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Now, a NaNo archivist geek moment thanks to the Wayback Machine

One of the challenges of running Wikiwrimo is researching all the material that happened in past years. The NaNoWriMo website has a site archive, but the archive isn’t complete due to some of the archives being lost and the most recent years being missing. The Wayback Machine at archive.org wasn’t much help either, for the archive was way behind and didn’t have much to offer in the past few years from NaNo.

Until now.

I was looking up the 2009 article featuring YWP forum moderator Cylithria Dubois on the NaNo front page and couldn’t find it online thanks to the site wipe. (Even though what you see gets wiped every year, like the forums, the news archives generally remain. However, this year almost everything apparently got wiped in the transfer to Ruby on Rails.) Since this was an important citation for the article, I turned to the Wayback Machine even though I knew the archive might not work. And then it did. So I tried for the main NaNo website, and sure enough, there’s a NaNo page from June. Hooray! This will make researching for Wikiwrimo so much easier. There are even pages (though I don’t know how many since I haven’t clicked too thoroughly) for the lost year of 2004.

Researching things for Wikiwrimo just got so much easier.

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Wikiwrimo has finally grown up

Soon after the new NaNoWriMo site launched last night, I found myself on there, refreshing intermittently while doing other things.

A proper review of the site is in the works for the next day or two. I have to give the new site time to get some of the old features back.

But there’s one very big thing from the relaunch.

Wikiwrimo is the very first site featured in the Procrastination Station… meaning it’s on the front page of NaNoWriMo right now.

Oh. My. Baty. Threads I’ve started have been featured there, but never a website I built. Then again, Wikiwrimo is the first NaNo-related site I’ve built. Still, seeing it on the front page of NaNo is ridiculously awesome. I BUILT that site, after all. My Wikiwrimo is all grown up.

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Wikiwrimo is more open than ever

I love being a geek, but there’s one problem with it. The problem is that I’m up at 3am because I was fixing geeky things. Here the geeky things were things on the Wikiwrimo site, hammering them into shape before Nano season really gets going. This is particularly important as one huge feature has been broken for months and I never noticed. Oops.

Which brings me to the big thing. You can now just sign up and edit! Just create an account and start editing the wiki. We’ll see how much spam the site gets as a result, but I do have a few measures in place to prevent some of it with more ideas in case the spam gets bad. The big weapons haven’t been brought out yet.

So get to editing! And especially find your region and write about it. I can’t write about all the regions, and you know yours better than I do. Even a few sentences are better than nothing; those few sentences can encourage more folks to edit the page to a great article. So what are you waiting for…inspiration?

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Introducing the Wikiwrimo regional directory

I hinted at this on Twitter over the past week or so, but it’s finally ready: the Great Wikiwrimo Regional Directory.

What is this, you ask? Wikiwrimo’s mission is to archive the history and culture of NaNoWriMo because so much of that gets wiped with the forum wipe every year. But there’s so much culture in each NaNo region, and there’s not much of a place in the main wiki to put all those regions. Sure, I could make a page for each region, but that’s a lot of regions, and consistency in region formatting in the article names could be an issue. So I sat down and figured out a way to make contributing a region to Wikiwrimo easy and finally came up with the current structure.

Here’s how it works. Visit the main region article, and navigate to your region. If you live in the United States, it may be, for example, United States::Georgia::Atlanta, so you’d click on the United States page, then the Georgia page, and then click the red Atlanta link and start editing. International regions require fewer clicks because there are fewer regions.

Just one thing: Not all the Elsewhere:: regions are up yet, partially because I’m hoping there will be some regional reorganization come October when the site relaunches. Mexico, Israel, Central and South America, Russia, I’m looking at you in particular. If you live in a part of the world whose region you can’t find and you want to create it (or you just want to create it), then use your own good judgment. Redirects can happen later.

You should request an account before editing, of course. It would also be a good idea to look through the Wikiwrimo guide to editing for some tips, particularly the section on regional pages.

Happy editing!

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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!