Categories
Uncategorized

Happy birthday, Wikiwrimo

Somewhere between a year and a half and two years ago the idea of a NaNoWriMo wiki popped into my mind. I thought of all the newbies who had questions about NaNo that didn’t show up in the FAQ and the things that only Wrimos would know about and thought of how great it would be if there were a place where all these questions would be answered. At the time I was still struggling to figure out WordPress, so I thought running a wiki that someone else would be using would be outside my skill set, even though I had plenty of time on my hands to launch the thing.

So I put it off. And put it off. And put it off some more.

Around June last year I told myself, “You know what? No one else is going to do this, even though I’ve already voiced my desire to build such a thing.” So I set aside a weekend to figure out MediaWiki and what I’d need to know to get started and got to work on what is now Wikiwrimo. MediaWiki turned out to be much easier to configure than I thought thanks to all the documentation out there; for comparison purposes, I broke WordPress more often than MediaWiki, and I broke MediaWiki in a more than minor way only once.

Right now Wikiwrimo stands at 676 total pages, which includes uploaded files, talk pages, and redirects. That number will likely go significantly up before NaNo season gets here because of some big projects I have up my sleeve. Wikiwrimo’s pages have been viewed 106,543 times in the past year and edited 1,715 times. According to Google Analytics, traffic is up almost 90% over the past month, something I can thank Camp NaNoWriMo for if the searches that bring visitors to Wikiwrimo are any indicator.

What’s coming up for Wikiwrimo? Lots of things! I can think of lots of pages off the top of my head that aren’t complete or may never be complete. (Lists, I’m looking at you.) Then there’s the very long list of wanted articles that still needs to be written, along with at least one huge project up my sleeve whose implementation I hope to have figured out and ready for human editing by NaNo season.

Here’s to another year of Wikiwrimo!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.