Fanlore:News/2010
December 16, 2010
November 16, 2010
A Thousand Ships challenge has closed, and a new challenge has been posted: First Vid. Start a page about the first vid or AMV you ever saw, the one that made you want to see more of them!
November 4, 2010
Both the Image Policy and the Copyright page have been revised; please check out the discussion on the dreamwidth community. User:Awils1 has also added a fancy hack to the image summary template that generates a standard copyright statement when you type "CC", "Fair", or "Permission" into the copyright field: try it out! Finally, Fanlore's latest challenge is a thousand ships.
October 21, 2010
A new version of the Image Policy has been released for comment, along with a set of image templates. We welcome questions, comments, and feedback on the policy and on the image templates. Please check out the discussion on the dreamwidth community.
October 19, 2010
A Lot of Character challenge: Pick a favorite character. Make a list of the three or four fanworks which most accurately capture what you love about that character. Then add those fanworks to the page about that character (or, if there isn’t a page yet, start one, and add those fanworks to the new page you’ve just stubbed out.) Then invite your friends to play along, and see what fanworks they add to those pages to complement the ones you thought of!
October 5, 2010
A new floating category, Tropes & Genres, has been created. You can find it under the Browse heading on the sidebar. Check it out!
September 24, 2010
First Fandom Challenge
What was your first fandom? If it already has a page in Fanlore, go add something -- even if it's just a snip of memory ("[Your_name_here] remembers XYZ...") or a link to a notable fanwork. If it doesn't yet have a page, stub one out! Remember to focus on the fandom, not on canon. And this isn't just for live-action or fiction fandoms -- if your first fandom was anime or RPF or something else entirely, we want those pages, too!
September 18, 2010
By request, we've updated the Capitalization policy for page titles to reflect actual usage on the wiki. The update has been posted for comment on the dreamwidth community.
September 15, 2010
We've created a new Intro to Fanlore FAQ. It is a summary of some existing policies that allows new editors to quickly get a sense of how Fanlore works. We've put it out for public comment on the Dreamwidth Community. Please take a look and comment.
September 9, 2010
New challenge: Profile-A-Comm
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: pick a community that you belong to and create a page for it on Fanlore. You can use the community template to fill in the basic information; then the fun part, writing about the community and why it’s nifty keen. What are conversations like? Is it active or are posts sporadic? Has it changed over time? Tell us about it! This challenge will run for roughly two weeks.
August 31, 2010
We have updated the Administrators page and set out a list of tasks to clarify their role. Please take a look at the changes and add your feedback to the dreamwidth community discussion post. We are also looking for volunteers to serve as Gardeners and Admins.
August 27, 2010
We've returned to posting challenges to the Fanlore community on dreamwidth. The current challenge is the Pink Sparkly Hearts Challenge, which invites you to make a page about the first fanwork you fell in love with. Fic, vid, fanart, filk, whatever you want to draw pink sparkly hearts around! The next challenge will go live on or around September 5.
July 1, 2010
Some questions have been raised about how to structure the categories for some particularly complex fandoms, and the wiki committee has come up with solutions in the cases of CSI and LOTR: Each CSI show now has its own subcategory under the main CSI cat, and Tolkien has been created to be the parent category for The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion. Please let us know if you have questions about (or solutions for) what category to use for any other fandoms.
June 29, 2010
On the menu to your left under Browse you'll now find a link to the Wish List. This is a working list of tasks (large or small) that need doing on Fanlore, so if you're cruising by with some editing or writing time on your hands and aren't sure where to start, just check the list and see what appeals.
June 25, 2010
Wiki Committee Monthly Report for June
Implementation of the Fandom as Category policy is finally winding down, with only a few more small fandoms left that need categories. We've also added two new categories, Poetry and Newsgroups, based on specific feedback. We continue to update the help pages and the Image policy is still in the hands of the OTW's Legal committee. Several members of the committee held a panel at CON.TXT this past weekend with the goal of encouraging more participation in Fanlore.
May 19, 2010
The wiki committee has decided to drop the previous policy of adding a page to not just the most specific category, but to every parent category in the hierarchy above that child category. Previously, a page on fanfiction would have been categorized under "Fan Activities" as well as "Fiction Writing". However, as users have pointed out, adding pages to their parent and grandparent categories has resulted in top-level categories that are too heavily populated to be useful for browsing. The new procedure is to add pages only to the most specific categories that fit and not to their parent categories. For example, a fanzine page would get the "Fanworks," "Zines," and "Fiction Writing" categories, but not the "Fan Activities" or "Print Media" categories.
Because categories are automatically included with some templates, the templates have been edited so that they comply with the changes.
An exception to the new rule: We want to keep main fandom pages in the "Fandom by Source Text" category (where they are now) until we've finished the fandom category project.
