Dear Fanlore readers, editors, and gardeners,

The 2012 OTW term has officially ended, and we wanted to take the opportunity to say THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to Fanlore this year, talked about it with friends, offered encouragement, and made this site great. Fanlore has over 22,000 articles today; that's over 6,000 more than in July 2011, from when we have comparison data. You are all fantastic. Please go and take a look at all the great content our editors added this year!

Some things the Wiki committee did this year to help:

• upgraded MediaWiki
• fought spambots
• created new categories, templates, and infoboxes
• dealt with identity protection and fair use concerns

Before some of us go on holidays, a few updates on things:

• MediaWiki upgrade: You might have noticed some changes since we had to revert back to the default skin after the upgrade to another version of MediaWiki. We hope to be able to come closer to our old design, but with term break and the holidays coming it's difficult to say when that will be. We are confident that the current design of Fanlore is good enough for now, but please tell us if you encounter any problems and we'll try to fix it.
• Forums: We were planning to open a Fanlore forum this term – we already have the basic set-up – but the question of how, and who, to moderate it has delayed the process considerably. We will tackle this question again next term, hopefully with more success.
• Categories: We are aware that there are several open proposals regarding categories at the moment. We are sorry that we didn't have the energy to follow up on all of them. We definitely haven't overlooked them, and these are also on next term's agenda.
• Surveys: We don't know yet when we'll receive the results of the surveys from the Survey committee and from the Strategic Planning committee, but we will of course make them public when possible.

We are sorry to say that aethel, our Chair, will leave the committee next term. We are grateful for all her work and happy that she's staying on as a gardener and editor of Fanlore. Tiyire will take over as Chair of the committee.

As you can see, we already have several open projects to finish for next term. With the help of Volunteers & Recruiting we will also revise our recruitment process, our training for newcomers, and our internal documentation and procedures. This might take some time, but it is very important to ensure that Wiki can keep up with the work, and we hope that you will be patient with us while we sort out these internal matters. That said, we are optimistic that we will become even more efficient next term as a result.

If you're interested in helping us keep Fanlore running and expanding, please consider volunteering for Wiki next term! We will post more detailed explanations before recruiting opens again.

In short: THANK YOU for making Fanlore as fantastic as it is! <3

Mirrored from an original post at Fanlore news.

Another OTW term is ending and all of our volunteers accomplished many great things this year working on Fanlore. To celebrate, the Wiki Committee is inviting you to join a Fanlore editing chat on December 16, 1300-1700 UTC in the Fanlore chat room (What time is that where I live?). Hang out and talk with other editors and volunteers while writing about your favorite new and old fandoms!

Wiki staffers will be present to answer any questions about Fanlore editing you might have and would be happy to see you there!

While fans are welcome to edit Fanlore at any time of the year, this month the Wiki Committee is organizing a special event. Stub September is a challenge for anyone, newcomers and seasoned Fanlore editors alike, 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 to find a page where you know something about the topic, 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 of any examples, just add them to the page.

Feel free to post links to the articles you work on and let others know about the project! If you haven't yet tried your hand at writing something for Fanlore, Stub September is a good month to add more information to existing Fanlore articles without having to start your own page from scratch. And you might also find out -- it's fun!

If you have questions about Fanlore, or how to get started you can contact the Wiki Committee or stop by their Dreamwidth account.

The Wiki committee is pleased to announce the opening of a permanent chat room for the Fanlore community. You don't need to be a member of OTW to get into the room. It's open to everyone and can be accessed from the Main Page of Fanlore. Best of all, it's open 24 X 7, so it's always there for you to come in and chat about edits and articles with other fans at any time, day or night.

FYI -- There will be a log of the chats kept, but it will be purged on a periodic basis.

Other cool things we've done recently include the Fanlore Live panel at Escapade. We invited several fans who have been around a long time (think decades rather than a few years) to talk to us about how they got into fandom. We have our notes put up here. Check it out.

And be sure to watch this space for more information on participating in our Oral Histories.

--The Wiki Committee: Rache, Melina, Anatsuno, Betty, Meri