Forum:Wiki Newsletter Take II

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FinalRest - I'm... so... startled. TALK - 04:31, 3 March 2013 (UTC) Hello everyone! Although I was unfortunately unable to attend today's roundtable, I just read over the log and I'm really happy that people are taking an interest in the wiki magazine idea that LegendAqua and myself put together! However, there were some issues that I felt were a bit muddled, and since I couldn't address them in the meeting, I'd like to clear up some things here, if that's okay. Hopefully I can answer any questions here and then we can all take a bigger look at moving forward with this project! First, I wanna talk about the issue of hosting. The idea was to host the magazine on the Keyhole for three reasons: We are the fan side of the wiki, so we'd like the fan aimed magazine to be hosted with us. We are just clinging on to life at the Keyhole, so we would like the opportunity to attract new users LegendAqua and I formed the basis of the magazine and planned it out, so it would upset us both if it were taken from us, really. However, the magazine was never intended to be solely for one wiki or the other. We want it to showcase BOTH sides of our community equally, to update users on the goings on of the Kingdom Hearts wiki as a whole. That's why I first brought the idea here for the go ahead before opening the big sign-up sheet. ^^ Next up is the content of the magazine. The sign up forum is so large because we wanted to split up the jobs as much as possible to allow users to sign up for as little or as much as they wanted to do, without feeling bogged down by the responsibility of an entire page. But obviously, the downside of that is that's hard to get an overall view of the magazine. :P Instead, here are the pages LA and I decided to include in the magazine. We initially decided the content ourselves because we thought a forum would take too long, but of course we're open to more ideas. Cover Page: The cover of the whole thing. Pretty self-explanatory, really. :) Contents Page: Again, self-explanatory Keyhole Report: A page updating readers on what's been going on at the Keyhole. Includes log updates, introductions of new users and current arena battles etc. .Net Report: The exact same as the above, but focusing on .net and adding in any info the userbase here thinks is important. Special Editor Page: This page is sort of like a guest writer page. Any user can volunteer to write an article about anything pertaining to the wikis or the KH series. An opinion article, or a profile of a character, or anything else they can think of! Tutorial: Aimed at the newer users, this page is for a different tutorial each issue that teaches users how to do coding on the wiki. For example, a tutorial on talkbubbles, userboxes, how to add videos to pages, rules for adding trivia etc. I also saw that someone thought it was a walkthrough page, which is an idea I like. Maybe we could split the page in two: one part for wiki tutorials, one for game tutorials? Feature Article: This article is written by whoever volunteers. It's subject is the theme of the issue, and it features a comprehensive piece on whatever the subject is. For example, if the issue's theme is Riku, this article will be a breakdown of Riku, talking about everything from his story to his abilities and appearance. In other words, a slightly watered down version of the Riku article on the wiki. Staff Roundtable: The idea of this was to get a fun back and forth between the staff of the wiki, based around one question, which pertains to the issue's theme. Sticking to the Riku theme, the question could be Do you prefer Riku or Sora, and why? Then we open up a forum, let the staff offer their opinions, and that's the article! It's like a mini staff interview for every issue. KH News Board: A page all about the latest announcements from the KH world. If there's no current news, we include fan speculation etc. in its place. Featured Content: A page to showcase the currently featured content on the wikis. Since the Keyhole currently has no featured article etc. this page would just include the Featured Media and Article from .net. Community Page: A page based around our users. Current ideas are a user interview with a random user, a Top 5 list written by another user on something to do with KH (eg. FinalRest's Top 5 Keyblades) and user reviews on anything from full games, to game mechanics etc. Fun Page: What the title says. :D Currently includes a puzzle, KH skit (I would love to find someone who could turn this into a comic!) and a one shot voting arena readers can vote in. Interactive Page: Designed to get users more involved with the wikis and the KH series. Includes a mailbag for user questions, two to do lists (one for the Keyhole, the other for .net) challenging users to complete certain tasks before the next issue and a user submission section for users to submit anything they're proud of (Fanart, fanfics, talk bubbles, sigs etc.) That's all we've got, and we tried to get a good balance between .net, the Keyhole and the KH series. Hopefully that makes the magazine easier for you to visualise! I saw a lot of talk about how often the magazine will be released. On the forum we got more votes for bimonthly, but I noticed that the Roundtable was leaning towards Quarterly. I think the latter is probably the best choice now, with our limited volunteer pool, so we'll probably go with quarterly. Another issue I saw brought up was that need for coding knowledge. To give you an idea of what we plan the magazine to look like, here's a link to the Fairy Tail wiki magazine which is what inspired LA and I to design our own wiki magazine. For our own wiki magazine to work, I believe we will need at least one person who can come up with templates for the writers to use. We might also need someone to check grammar and another to supervise the layouts of the articles. LA and I were also planning to be the "Editors In Chief" and oversee the finished product. And we'd also need someone who can work with photoshop to create things like the cover, or the puzzles. But of course this depends on who's willing to contribute what. I for one know that I could probably handle the photoshop stuff, grammar check, article layouts and most of the templates myself if need be, but I obviously wouldn't be too thrilled at having to take on all that work. ^^ So the more volunteers the better! Hopefully that answers most questions. Because I can't attend IRC meetings, I can only offer my assistance through forums, so if there are any concerns or questions or anything, I'd really appreciate it if we could discuss it here, especially because I'd feel a little put out seeing my idea discussed without being there myself. ;) So yeah, if there is still some confusion just ask me about it! And a big thanks to everyone who was willing to show an interest in the magazine! I was really bummed when we didn't have enough user support before to go forward with this project, so hopefully this time we'll be able to come up with something. Thanks for your time! XD

