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Site design update: back to the default skin

tiyire: (Fanlore our story)
[personal profile] tiyire
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012 12:03 am
It was helpfully pointed out to us that the new skin has severe accessibility issues when changing the font size. We're sorry we missed it during our initial testing phase. For the moment we've reverted to the default Vector design until we get this fixed - which we hope will be soon, but could be in a few days.

Thanks to everyone who reported bugs so far! We are working hard to resolve them. Once the changes slow down or by next week we'll make a list of known bugs and some features.
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Categories/templates in Animanga and Translation?

briar_pipe: Yun staring at her necklace (Yun - necklace)
[personal profile] briar_pipe
Tuesday, November 27th, 2012 04:50 pm
*tiptoes in*

Hi folks! I've been tackling one small boulder in the mountain of fansub information not yet on the wiki, and I have a few questions about categories and templates.

( In no particular order... )

An unrelated question: I'm trying to make an internal link to /a/, in case anyone gets brave enough to tackle 4chan-related info. However, I can't get the wiki to show the //. Any wiki gurus out there know the trick?

Thanks, guys!
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Fanlore upgrade on Saturday!

aethel: (fanlore)
[personal profile] aethel
Thursday, November 22nd, 2012 11:06 pm
Dear Fanlore editors and readers,

Finally, after months of work, the MediaWiki upgrade is ready to go live! It is scheduled for Saturday, November 24, at 22:00 UTC. (What time is it where I am?) If everything goes according to plan, there should be no downtime, but you will not be able to edit Fanlore for a short time.

Why the upgrade?
MediaWiki is the software Fanlore and many other wikis, including Wikipedia, are built on. Until now Fanlore was using version 1.15, which is woefully out of date, so we are switching to 1.19. Upgrading will allow us to, for example, install new extensions to better fight spam on the site. For more information about different versions of MediaWiki, you can go here.

Why the new skin?
With the new mediawiki version, we decided to switch our default skin from WordPress to Vector. The WordPress skin is no longer under active development and wasn't meant for this MediaWiki version. Continuing to use it would have meant extensive fixes now and in the future, and we decided against it.

Instead, Natalie (from the OTW's Webmasters committee) and Qem (an AO3 tag wrangler) have very kindly volunteered to customize the CSS to recreate an approximation of Fanlore's old WordPress skin. You will see a few differences: the sections in the sidebar are now collapsible, wikilinks are no longer bolded by default, and the talk page link appears on the left side of the screen. Let us know if anything is broken with the new skin.

To save ourselves much effort, we are only supporting our default skin at this time. It's possible to use a different one, but the formatting might be strange.

Other Changes?
We have removed the bugtracker extension (also no longer supported) and OpenID support.

Problems?
If you discover any bugs or issues, please let us know!

Many Thanks
to Emufarmers, the Systems Committee, astirya, Natalie, and Qem
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posting on behalf of the Strategic Planning Committee

aethel: (fanlore)
[personal profile] aethel
Saturday, November 17th, 2012 04:16 pm
Greetings from the Strategic Planning Committee!

For those of you who are not aware, we are a committee with the Organization of Transformative Works (OTW), the parent organization of Fanlore. For more information about who we are and what we're doing, please see our update posts at the OTW website.

As part of our information-gathering process, we have put together an anonymous survey for Fanlore editors. We'd appreciate it if you could take some time over the next two weeks to fill it out and help us gain more insight into Fanlore -- both to the team as a whole and to the
individuals within it.

( Read more... )

Any questions or comments about the survey should be addressed to strategic-plan@transformativeworks.org (not to the Fanlore staff). Additionally, if you would like to read the text of the survey before you fill it out, you are welcome to request a copy of the survey as an RTF or TXT document for your personal review.

Thanks so much,
Strategic Planning Committee

Link to the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CKB6MPK
DEADLINE: Please complete by December 1, 2012

[Please note that there is a separate survey for Fanlore gardeners. If you are a gardener and did not receive an email, let me know. -- aethel]
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What the Wiki Committee did in October

tiyire: (Fanlore our story)
[personal profile] tiyire
Sunday, November 4th, 2012 06:18 pm
We are close to finishing the mediawiki upgrade - no, really this time! It is scheduled for the middle of November. A more detailed explanation about the upcoming changes will be posted soon.

