Forum:Operation Singing Telegram

Jonny Manz has intimated that he wants to contact Equestria Daily and ask them to mention the wiki again. I support that, but we should remember that the operative word is "again". There are a number of possible reasons why the last time only gave us a little bit of a boost, activity-wise:


 * 1) There is a limited pool of people both able (knowledge-wise) and willing (motivation-wise) to contribute to a Fan labor wiki.
 * 2) The last mention was very short and buried in a Nightly Roundup.
 * 3) It was also somewhat misleadingly worded, possibly unintentionally giving people who didn't read the comments the wrong impression.
 * 4) Equestria Daily doesn't reach the kind of people who would want to contribute.
 * 5) Our rules are too tough / standards are too high.
 * 6) Adding content is too difficult.
 * 7) The wiki back then gave the impression of being unfinished and possibly not worth the effort.
 * 8) Unregistered users see ads (if they don't have content-blockers installed), and ads drive people away.
 * 9) There weren't enough incentives to contribute.

What can be done about it? --Tulipclaymore 19:41, March 17, 2012 (UTC)
 * 1) If 1) is true, and it very well might be, there is nothing to do. No amount of promotion will increase traffic and (more importantly) participation, at least not significantly. That's just how it is.
 * 2) If Petirep read this, he could confirm that there's a world of difference between Nightly Roundups and regular posts in terms of raising awareness. I think it would be wise if Jonny were to try to politely suggest to Sethisto (or whichever one of the other editors replies) to not dump it in the Roundup (if they agree to post it at all, since they can rightly say they've already done so).
 * 3) Sethisto likes his copypastes. Let's give him one, a brief summary of what the wiki is, who it is for, and what it can do for the fandom. Such a description could also help with 2).
 * 4) I kind of doubt that, given the size of the site. But still, it can't hurt to also reach out to other news blogs, some of the bigger forums, reddit, and contact the operators of the major fanfic repositories. I don't want to oversell the value a wiki entry has as a promotional tool for writers, and I also don't want writers to primarily use it that way (because that kind of attitude can lead to incomplete, "book blurby" summaries). But I've read several comments now of people saying "I found this story via the Fan Labor Wiki". This is something we can point to as to why it might be a good idea for authors to encourage their fans to come here.
 * 5) I don't really see how this criticism can possibly be alleviated without compromising the integrity of the site as a proper wiki (as opposed to the kind of weird blog/advertising space/self-esteem-raiser hybrid many other fandom wikis are used as). To be honest, I sometimes think what little we have in the way of restrictions is a little too lax...
 * 6) We're in the process of working on that, with the Guides/preformatted pages. Those very same steps are also likely to alienate and annoy users who already have problem 5), though, since they're not likely to want to be told what to do. We can only try our best to keep the guides from being too patronising ot too much of a slog to read.
 * 7) I think we've come quite a long way since then, and that's with only a handful of regular contributors. For comparison, this was all of the content at the time. The new front page should also help. I'm still unhappy about the state of some of the main character articles, though; Rarity and Applejack in particular.
 * 8) Nothing we can do about that.
 * 9) I guess we could mention Badges on the Community Corner? We can also add new ones (e.g. "X edits on character pages"), but there's no point in doing the latter until traffic picks up.