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Challenge: Supernatural!

cin1607: (Default)
[personal profile] cin1607
Thursday, March 4th, 2010 09:39 pm
The sad, sad state of the Supernatural page over on Fanlore has already been pointed out, and rightly so! Someone passing through who has, I dunno, lived in cave since 2005, might think this was a fandom for a show people were casually fond of, rather than the massive, incredibly passionate fandom it actually is. And poor Castiel! (I might be a bit single-minded here. *g*) He has no pairing subpages. And I know Misha Collins has a huge following. Spread the word! Let's see if we can flesh this out a bit. :)
  • Current Mood: amused
Tags:

(no subject)

watersword: I'm not a very good writer, however/but I'm an excellent rewriter. (Writing: rewriting)
[personal profile] watersword
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 03:34 pm
Guys, I just noticed: Fanlore has 99,750 edits. How much do you want to bet we can break 100,000 edits by the time the OTW development drive kicks off on 9 March?

I dare you!

::goes on a typo rampage::

Drive-by coding update: Table of Contents and Templates

cin1607: (Default)
[personal profile] cin1607
Monday, March 1st, 2010 09:04 pm
Hey all,

Just to let you know, based on the discussion in [personal profile] franzeska's earlier post about TOC weirdness due to TOC coding in the templates, we've now taken that bit of coding out of all of the templates. (Let us know if we missed one somewhere.) So while Fanlore will still generate a TOC for any post with three or more subheaders, the placement will be the same as wikipedia's.

Yay? :)
  • Current Mood: busy

Supernatural Page is Unnatural!

cesperanza: (fanlore!by Laura Shapiro)
[personal profile] cesperanza
Sunday, February 28th, 2010 11:59 pm
I just went to fanlore to find out something I wanted to know about Sam and Dean and:

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Supernatural/Sam/Dean

!!!!!!

That's really SAD! It's not enough of my fandom for me to be able to add much myself, but that's a sad sad sad page that makes me cry!--is there somewhere I could post beyond here to beg help in making that page better? Is there a community like SPN_Noticeboard? (I mean, there is spn_noticeboard on LJ but its never been used...)

(Xposted from my journal!)

The Wiki Committee's monthly report

cin1607: (Default)
[personal profile] cin1607
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 12:18 pm
Since I just gave this report at an OTW meeting, I thought I would post it here, too. :)

The Wiki Committee is mostly new this year. Our Chair, [personal profile] meri_oddities, is our only member who served the entirety of last year. [personal profile] christycorr joined last summer and [personal profile] cin1607, [personal profile] cordelia_v, and Evelyn Brown are entirely new. We've had a very busy first month!

We've asked Systems to install the Sphinx search engine, as our research has shown that it's the best system available to us now. We are currently working on developing a test plan to test the search engine once it's been installed.

A draft of the "Major Fandoms as Categories" policy has been completed and is ready for Board review, and we've also drafted a policy on images posted to Fanlore (focusing particularly on the question of copyrighted images and explicit images) and this draft has been sent to Legal and the Board for approval.

We're attempting to post regular themes or challenges on the [community profile] fanlore community to encourage and focus participation. Some of these have been more successful than others, but we'll keep working on it, so bear with us. *g*
  • Current Mood: geeky
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Table of Contents behavior

franzeska: (Default)
[personal profile] franzeska
Friday, February 26th, 2010 12:04 pm
It looks like Fanlore tables of contents should behave like Wikipedia ones: in other words, after the opening paragraph(s) and directly before the first header. Putting in "__TOC__" should force the table of contents to appear at that point. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening. It looks, or at least it looks to me, like the table of contents is stuck to the end of whatever template is in the article. Is there any way to change this? I think articles would be a lot easier to read if we could split the two.

Here's an example of a Wikipedia page with a huge template and a huge table of contents that's still pretty readable because of how they're positioned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history

Is this just a problem with the skin I'm using? (Monobook--more or less the same as the Wikipedia default, right?) Is there some editing trick I'm missing?