Our twitter account was briefly hacked to send spam messages to people. Sorry about that, and thanks to everyone who alerted us to the problem. We have taken steps to be able to react quicker in the future.

We are sad to report that Shannon and Tuulia left the Wiki committee, and we hope to one day see them on RecentChanges again.
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What the Wiki Committee did in September

tiyire: (Fanlore our story)
[personal profile] tiyire
Monday, October 15th, 2012 03:19 pm
September was a busy month for Fanlore! We started a new challenge, Stub September, and invited people to work on unfinished pages. Many thanks to our editors, who did fantastic work like they always do. As a result of discussions about the definition of a stub we created a new template, ExpandArticle, and in the process noticed that we could delete some that are no longer in use.

We held an editing chat on September 22 for editors to talk about Fanlore editing that was fun for everyone involved (we hope), and as usual we resolved to hold them more often.

An animated discussion arose around the question of how best to distinguish pages about podfic from pages about fic. While the debate was misrepresented in other places, the discussion on the Fanlore dreamwidth community was productive. We hope the solution is satisfying for everyone.

Spam-fighting, getting ready to make the forum public, and the mediawiki upgrade are among our ongoing efforts. The latter is almost ready and we hope to be done with it soon. The upgrade will come with some design changes because we are switching to a different default skin.

You can find the OTW newsletter for September here.
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Calling Italian Speaking Fans

morgandawn: Fandom is my Fandom (Fandom is my Fandom)
[personal profile] morgandawn
Monday, October 8th, 2012 11:40 am

There is a set of Italian Star Trek fanzines that need to be added to Fanlore. Luckily the Star Trek fan club, STIC, has a well-organized website and all that needs to be done is to create pages for the zines, add the covers, dates, pages and tables of contents (tocs). We have a sample page (with one issue) set up here.
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Log_%28Star_Trek_Italian_Club%29

If you are interested in helping, the link to the master list of the STIC club fanzines is below. From the master fanzine page, each link takes you to the specific fanzine subpages that contain covers, tocs, dates and pages.
http://home.insinet.it/SticEdit/index_nj.htm (Master zine list)

Here is an older website partially in English that talks about the zines:
http://www.ponilla.org/Vulcan/bacheca.html

It is not absolutely necessary that you read/write Italian to add the fanzines to Fanlore - but it would be wonderful to have someone a bit more knowledgeable and able to read Italian to add the 'crinkly background bits" about the fanzines and their history.

Podfic discussion follow-up

tiyire: (Fanlore our story)
[personal profile] tiyire
Sunday, October 7th, 2012 04:35 pm
Thank you to everyone who participated in the recent discussion about podfic pages! There were a great many comments and contributions, so this a follow-up summarizing the results.

As it turned out, the main issue was to avoid confusion for editors as to what the topic of a fanwork page is, in particular when it comes to podfic pages. To that end we have added a line to all fanwork templates. The infobox now includes the fanwork type at the top with a wikilink to Fanlore's definition. (For an example, see the podfic template.) This makes it more obvious what a page is about.

It also makes it more obvious when the wrong template is used. For example, if you now see the infobox on an AMV page say "Vid" you can switch the template to the AMV template or leave a note on the respective discussion page so that someone else can fix it. If there doesn't exist a fitting template yet, please leave a note on the discussion page of the template currently used on the page so that we can make more templates.

If editors want to take additional measures to avoid anticipated confusion, they also have the option of adding a disambiguation line at the top of a page, like this.

As always, editing a page is up to the discretion of the editors. In case of editing conflicts, please use the respective discussion pages so that a satisfying solution can be found and follow the steps at Managing Conflict.

Controversial edits are rarely done with malicious intent. When it comes to wikis, please keep in mind that the guiding principle is to always assume good faith; disagreements and discussions between editors are normal and always welcome.

If all this made you curious about other recent discussions, check out the talk pages on Fanlore. If you are interested in adding pages about podfic you can find help here. We are looking forward to seeing you on RecentChanges!

