Archive:Monthly Write-a-Thon

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What's a Write-a-Thon?

It's a bunch of people getting together on a wiki at a particular time to do a bunch of writing. It's like an online party! Heck no, it is an online party! It's also an excuse for infrequent wikiers to show up and party hardy; to exchange ideas with people we might not "meet" otherwise.

But hey, why not show up in between the write-ins, too!

When?

Write-a-Thons happen the first Wednesday of every month. It starts on Tuesday 1200 UTC, when it starts being Wednesday in New Zealand, and ends on Thursday 1200 UTC, when it finishes being Wednesday in Hawaii. Save the next month's date! Put it on your calendar! Set yourself a reminder!

Any new article you create, and any edit you make to somebody else's Write-a-Thon article during that time period will count, though to be a bona fide partier, you have to write your new articles when it's that day in your part of the world.

Our first Write-a-Thon took place Wednesday, August 1, 2007 and was considered a roaring good time--we had about 30 partiers creating something like 50 articles, and editing lots.

Read all about it!! Let's try this again

By popular request, we'll be trialling Write-a-Thon II, a Sunday session of the Write-a-Thon to accommodate those who work all week and have trouble making it in to the party room on Wednesdays.

Soooo--if you worked Wednesday, if you had a bad day Wednesday and didn't get to come to the party or didn't get to do as much as you would have liked, or if you would just like another opportunity to join in the fun, come on along. Starts on Saturday, 1200 UTC, when it starts being Sunday in New Zealand, and ends on Monday, 1200 UTC, when it finishes being Sunday in Hawaii.

What are the rules?

Rules? This is a party! There are no rules!

Well, OK, maybe there are a couple rules:

• We'll have a Write-a-Thon the first Wednesday of every month.
• To participate, you only have to do two things: (1) start a new article (even just a stub will qualify, if not too short - and please remember to include the subpages template!), and (2) make a substantive edit (not just a copyedit) to somebody else's new article. Then you can list your name here as a partier. Until then, sign in as a porch-sitter, party-crasher, or total party poop.

Next party

May 5, 2010

Humour! Or 'humor', if you'd rather. In any case, it's all about fun. Let's lighten up and talk about what amuses, what makes us laugh, and did you hear the one about...?

Write-a-Thon starts on May 4th, 1200 UTC, when it starts being Wednesday in New Zealand, and ends on May 6th, 1200 UTC, when it finishes being Wednesday in Hawaii.
Write-a-Thon II starts on May 8th, 1200 UTC, when it starts being Sunday in New Zealand, and ends on May 10th, 1200 UTC, when it finishes being Sunday in Hawaii.

The partiers

• Aleta is not amused. However, we've all survived the Tallong Apple Festival while keeping our sense of humour fast, hence the topic. I already wrote about Who's on First?, so here's another of my favourites! Aleta Curry 23:32, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

• Hayford, feeling far from humo(u)rous after having just finished reading two grim novels about Nazi brutalities, nevertheless wrote a new article about the more unrelentingly grim of the two, Pale Moon Rising. It's pretty hard to tell the hero from the bad guys -- as the Kirkus Reviews summed it up: "Especially recommended for aspiring mass murderers and beginning psychopaths." Ugh. The other novel, An Infinity of Mirrors, at least has some of Richard Condon's usual light-hearted moments of inspired wackiness. Which, when then contrasted to the rest of the book's litany of Nazi horrors, probably makes the whole thing even worse. Well, next month I'll try to find a more cheerful topic.... Hayford Peirce 22:44, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Keen-as-mustard and jumped the gun

Chicken-based technologies certainly seems to qualify, both as real things and humor. For the official encore, I shall do Violet Club (nuclear weapon), further indicating the influence of Monty Python on United Kingdom nuclear weapons. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:20, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Who said smart people don't have a sense of humour? (Warped, maybe, but they have one!)Aleta Curry 23:29, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Porch sitters--article creators who didn't edit a new article

Chris Key isn't having fun. He has five pieces of coursework and two presentations due this month (two this week) for his end of second year BSc coursework, so he isn't feeling up to much writing at the minute.--Chris Key 23:28, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

• Chris felt like he should do better. He tried his hardest, but nothing happened. --Chris Key 00:14, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Standing orders

Tasks: Recent Changes • New Pages • Popular • Needs Defs • Basic Articles • Requested • Wanted articles • Low-intensity • Uncategorized articles • Needs Metadata • Opinions Sought

Related pages

We had a special request for people to start stubs from the Related Pages of existing articles. A good idea which will help us to complete clusters.

Definitions

Please take a look at Category:Need def and help to bring the number of items on that list down. You will also find links for this by Workgroups!

Previous shindings

empty form

• March 14, 2021 Power
• January 31, 2021 Stems and branches
• January 24, 2021 Round things
• January 17, 2021 Messaging and Missives
• January 10, 2021 Heavenly bodies!
• July 6, 2011 Standards!
• July 7, 2010 Celebrations!
• June 2, 2010 (no Write-a-Thon)
• May 5, 2010 Humour!
• April 7, 2010 Context or Spring Clean!
• March 3, 2010 Something you absolutely *love*!
• February 3, 2010 The Play's the Thing
• January 6, 2010 Stubs
• December 2, 2009 School
• November 4, 2009 Myths and Mythology
• October 7, 2009 Continents
• September 2, 2009 Design and Designers
• August 5, 2009 Heads of Government/Heads of State
• July 1, 2009 Sudden death
• June 3, 2009 unthemed?
• May 6, 2009 It's a Wide World or: It's a Small World After All!
• April 1, 2009 Events
• March 4, 2009 Spring Cleaning
• February 8, 2009 Thoughts and Books
• January 7, 2009 Controverises
• December 3, 2008 Retro, the 80's
• November 5, 2008 National parks
• October 1, 2008 Spring Cleaning
• September 3, 2008 My favourite bands
• August 6, 2008 Attractions
• July 2, 2008 Olympics
• June 4, 2008 Biographies
• May 7, 2008 Holidays, festivals and fetes
• April 2, 2008 Core articles
• March 5, 2008 Something you absolutely love.
• February 6, 2008
• January 9,2008
• December 5, 2007
• November 7, 2007
• October 3, 2007
• September 5, 2007
• August 1, 2007

