I'm forwarding this (below) on behalf of the Fanlore community, which is seeking some volunteer help. Fanlore is an important archive for the speculative fiction community. I'd appreciate it if someone could take a few hours to help them with their current needs, and I'd be delighted if you could mentor some of their volunteers so they could fix their own long-term needs.
-- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation Fanlore (fanlore.org) is a wiki about fan culture and history that can be edited by anyone who registers. The wiki is a volunteer project of the Organization for Transformative Works (transformativeworks.org). It's a few years old now, and in need of advice on the technical front. We're looking for someone who, basically, knows enough about MediaWiki and wiki spam protection to know what Fanlore needs. We need a technical liaison whose role would be to advise us (the OTW's wiki committee) on what improvements are needed, and which software/extensions we need to make those improvements. Someone with knowledge about MediaWiki skins would be ideal. Our current default skin, WordPress, has an unfortunate bug that prevents image centering, and the skin is deprecated or soon-to-be deprecated in the most recent versions of MediaWiki. We'll need to switch skins eventually, but before we can do that, we need to redesign the infobox templates because those were originally designed mainly to work with the default skin. We already have people with knowledge of CSS and HTML, but no one with advanced knowledge of wiki templates. In addition to our current needs, long-term maintenance of the wiki also involves investigating (rare) bug reports from users. The technical liaison would investigate the bugs and determine whether they can be fixed, how to fix them, and who can fix them. We're currently in the testing phase for a MediaWiki upgrade, but it's been plagued with various technical and personnel availability issues and isn't going very quickly. The MediaWiki upgrade will theoretically help our spam problem because better tools are compatible only with the more recent versions. In the meantime, we're also testing recaptcha and will use that to prevent spambots from signing up. However, recaptcha isn't our favorite, and we're hoping we can revisit our spam solutions once we upgrade MediaWiki. Anyone who's interested in advising us on how to whip Fanlore's MediaWiki installation into shape, please mail [email protected] with any questions and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Looking forward to hearing from you, The OTW wiki committee _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