Podfic Entries

paraka: A baby wearing headphones and holding a mic (Default)
[personal profile] paraka
Friday, September 21st, 2012 03:24 pm
I've been trying to add more entries to Fanlore about podfic and have run into a bit of an issue. When I was creating new pages I was titling them "Title (podfic)" to help distinguish that this was an entry about the podfic not about the fic, which normally has the same title.

The problem though, is that this goes against current Fanlore policies to only add an honourific to an entry if there's a conflicting entry of the same name and there's a need to disambiguate. So the gardeners, rightly, were changing the names of the pages I created to remove the honourific.

And while I totally understand the reason for the policy, it still made me nervous because without the (podfic) in the title it just wasn't as clear that the entry was a podfic entry. Sure enough, one of the entries I made was later edited in a way to make it seem more like a fic entry (it's since been changed back and with other additions).

So I'd like to have a conversation about what we can do to make sure that podfic entries are welcomed on Fanlore and that future editors, trying to be helpful but not aware that the entry is a podfic entry, won't end up morphing the entries into fic entries. I've spoken to some individual podficcers about this as well as some of the Fanlore gardeners, and here's some of the suggestions we've come up with so far:

( Possible Suggestions )

Personally, I think I like options 2 and 3 together best, but I thought I'd ask others how they feel before I start creating a bunch more pages. And please feel free to add more suggestions!

progress!

[personal profile] mrs_potatohead
Thursday, September 20th, 2012 05:46 pm
Sometimes it's easy to forget just how far we've come and how much progress we've made at Fanlore.

When I first started adding things to/editing Fanlore in July 2009, we didn't even have categories. None. Not for anything.

And, there was ONE template for ALL fanworks.

It looked like this:

{{Fanwork
|fanworktitle=
|creator=
|dates=
|medium=
|fandom=
|externallinks=
}}

These are some of the templates we have now: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Infoboxes.
Here are the categories: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Special:Categories.

All volunteers have worked long and hard on at making Fanlore better and better: gardeners, committee members, and editors, editors, editors!

Anyone who's added an entry, tweaked an entry, contributed a few sentences or a whole lot more, those who've emailed with suggestions, scolded Fanlore, praised Fanlore, it's all been absorbed and used to improve our fan wiki.

We've come a long way!

~ MPH

Stub September editing chat

tiyire: (Fanlore our story)
[personal profile] tiyire
Thursday, September 20th, 2012 10:00 pm
You are cordially invited to a Fanlore editing chat for questions, discussions, or just to talk about Fanlore editing, on

Saturday, September 22, 5pm UTC (in your time zone), in the Fanlore chat room on Campfire.

Stub September is still ongoing - talk about what you did so far, what you still want to do, and recruit other people to help you!
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What the Wiki Committee did in August

tiyire: (Fanlore our story)
[personal profile] tiyire
Monday, September 10th, 2012 03:51 pm
For those who are not subscribed to [community profile] otw_news, the OTW newsletter for August was posted here. Here is an extended and updated version about the Wiki committee's activities:

We have finally made progress in the fight against the spambots! Phoenix has been very busy banning known sources of abuse, and as a result the bot situation has improved considerably.

We are still testing the mediawiki upgrade - thanks to Emufarmers for his work on that - and working on the forums. So far we have heard positive feedback from our gardeners.

In behind-the-scenes news, Wiki has a new Board liaison who once was a committee member herself - Ira Gladkova.
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Fanlore Challenge: Stub September

smarieru: (Default)
[personal profile] smarieru
Monday, September 3rd, 2012 07:24 am
Stub September is a challenge for Fanlore editors and gardeners to pick a stub and expand on it. A stub is an article on Fanlore that is under-developed and missing important information. Right now, there are nearly 1800 existing pages on Fanlore that are already identified as stubs. You're invited to use the list and the index at the top of the page to find a page where you know something more and edit the page to add your new information. It's as simple as that.

In addition to the identified stubs, there are also pages that are missing specific examples to define or illustrate the page topic. This category, examples wanted, is much shorter and needs more specific information. If you know any examples, please just add them to the page.

In other words, Stub September is a good month to add more information to existing Fanlore articles. Have fun and good luck!

ETA: Feel free to post links to the articles you work on, whether it is updating a stub yourself or reviewing a stub and upgrading it to the examples wanted template. Comment here and let your editing colleagues know what you've been doing. We all want to share the experience when we're improving on Fanlore.