ETA: The issue is the inclusion of "__TOC__" in some templates. I really think it shouldn't be there. Anyone have reasons it should? The templates that contain this are:

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:FandombyText
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:FandombyText-RPF
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Fanwork
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:GlossaryTerm
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:OrganizationCorporation
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:PolicyInfobox
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Site


http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ArchiveProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:AwardsProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:CharacterProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Commentary
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:CommunityProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ConventionProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:EventProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:FanProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:PairingProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:PersonProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:UsenetProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ZineAnthology
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ZineNovel
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ZinePublisherProfile

Challenge: Challenges!

cin1607: (Default)
[personal profile] cin1607
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 09:40 pm
[personal profile] cesperanza once said to me that the cold, wet nose test of any fan (using the analogy of an obviously healthy puppy is one with a cold, wet nose) is their enthusiastic attempts to pimp other people into their fandoms. I think the cold, wet nose test of any fandom is the number of challenges, in the forms of fests, exchanges, big bangs, battles or what have you, that the fandom hosts in an effort to enthusiastically encourage participation in the fandom.

So in an attempt gauge our respective fandoms' health, the challenge this week is to create a new page for your fandom called "List of __Challenges" where the blank space will obviously be your fandom's name, and then start compiling lists and links of your fandom's various challenge-type events. You may, if you have a lot, want to sort them by headers, like General Fests & Exchanges, Holiday Specific, Pairing Specific, or whatever you think is appropriate for your fandom. We'll use the Community Profile template for this, like we did for the Newsletters. We would also like you add the [[Category:Challenges]] just to be consistent.

A number of fandom pages on the wiki already have a paragraph or so about some of the challenges in the fandom. If that's the case, just add a line to that paragraph that says something along the lines of "For a more extensive list of challenges, fest and exchanges, see the [[List of__Challenges]]."

This is a big challenge! There's a lot to do. But you won't have to look too hard to find the fandom challenges. We're not far past the tons of holiday fests from the winter holidays and now I'm seeing people starting to get ready for their fandoms' big bang challenges. There's always something happening. So let's see if we can round them up and give them a central home.
  • Current Mood: hopeful
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the 10,000th article coming closer

ratcreature: RL? What RL? RatCreature is a net addict. (what rl?)
[personal profile] ratcreature
Saturday, February 13th, 2010 02:21 pm
Right now there are 9,990 articles, so there probably will be 10,000 very soon, like today or tomorrow, and I thought that the occassion could maybe marked or celebrated somehow?

ETA: I meant by highlighting the eventual 10,000th article on the main page for a while as spotlight, or maybe some sparkly celebratory graphic that announces the milestone in the news and makes it more noticable than just passing the number, or that sort of thing.

Challenge: Those three little words. Or that head smack. Whatever gets the message across. ♥

cin1607: (Default)
[personal profile] cin1607
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 08:48 pm
I've snagged the idea for this week's challenge, since it will roll through Valentine's Day, from [personal profile] thingswithwings. A couple of days ago she made a post full of "Awww!" where she talked about the various ways emotionally stunted OTPs in her fandoms said, "I love you." For example, in due South, you see a lot of "Partners?" "Partners." I'm spending a lot of time in Merlin right now, and their version seems to be "Idiot." "Prat." ♥ ♥

So what is it that you see, in canon or fanon, that makes your heart melt over how obviously in love your favorite pairing is, even if they're not able to admit it? What's that thing that your fandom points out to new people, saying, "See? That thing they did? So. In. Love." Now go to their pairing page and see if it's described, and if not, stick a paragraph in there explaining it. And if your OTP doesn't have its own page, make one!

And post them here, too! I don't know about you, but I could use a week full of "Awww!" :)
  • Current Mood: mellow
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Wait Wait Don't Eat Me

wickedwords: (fandom fanlore)
[personal profile] wickedwords
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 08:37 am
I entered the basic information on this, but I don't remember who first twittered about it on Tuesday. Can someone go update the entry with that information? I also set all the links up as external references, but it might be better to make the footnote-type links.

Challenge: Newsletters!

cin1607: (Default)
[personal profile] cin1607
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 07:27 pm
So I was cruising around Fanlore looking at some of the proposals for challenge topics and hit the Newsletter page and saw that it was a stub. And then I looked at the Newletter Communities subpage and saw that it was a sea of red! There are over 100 newsletters listed on the page, but only a handful actually have any information in the wiki. Most are just empty pages. There are links to the actual newsletters associated with almost all of them, which will be helpful, but we really don't want all of the information about these (for me, at least) absolutely critical fannish resources to be dependent on the permanence of an external link!

This should be an easy fix and there are enough fandoms listed, I'm sure there's something for everyone. Let's create proper pages for these newsletters! Here's a handy template that will create the nifty Community Profile box for you. Start with that, and as for the rest, see what you can discover. Who founded it and when? Who maintains it now? Is it inclusive or exclusive? How are they gathering their links? Does it have any particular quirks or controversies? Is the journal defunct? What happened? And if you're in a fandom and you have a newsletter that's not listed, by all means add it!