TheFifteenthMember Yes. You're creepy. I can't say we'll miss you while you're gone, so it'd be best if you did go. We all win that way. — TheFifteenthMember 12:35, 3 March 2013 (UTC) Ah, so we're doing the magazine with tabs, that's good. Someone can look at the coding of their magazine and recreate something similar for ours. OK, here's a couple of points: We should move the KH News Board to the third page (after contents) then proceed with the Wiki news so that all news is in one place. The Featured Content could include the new Featured competitions from the Keyhole too (like the Featured Talker etc.) If we do the Featured Article, we should probably lean towards a more trivial approach to offer something different to our normal articles. Erry already said he wants to do the photoshop images and I think he'll be good at it. I think the magazine should be kept on the Keyhole too for the reasons you said, plus, we're gonna need to upload a bunch of gifs and pics for it so it should be on the Keyhole. We can simply link to the Keyhole page anyway (or maybe just have the front page on the home page which links to The Keyhole). We need a coder and a designer. Really anyone can be a grammar police. I guess I can help with bits and bobs and I wouldn't mind doing a Special Editor Page (I would do an article about why people keep complaining about KH3 not coming out and then on the interactive page, we could have a poll for people who are annoyed and people who aren't, or something along those lines). So fortnightly newsletter, is basically a magazine with just the first five pages (front page, contents, game news, Keyhole news, .net news). If someone makes a template for it, it would be easy to update every two weeks.

I think for Editors in Chief, there should be at least one .net editor. That's pretty much my only dispute, if I am allowed to do all Photoshop work.Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill because they pissed me off. - Erry 13:04, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

FinalRest - Clap your hands if you believe. TALK - 01:35, 4 March 2013 (UTC) @Erry: I was thinking the same thing. And of course I wouldn't object to you handling all the photoshop stuff. ^^ @TFM: We definitely would like to include our competitions, but for now we don't have the people to vote for those competitions. We could always look at opening them up later, though. As for the featured article, I was imagining it a bit like a less formal version of the proper article, so that way we can link to the official page at the end of the page. Hopefully the writer will be able to relay the info in a fun, magazine friendly way. If we really needed it I could have a go at creating the templates myself, but I'm not perfect with coding. I could probably figure it out, it'd just take me a while. But hopefully someone more adept with codes will come along and offer to help. ^^ So, is the fortnightly newsletter like a mini version of the magazine to fill in the gaps between issues? That sounds pretty cool. Would it also be on the Keyhole, or on .net, or both?

TheFifteenthMember Yes. You're creepy. I can't say we'll miss you while you're gone, so it'd be best if you did go. We all win that way. — TheFifteenthMember 17:39, 4 March 2013 (UTC) Oh, so that's what the Featured Article is meant to be. However shouldn't the name be changed so it is not confused with something else but I can't think of any alternative names ._. As for the newsletter, I would think it should be on both since .net will depend on it to announce game news. MEX has already started a template which seems to be going well.

Well, I don't know if this can help but I started a draft for the template. If I know exactly what will be in each page, which colors you want to use, I could make it better. Hope it helps. If there's anything more that I can do, just say, guys. EDIT: well, I would write this but FM already saw it ¬¬. He was quicker. - MateusinhoEX - 14:37, 04 March 2013 (UTC)

I think pretty much everything is covered. We're gonna need a single Editor in Chief that everyone hands everything into so that they can put it together. Someone will need to make a cover image, and images in general. I think we decided on a quarterly magazine, because Square doesn't release news that often. Edit the template that MEX put up and at least get that up and running, then we can decide more on content and page names, etc.Freezing Cold20:09, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I see what you mean about the Featured Article name FM. ^^ That's just a temporary name to refer to it in general. In the magazine the article will just be named whatever the author wants to call it. Like the center article of a real magazine, you see? So the name will change every issue depending on what the article is. I've also said before that LA and I are the chief editors because this was our idea. What we need now is a .net editor to join our overlooking team and make it a trio. Now over to the template to take a look at what's going on over there! This concludes my wonderful story! 03:42, 6 March 2013 (UTC)