Wikiwrimo press?

Day Two word count: 25,157 words.

Things of note: I am currently on page six of the NaNoWriMo author word count list. That is, if you search for all the authors and sort by word count, I’m currently on page six. This won’t last for long, though, so I need to get myself in gear to maintain this, or better yet, write my way to page five.

But today I’m here to talk about Wikiwrimo. Over the past month there have been several spikes of activity, mostly when the URL appeared on NaNo’s Twitter stream (which has happened three times), the NaNoWordSprints Twitter account (quite a few times for the word war article), and the first page of a forum post that was featured in the Procrastination Station.

That was nothing compared to the spike on October thirty-first. The NaNoWriMo website was slow and continued to be slow over the next two days thanks to being featured everywhere on the Internet, including being the number one trending topic on Twitter. I tweeted about Wikiwrimo asking what needed to be there, the fine folks at NaNo retweeted it, and the spike in my site stats that resulted makes the rest of the month look empty in comparison. Okay, there’s a small spike, but it looks so lonely.

Wikiwrimo’s existence is starting to get recognized, though. A bitter author for the Salon wrote an anti-NaNoWriMo article arguing that people shouldn’t do NaNoWriMo because there need to be more readers out there. She fails to see that the intersection of the group of readers and the group of writers is nonempty; that is, there are people who are readers and writers. In fact, the threads on the forums about books are extremely popular. But this part stuck out:

In that spirit, NaNoWriMo has spawned countless tutorials, tip lists, FAQs, wikis and Twitter feeds, all designed to cheer the contestants on to their own personal finish line.

If you read that sentence carefully you’d notice the mention of a wiki. If she did her research for this article, she’d know that NaNoWriMo did in fact inspire a wiki. Even if I disagree with just about everything in this article, I’m amused at the mention of a wiki in it, even if it’s not linked. Maybe people will start looking for it.

The second part of Wikiwrimo press comes from an article I was quoted in. North Carolina State University’s Technician featured an article on NaNo, and a friend who attends passed along an email requesting a quote to me. Yes, that article has my real name in it. Yes, I am amused at being the community manager at Wikiwrimo because that’s actually a non-writing dream job of mine. Of course, I could call myself anything at Wikiwrimo: founder, administrator, tech person, grand poobah, and it’d all be true. I couldn’t call myself a dictator, though. Wikiwrimo is anything but a dictatorship despite any executive decisions I make.

This means it’s time to make a Wikiwrimo press page, known as “sites besides NaNoWriMo that acknowledge Wikiwrimo’s existence.”