Let's see what we can get done this week. Next Wednesday, we'll tackle something new. :)
  • Current Mood: energetic
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I love Fanlore!

sherrold: Sam Carter smiling and happy (happy sg1 sam)
[personal profile] sherrold
Friday, January 29th, 2010 01:37 pm
I'm very excited that there's a new committee and some new attention being paid to it, and I love the new ideas rolling out.

But.

Personally, I'm not really to start talking Fanlore up in my LJ/DW and encouraging other people to play. I don't think it's time to start weekly activities, yet, either.

I think it's foolish to start pulling a bunch of new volunteers in while there are some specific issues that need to be addressed, and specific processes that need to be put in place.  There are questions strewn through administrative talk pages all over the place. Let's get so many of those answered, and a FAQ going, first.

Otherwise, I fear it will be like the first flush of excitement all over again. A lot of enthusiasum, gradually eroded by the lack of clarity and answers.

Though, maybe an early volunteer task is, going through the old admin talk pages and rolling up the big open questions... I might even volunteer to work on that if I thought there was someone to read and start working through the list once we'd compiled it.

2nd early volunteer task, while I'm on a role: make a list of other fannish wikis, and steal (where appropriate) their good ideas (not their articles: cool features of their home pages, ideas for recognizing their volunteers, etc..

suggestions for the front page

[personal profile] mrs_potatohead
Thursday, January 28th, 2010 07:52 pm
Right now, folks coming to Fanlore see a lot of words, text that doesn't change and isn't that interesting.

A new user might poke at the templates along the left side, something not intuitive and not very interesting. Or that user might type something into the search box, navigating the "go" and "find" function AND the dodgy search engine to find something that interests her or him. That's a lot of hurdles for the casual visitor, a person that may be enticed into staying and contributing. :-)

I'd like to see a prominent section on the front page that adds some enticement to go further. Perhaps a box, right up front, that has "quick links" to things like: glossary terms, vidding, conventions, fanzines, fandoms, awards, publishers, fans/people...

Plus, it would be nice to have some visual on the front page, even if it changes just once a month. It doesn't need to be anything with text, even, perhaps a teaser to a page: a convention program, a logo, a cartoon...

I don't know enough about Fanlore to know if these things are possible, but I think something along this line would be a good idea.

MPH

A mini-introduction and a call for brainstorming!

cin1607: (Default)
[personal profile] cin1607
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 09:18 pm
Hey all!

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Cin and I’m new on the wiki committee this year. *waves* I see that back in September, [personal profile] ratcreature made a brilliant suggestion that we post themed challenges to this comm to stir up more regular waves of activity and enthusiasm and updates to the wiki. Plus, it would give us good excuses to go poke our fannish friends and say, “Hey! They’re talking about X on [community profile] fanlore this week. Do you remember that? Let’s create/update a page for that on the wiki!” I love the idea! I intend to grab that ball and run with it!

If you check out the original thread, you’ll see a lot of good suggestions already, but I’d like to spend a little time before I throw out the first official challenge and do some brainstorming. What would you like to see? What would work? What might not? At this point, I’ve seen:

What was your first fandom?

What was your first fandom community?

Focus on conventions.

Focus on holiday exchanges.

Did you come into fandom between (pick a span of dates)? Which fandom? Do you remember X event from then? (“It was May, 1999. Ricky Martin was at the top of the music charts, and The Phantom Menace ate fandom!”)

Focus on specific fandoms, or specific fandom events. (“Hey X-Files slash fans, do you remember the “Kiss heard ‘round the world?”)

I think we can have a lot of fun with this! Start lobbing ideas. I’ll take notes and if we get a bundle, I’ll do a poll and we can hopefully get the first up and running next week. :)
  • Current Mood: excited

loading problems

ratcreature: Woe! RatCreature feels emo. (woe!)
[personal profile] ratcreature
Thursday, January 21st, 2010 09:31 am
The wiki has been loading slow quite often for me, but now it won't load at all, and yesterday evening the same thing happened. Do others have the same problem or is this just me? :(

ETA: Of course now just as I posted it loads again, but I'd be still interested if there is some underlying problems for this repeated non-responsiveness I experience.

