anotherwiki

So, I'm considering the structure of information on AnOtherWiki and I think making some changes to existing categories might make it easier for people to find things.

Right now, we have separate categories for "Blogs" (currently only communities, not personal blogs), "Mailing lists", "Forums", and "Social Networking Groups". I'm thinking that it may be better to roll all of these together into one larger category: "Discussion Groups".

Subcategories would continue to organize these into the various types of Discussion Group, all the way down to the specific providers such as Facebook, LiveJournal, Google Groups, etc. This is a similar approach to how "Chats" have been addressed on the wiki, and would focus more on the function of the group - hosting discussions - than on the specific medium being used. What do people think? Would that be less confusing? More? About the same? It's a big change and I'd like some feedback before I decide whether or not to implement it.

I'm also considering getting rid of the category "Community Resource" as it is currently poorly defined and I think it might be better to focus on specific functionality the sites provide.

And as long as we're on the topic, are there any major categories for resources that we're currently missing?

Current Mood: busy

jarandhel

A few updates for AnOtherWiki this month:

We've moved to a new webhost!
We've upgraded from MediaWiki 1.23 to 1.25!
We've put some new features in place behind the scenes to deal with malicious users and spammers.
We've reduced the Captcha questions on signup and page edit for users who have not confirmed their email address to just one question: what is the name of this wiki? This was done to help users who may not be as familiar with the community trivia necessary to answer our old Captcha questions.

Current Mood: accomplished

jarandhel

As I mentioned in my last post, I've gone ahead and updated the template for upcoming community events on AnOtherWiki. It has a bit nicer and more modern look to it, and requires a bit less special handling to get images and such to show up properly in it. All of the new features are implemented in it, and appear to be working fine. It will also make editing the template in the future a bit easier, as it makes use of another template to dynamically generate infoboxes. As always, if anyone encounters any bugs or unexpected behavior with this change, please let me know.

Current Mood: accomplished

jarandhel

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been doing some work on enhancing the Upcoming Community Events listing over on AnOtherWiki. It took a bit of late-night hacking followed by some early morning debugging, but I'm pleased to say that I've finished another round of updates and it looks like we have automatic creation of RSS feeds and iCal feeds (the latter of which have automatic tinyurls so they are compatible with google calendar) working now. I can't say there won't be any bugs going forward, I've already encountered one with long event names that's been fixed, but if you run into any let me know and I'll fix them as quickly as possible. The new feeds show up as part of the infobox which is created automatically for all events made using the event form.

In the next few days I'll probably also update the infobox template to make it a little fancier/more modern looking.

Current Mood: accomplished

jarandhel

A little change for upcoming community events over on AnOtherWiki that I think is going to be very interesting and useful for everyone: you can now subscribe to upcoming events in iCal, Google Calendar, or other programs which accept iCal feeds using this url.

This is step one. Step two is getting each individual event its own feed so that people can subscribe to just the events which are local to them and which they are interested in. That's going to take a bit more planning, since at this time Google Calendar can't work with the long urls by which Semantic Mediawiki's iCal export is generated and there is no easy way to automate the use of tinyurl for each new event. It may simply need to be done manually. I've already set up one for the Northern Virginia Otherkin Meetup as a test, and it's working perfectly, but I'm exploring options to see if we can automate it somehow before doing them all by hand.

The iCal export only covers events happening in the next 60 days at this time. If you know of any community events happening in that time period which don't appear on it, please let me know. Or, better yet, add them to the wiki yourself! They'll be added to the events calendar and list of upcoming community events automatically.

jarandhel

Seeking volunteers to help maintain and update AnOtherWiki. It's a big job, and a wiki really isn't meant for one person to edit. Ideally, I would like to build a core group of editors working steadily to grow and improve the wiki. Over time, as we get more users and activity, this may evolve into an co-mod role for those with a history of valuable contribution to the wiki.

