to see you on the Recent Changes page!

Comments

[espresso_addict]

Thanks for this! I came in right at the end of the chat and missed most of it.

[soyalex]

Glad you found this helpful! All credit for the chat summary goes to jsparc!

[msilverstar]

I like the scalzi parody page so much I went and formatted the references, added categories, etc. Is it still a stub?

[soyalex]

Yeah, I checked the page (it's so awesome, btw, thanks for contributing to it!) and it looks less like a stub.
Yay! Stub September's objective fulfilled! \o/

I'm removing the stub template