Official libations

2007

• Inaugural - beer!
• September - champagne
• October - we were refurbishing the bar and only had coffee!
• November - made up for last month with more vodka than was good for us and plenty of rum.
• December - eggnog and wine

2008

• January - Whisky and the Cocktail of the Month, a pharisee
• February - schnapps and the Cocktail of the Month, the caipirinha (considered the national drink of Brazil)
• March - port wine (which should probably live at port (wine), no? (Someone put that on their list, please....Oh, *someone* did--thanks, Ro) and the Cocktail of the Month, a Dead Aunt
• April - Akpeteshie hot and fresh from Ghana. And cool shandies and spritzers if that took your fancy. Lotsa staggering around the bar after this party!
• May - Was it champagne? No, we were dry, I think.
• June - Were we abstaining yet again?
• July - Sherry
• August - pineapple juice Well, that's all right, I guess!
• September - Given the music theme, i assume it was pop?
• October - Cranberry juice. Some nut who shall remain nameless but whose initials are HP suggested Drano, (i.e. what cleans better than Drano?) but....
• November - Spring water (Now Bruce just has to write it! Aleta Curry 04:00, 3 December 2008 (UTC))
• December - Piña colada - get some light rum, mix it with pineapple and coconut cream. Instantly warp back to the eighties.

2009

• January - Bloody Mary - because, as Nietzsche said, we should only love that which is written with blood. Controversial enough?
• February - Absinthe - updates last month, but doesn't it make one forget? (No. Urban legend, except that 50-percent-plus alcohol does do its mite)
• March - Energy Drink - pump that caffeine into your system so you can burn through all those pesky definition subpages!

2010

• January - Hot toddy - for our friends in the Northern Hemisphere.
• April -- has to be a contextualizing mixer, or perhaps a nibble with the drink.

Write-a-Thon Theme Suggestions

New Suggestions and Discussion

• What about red links in Random pages? --Daniel Mietchen 10:15, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

• I suggest "Numbers". Richard Pinch 07:21, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

• "Hometown Heroes" - write about someone famous from your part of the world (either where you're from, or where you are now).
• "Poles Apart" - find the spot directly on the other side of Earth from you, and write about someone or something in the vicinity. (Contributors on other planets, follow a similar procedure for whatever planet you're on. Contributors not on planetary bodies permitted to write about whatever they feel like.)
• Fill in an item from this interesting list of natural objects. Or this interesting list of people.
• All articles must start with the same letter of the alphabet, allowing for diacritics and transliteration (so Å, Á, and あ would all count if A were the letter, for instance).
• Photo stubs - no minimum word length, no theme requirement, but must contain an image.
• Choose a random number from 1 to 500, then go to Special:WantedPages and start an article on the topic currently at that rank.

Petréa Mitchell 19:15, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

• What will people most enjoy writing that could lead many different contributors to a short, but complete and interesting article that links to larger articles? Maybe "Events" could be a theme - pen-portraits of memorable sporting moments (see try, or notable historical events - including tsunamis, eruption of Krakatoa, comet collision with Jupiter, the birth of Dolly the sheep, freeing of Nelson Mandela, the sinking of the Titanic, assassination of Martin Luther King, the Mutiny on the Bounty, the discovery of the Americas? Can I suggest asking that every new article should have at least one external link and links to other articles here?Gareth Leng 12:31, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

• I like this idea. Further, definitions and other subpages are preferable, even for stubs. Chris Day 17:01, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Dare I suggest that even stubs can and should be non-orphans? Basic criteria: Howard C. Berkowitz 18:00, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

• Reachable from the front page or a core article/workgroup page
• Link to at least three other articles, even if they are redlinks in a Related Articles subpages
• Have at least three other articles link to them

• I propose "childish things" as a topic. --Larry Sanger 15:51, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Er...you talkin' 'bout me again??? You can always tell who's got a toddler at home, huh, Larry? Aleta Curry 02:57, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

• Context (as provided by Related Articles or the addition of an image, e.g. from flickr) --Daniel Mietchen 14:49, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

This may involve blogging about an entry here at CZ, or about any aspect of the wiki. If you have never blogged before, please let me know, and I can help you set things up. --Daniel Mietchen 17:56, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

• Eyjafjallajökull‎ and anything that can be plausibly linked to or from it or its Related Articles. --Daniel Mietchen 14:31, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

• With a bang? I've been improving explosives, but also creating lots of linked things, conventional and nuclear, including United Kingdom nuclear weapons, and also hoping to find a physicist to help some in getting into theory of operation. But not everything that goes bang is a weapon: drums (well, maybe sometimes a weapon), more kinds of hammer, etc. One could even extend to booms, which gets you into sailing. Howard C. Berkowitz 13:34, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

See also

• Larry Sanger, Why the Write-a-Thon worked, Citizendium Blog, August 9, 2007
• Weekly Wiki
• Article of the Week
• New Article of the Week

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