May 12, 2010
We've posted some of our decisions about implementation of the fandom category policy to the Dreamwidth Community. You can find the post here.
May 2, 2010
Wiki Committee Monthly Report for April
Wiki has had a very busy month! As most people already know, the Wiki committee welcomed new member Aethel~, who has been doing amazing work with our help pages. We have posted two new policies. The Fandoms as Category Policy is now final, and we have begun the process of creating the new categories and links to go along with that. The Image Policy has been posted as a draft on the wiki and on the Fanlore Dreamwidth community for comments for the last week. We’ve received a ton of good feedback on the policy and it’s now headed back to the drawing board for revisions based on that feedback.
April 23, 2010
We have posted the draft copy of our new Image Policy for review. \o/ Because of the constraints of the wiki, the discussion is being held on the Fanlore Dreamwidth community. Please do let us know what you think. We would particularly like input on how you would define "high res" and "low res" images for Fanlore. We will pull the draft for revision based on comments on April 30th.
April 21, 2010
The revised draft of the Fandom as Category policy change has been posted to the wiki. We invite discussion on it at the Dreamwidth community here. There will be a post directing people to that site in OTW News as well as an announce on the community.
Also:
We posted a new challenge on the Fanlore community at Dreamwidth last night. Our goal is to flesh out the Doctor Who pages on Fanlore. The online fandom and fanfic subpages particularly are crying for details. What about the Rose wars? How about Donna? We have a pattern for knitting the scarf, but not one for knitting the adipose that was so popular at the art auction at CON.TXT a couple of years ago. Any notable vids? How did the tone of the fanfic change while the 10th Doctor was in the midst of his downward spiral of manpain?
There's lot we can do with these pages, both Old School Who fans and New Who fans alike, so let's play with this for a couple of weeks. Pick an area that strikes your fancy and have at it! :)
April 20, 2010
Just a quick note to say that we've added a few requested categories — Doujinshi, Characters, Pairings, and Zine Publishers — and updated the respective templates with these categories. Meanwhile, the "Fan Docos" category has been replaced with "Fan Documentaries" by request. The policy on fandom categories is forthcoming.
April 16, 2010
Last month one of our members had to step down for RL work reasons. We're pleased to announce that Aethel has joined the wiki committee to fill the vacancy.
We're delighted to have her!
March 20, 2010
We've posted the Fandoms as Category policy change to the policies section of Fanlore. We'd like to open it up for comment. You can find it here.
We, the wiki committee, don't work in a vacuum and would like your input on this. If possible, We'd like to have the discussion here on Dreamwidth. The entry for that is here. It's easy to answer questions and respond to comments. If discussion becomes unwieldy, we can schedule a chat in the Fanlore chat room.
This is only the first of several policies we're working on and are planning to put out for comment in the next few months. So, let us know what you think.
March 14, 2010
A quick note to let everyone know that the Sphinx search engine has been installed at Fanlore and is ready for use.
If you have any issues send a message to the wiki committee at wiki [at] transformativeworks [dot] org.
Thanks to everyone who helped out with the testing! We appreciate it!
March 10, 2010
Fanlore will be down on Sunday 3/14/2010 from 3:00pm Eastern Standard Time (UTC -5) to 4:00pm EST to install and test the Spinx search engine extension.
The wiki committee will be testing it after the install, basically just running a few searches. If anyone is around and wants to help out, you can join us in the Fanlore chat room at about 3:30pm EST to run a few searches and make sure that everything works right.
March 4, 2010
We've now topped 100,000 edits! *\o/*
We're not certain, but chances are good that the 100,000th edit was either on the Chromatic Vision page or the PWP page.
February 27, 2010
Wiki Committee Monthly Report
The Wiki Committee is mostly new this year. Our Chair, Meri, is our only member who served the entirety of last year. Christy joined last summer and Cin1607, 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 Dreamwidth 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.
February 15, 2010
We've hit 10,000 articles!!! And we're sneaking up on 100,000 edits, so that's the new number to watch. *\o/*
February 11, 2010
We posted a new challenge on the Fanlore community at Dreamwidth last night. Since this one will run through Valentine's Day, we're focusing on love, or more specifically, those phrases or gestures from our emotionally stunted OTPs that have become the accepted shorthand for "I love you."
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!
February 4, 2010
We posted a challenge on the Fanlore community at Dreamwidth last night to build on to the Newsletter stub on the wiki and also to create as many proper pages for the Newsletter Communities on the subpage as possible. Most of the fandom newsletters listed there only have an external link to their actual site, and we want to be sure their stories are preserved on Fanlore. There are over 100 fandoms and their newsletters listed. Let's see how many pages we can create in a week!