For those who don't already know, AnOtherWiki is a free encyclopedia written by, for, and about the otherkin, therian, draconity, and real vampire communities. It also contains information about other related communities which have had significant overlap with ours, such as the multiplicity community, the soulbonding community, and the psionics community. And more information is being added virtually every day. We currently have over 800 articles, and are always seeking new information about websites or people in the community, gathers, chatrooms, jargon, or anything else of general community interest. We also take the view that a community is only as good as the collective memory it has, so we're particularly interested in information about our community's history and shared culture. Please join us, and help us grow.

To get started, sign up here.

Current Mood: busy

jarandhel

I'm still giving some thought to the creation of Portals, ala Wikipedia, to aid in navigation on AnOtherWiki. I can see how it might be useful to have some sort of guide to a subject, rather than just dropping someone off in a category and expecting them to find their own way around. But looking at the actual Portals that have been implemented on Wikipedia, I'm not sure they actually accomplish that very well. They're pretty much just topical reproductions of the Main Page.

If we did decide to use Portals as guides to the subjects on AnOtherWiki, I think we'd have to do it somewhat differently. More like a travel guide, perhaps, or a WikiProject but still geared towards readers as well as contributors. But doing so also opens up its own dangers - it may be difficult to write guides to broad subjects in the otherkin community without potentially violating the Objective point of view policy.

And, on the other hand, WikiFur seems to function fairly well using just categories without any sort of Portal, Project, or Guide. And any effort we dedicate to making a Portal or Guide is effort that's being taken away from writing new articles, creating new categories, etc.

Yeah, still no firm decisions yet. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Current Mood: contemplative

jarandhel

Trying a new layout for the main page that gives higher placement to the Otherkin News and Upcoming Events sections. It also reduces whitespace (well, bluespace in this case). I'm not 100% sold on it just yet, but I think it might be better than what we had before. Possibly with a few more stylistic tweaks.

It's been suggested that usability may be further improved by replacing the current category links on the main page with portals, as found on Wikipedia. Making and maintaining them would be a lot of additional work, and I'd have to work out exactly what topics it would be most useful to have portals for, so I haven't started on that yet but it's definitely under considerations. Suggestions/alternatives are of course welcome.

Unfortunatly we've lost power here and I'm not sure when it will come back up. Connected via my phone and the wonders of tethering right now. So that's it for the moment.

Current Mood: busy

jarandhel

Continuing the effort to make things on the wiki more accessible for newcomers, I've installed an extension that will post the following greeting on new user's talk pages when their accounts are first created:

"Hello, [UserName]! Welcome to AnOtherWiki! I'm Jarandhel Dreamsinger, the admin here, and I hope you enjoy what you've seen so far. There are some resources to help get you started at the community portal. If you have any questions feel free to start a new topic on my talk page, or at the help desk, or come chat with folks in the IRC channel. Actually, do that last one even if you don't have any questions, we love to meet new people! *grins*
-- Jarandhel (talk) [Datestamp]"

I've also started an effort to get users to spread the word about us. We're no good to the community if no one is aware of our existence, and the more editors we have adding new content the more useful we can be. I'll also be trying to spread the word more myself, on other forums, in the near future. Webweaving is important, and it's something I think gets neglected too much in the community today.

In that spirit, I've also added a list of new users to the bottom of the community portal to help recognize and showcase our newest editors. The links there go directly to their user talk pages, so it'll be easier for all of us to welcome them to our community and see how they're doing. Right now the order of that list is a little messed up because of the last batch of manual "Welcome to AnOtherWiki" notices I sent out - I didn't take care to do the oldest ones first - but now that welcoming is automated the issue should correct itself.

Current Mood: pleased

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Page generated Jul. 23rd, 2025 11:35 am

A free encyclopedia by, for, and about the otherkin community.

Entries tagged with real vampires

Possible Structural Change

Updates!

Upcoming Community Events: Part 3

Upcoming Community Events: Part 2

Upcoming Community Events

Seeking Volunteers for AnOtherWiki

Pondering Portals

New Layout & Portals, Possibly?

Accessibility, Webweaving, and User Recognition

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January 2022

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