I wish tedious things were more automated in the wiki

ratcreature: grumpy (grumpy)
[personal profile] ratcreature
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 10:30 pm
There must be a way to have some kind of bot to do routine maintenance tasks that don't take any thought at all. Like when you make a new fan profile, and the fan is not consistently wikilinked, and the fan is prolific, manually inserting wikilinks to connect the article properly just sucks. Really sucks. I've inserted the same four brackets in dozens and dozens of pages just checking a few names. It took hours and is a task that requires no thought at all. (I'm not talking about difficult things like spotting variances or such just wikilinks that match exactly.) You run a search on the title of the article, go to the result list, check the first article for "is the first instance of this string in double brackets?" if yes, do nothing, if no add the brackets and go to the next result, and do the same over and over and over again. Couldn't there be some kind of maintenance bot checking this for all newly created articles and maybe the old ones in batches or something?
  • Current Mood: disgruntled
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Opinions wanted!

facetofcathy: four equal blocks of purple and orange shades with a rusty orange block centred on top (Default)
[personal profile] facetofcathy
Sunday, January 10th, 2010 08:01 pm
Edited to add, January 11, 2010:  I did some tweaking to the usage section of the page.  I tied the dictionary cite into the part about aca usage, so that it now clearly says that the fan fiction usage is correct in academia and American publishing.  I shamelessly borrowed some phrasing from this conversation.  I found some cites, but there is no cite for the idea that the fan fiction usage denotes aca or noob anywhere other than here, and the talk page itself.  Anyone got one?

Go check it out and edit that page or something else while you're there--if the urge hits, that is. 

------------------------------

As I found out on the OTW news site, fan fiction has hit the dictionary.  There is a discussion on the Fan Fiction page from a while back about usage on the page itself, and about what that usage says about the person using the, er, usage. 

We could really use (had to, sorry) some fresh opinions, and even some cites on this. 

Should the Fan Fiction page use the term fanfiction, or fan fiction?  Does writing it as fan fiction make people think you're a noob or even an acafan in disguise?  Should I have made this a poll?

Opinions here, or on the talk page at Fanlore would be appreciated. 

From the open ID/anonymous thread

melina: Fanlore on a piece of notebook paper (Fanlore)
[personal profile] melina
Thursday, December 10th, 2009 12:13 pm
On behalf of Michelle:

I’ve had a Fanlore account for pretty much all the time the wiki was up, but I’ve found I’m not editing as much as I want to. Or as much as I could. One of the reasons for this is my general laziness. I always plan to edit, but when I actually sit down to do so, my brain goes all blank and I fail to come up with a coherent thought. It’s most frustrating.

The other reason is one I would like to discuss here, because I feel a lot of people are struggling with it. Despite their general interest in the wiki, they don’t work on it. I’ve tried to come up with a few explanations why that is and would like to hear your thoughts on it. Basically, I think Fanlore’s problem is to engage people enough to care, sign up and edit. Only, the "engaging" isn’t happening for various reasons.

* Fanlore is still in beta. That in itself might make potential user reluctant to join in. A beta suggests a site that is unstable, that might just go away without further notice. There’s no stability here, you don’t want to make yourself feel at home in such a place. My question would be: Why is the wiki still in beta? Is it the code? Is it the policies? When will that change? And why is that not communicated somewhere?

* The Front Page. It’s boring. Actually, I think this calls for a capitalization: It’s BORING. The wiki has been up for over a year and nothing has happened on the front page. Okay, the link to the DW Comm was added, but that’s hardly a groundbreaking thing. And a very rudimentary news page was added as well, but it doesn’t actually give you any useful info. What about the policy change for fanwork titles? Why did that not go up there? Have you looked at a random wiki lately? Have you seen what’s going on on their front pages? Article of the day, author of the day, this day in history. There is *so* much you could do with a front page, even when a wiki is small. Fandom of the Day. Fannish Person of the Day. Author of the Day. And yet Fanlore totally disregards this opportunity. Why?

* In lieu with the front page is the problem of giving visitors the chance to discover content. A good front page would make that easier. It would give you lots of interesting links to click and in the best of possible worlds you would just dig yourself deeper and deeper into the wiki. Instead, the only way to discover content at the moment is by search, by recent changes and by random page.

* Communication. I think it isn’t happening enough. Or if it’s happening, it’s happening in the wrong places. The wiki committee members should be easier to find (at the moment: front page: beta: committee) and it should be made clear what the committee actually does. The OTW newsletters are kind of vague in that regard. I’m assuming the committee is doing something worthwile, but I have no facts to back that up.

* Users offer ideas, everyone likes them and still nothing happens. As evidenced here (http://fanlore.dreamwidth.org/7275.html). This conversation is from September and has had no visible results. I do think this user is hitting the target. The wiki needs something like "Add you favourite author day" or "Fill out a stub week". It would help give the wiki and the users a focus.