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error message when saving edits

aethel: (fanlore)
[personal profile] aethel
Friday, August 24th, 2012 11:12 pm
Editors have reported an error message when saving edits, caused by an update Systems just rolled out for combatting spam. We have reported the issue to Systems and are assuming the problem will be easy to identify and correct. We'll keep you posted.

ETA: Problem was fixed! Let us know if you see any other issues.
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Two Current Wiki Editing Tools

morgandawn: (Default)
[personal profile] morgandawn
Saturday, August 18th, 2012 05:23 pm
 Two existing WYSIWYG wiki-editing tools that new users can install to help them learn how to use wiki code. One is for Microsoft Office 2007/2010 and the other is for OpenOffice (which Mac and Linux users can use, as well as PC users who don't own a Word license); 

The Word add on is discussed here.  The Open Office add on is here (with a visual tutorial here for another Wiki).

More handy wiki tools posted in this community here.


 
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What the Wiki Committee did in July

aethel: (fanlore)
[personal profile] aethel
Wednesday, August 8th, 2012 08:09 pm
For those who are not subscribed to the [community profile] otw_news community, you can read the Fanlore section of the OTW's July newsletter here. Here is a modified and updated version of the Wiki Committee news:

This month we implemented ReCaptcha with the help of Systems to battle the spambots. Unfortunately, it didn't work as well as we hoped (details here), so we're back to looking for other options.

Wiki has two new members who volunteered to help us fight against spam and upgrade our version of mediawiki: Welcome, Emufarmers and Phoenix!

We are also happy to welcome three new Fanlore gardeners: Sparcicle, Espresso Addict, and Greenygal.

Our second big project, the forum, is still under construction and looks better every day.
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Update to ReCaptcha proplem!

tuuulia: (Default)
[personal profile] tuuulia
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012 03:37 pm
Update to our latest post in here.

We know that our ReCaptcha is not working as well as we hoped at the moment and that it's difficult to solve, so we'll be looking for other options, but can't do anything immediately.

If you've been trying to register on fanlore.org, but can't solve ReCaptcha, please click here to send an email requesting a fanlore account (we need to know the username you want and your email address, we'll give you a temporary password, which you can change later on)

We also want to say thank you to people, who has letting us to know that ReCaptcha is hard to solve ♥

- Wiki Committee


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ReCaptcha is live !!

tuuulia: (Default)
[personal profile] tuuulia
Thursday, July 26th, 2012 04:01 pm
Systems has implemented ReCaptcha on Fanlore to prevent spambots from signing up with new accounts. ReCaptcha is an image captcha that is supposed to be more effective against spam than our old math captcha.

Anyone who already has a Fanlore account should never see ReCaptcha. Let us know if you do encounter ReCaptcha, or if you see anything weird, or if (heaven forbid) you see an uptick in spam activity.
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OTW June newsletter

aethel: (fanlore)
[personal profile] aethel
Saturday, July 7th, 2012 08:54 pm
For those who are not subscribed to the [community profile] otw_news community, here is the Fanlore section of the OTW's June newsletter:
In the meantime Wiki has been waging its own site battle against a wave of spam. The Wiki Committee is working with Systems to research and test better spam protection options. In the meantime, this filter hides the sea of red. They also welcomed new staffer Tuulia to the committee, and proposed some more fanworks categories (check out the Dreamwidth discussion post here).


And by spam, we mean spambots who are utterly defeated by the impenetrable wall of our four-hour page-create block and the heroic warrior-gardeners standing ready with banhammers behind the barrier. Thanks, gardeners! We are testing a new captcha right now and will let you know when it is implemented.

Not really news since it's not ready yet, but we haven't forgotten the Fanlore forum and are working on setting it up. Stay tuned!
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Status of Fanwork Categories

aethel: (fanlore)
[personal profile] aethel
Friday, June 29th, 2012 07:41 pm
Since response to the fanwork category proposal post was positive, we have started creating the proposed fanwork subcategories. So far, we have added:

* Zine Fandom
* Podfics
* Fanfiction
* Vids

and updated the corresponding templates. Now the Fanworks category contains only 348 pages, down from over 11,000! Check out the current Fanworks category.

( still to do )
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