* I've had the same experience on a conversation leading nowehere on the issue page, where I asked about policies for images (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore_talk:Issues). The wiki is in desperate need of more eyecandy and I’m convinced it would help to give people a guideline where to put them. "We’re working on it", was the reply. That was in April.

* A minor problem with the DW comm: It would be helpful to see right away who is actually associated with the wiki. It’s nice that discussion happens there, but it would be good to know whether the discussion is happening with another user, with a gardener or with an admin.

Michelle
http://michelle.fancrone.net
http://fanlore.org/wiki/User:Michelle

Categories: this week's theme, apparently

aethel: (spock - cheer up)
[personal profile] aethel
Monday, December 7th, 2009 04:05 pm
[personal profile] msilverstar posted a while back about drafting a guide for categories, since there isn't one yet. Meanwhile, I've been running around the wiki, adding and removing categories according to my own interpretation of what they mean. But sometimes I just have no clue.

So! I thought I would collect my thoughts in one place and see what other people think. Here are a few of my working definitions of categories, along with questions and hair-pulling:

Discussion - articles about the art of fannish discussion (e.g. glossary terms like "meta"), plus articles about discussion forums (newsgroups, lj comms, e-lists, etc.). This one had me pulling my hair out for MONTHS. Do you include the discussion theme articles like "Misogyny in Fandom"--that don't take place just once, but over and over and over--in this category? I removed this type of article from the category, but only based on my own gut feeling.

Debate - articles about particular discussions of a controversial nature. All-out flamewars not based on any particular theme listed in the debate category would fall under Fandom Occurrences instead (although several pages count as both an occurrence and a debate).

Fiction Writing - all fanfiction and many zine articles, all e-lists/newsgroups/lj comms where fic is posted, plus the article called "Fan Fiction" and other glossary terms related to the creation and enjoyment of fic.

Non-fiction Writing - any article about the art of fannish non-fiction writing generally (e.g. glossary terms) AND any article describing a particular piece of non-fiction. Articles about wikis or discussion forums aren't currently assigned this category, so should we clarify that "Non-fiction Writing" applies to discrete pieces written by one or a limited number of fans? And should it be applied to non-wiki websites that are canon/fandom resources (see Yoxley Old Place and Argo and Bliss)?

ANOTHER QUESTION: where do articles about rec pages go? Recommendations and reviews are themselves non-fiction, but are *about* fiction.

Print Media and Zines are fairly straightforward, but are there any articles in "Print Media" that are not also "zines"? Convention program(me)s? What else? I suspect these articles will drown in the sea of zines if we don't add another category for them.

Offline Spaces - should this category be applied to conventions? Most (although not all: see out-of-con.txt) conventions are offline spaces, yet they are not listed here. What say you? (ETA: Actually, some conventions are here.)

Fan Activities vs. Fan Communities - Lots of articles have both of these categories and nothing else. To me, this suggests a need for another subcategory. An additional problem is that almost any fanac could be labeled a community or vice versa: for any fanac, it takes a group of people to do it or appreciate it or use it or talk about it. Fan communities are all based on a shared activity by definition! We need to draw the line somewhere, or these categories will be useless. When someone looks at the category page for fan communities, which articles do we want them to see?
Tags:

source text sub-categories

ratcreature: RL? What RL? RatCreature is a net addict. (what rl?)
[personal profile] ratcreature
Sunday, December 6th, 2009 03:52 pm
There are media missing in the source text categories. I mentioned this a while ago on a category talk page, but no discussion or category expansion with more media types followed, and I just noticed again when I added a fandom. Currently the options are "Anime", "Books & Literature", "Cartoons", "Comics", "Film", "Games", "Manga", "Music", "Real People" and "Television".

There is no category for stage productions like musicals, plays and such, something I noticed when creating a stub for Phantom of the Opera, which admittedly also was a novel, and there are films, but the musical version is rather prominent in its fandom. And I guess there could be the view that musicals could fit under "music" and plays under "literature" with no need for extra categories, but the former is not quite the same as fandom for bands and such, and not only music and the latter isn't quite like book fandoms, so having some sort of stage option would be nice, IMO. Especially if we make distinctions like "comics" and "manga" and "cartoons" and "anime" to acknowledge differences between western and Japanese incarnations of the same medium, so the categories are not minimized in number by design. Also there is no radio category either, and there are fandoms with audio play incarnations, as I noticed for The Tomorrow People. I added "audio" as category, but that is not actually a subcategory of fandom by source text.
Tags: