March 26th, 2016 — The Takarazuka Wiki is nearing its 10th anniversary! What's next?
The Takarazuka Wiki is nearing its 10th anniversary. In late 2005 and early 2006, Merry Shannon spent months experimenting with tiki database software and a brilliant idea, and began a Takarazuka Wiki. At the time, there were maybe three websites in English where you could find information on Takarazuka, a Yahoo mailing list, and a community on LiveJournal. Merry Shannon opened it up to editing in May of 2006, and the TakaWiki revolutionized the English-language fandom in ways it's hard to comprehend now.
Merry Shannon worked hard as an admin and kept it going for several years, before outside concerns meant that she had to pass on the torch. Some of you may remember the technical difficulties in 2007 that had the database down for a month or so. I think it helped us realize how addicted we were to the TakaWiki. Princess Lucia stepped in and worked like a mad-woman to figure out what was wrong, to resuscitate the database, and to get it working again on her own server. She served as admin for several years after that, and also worked hard to raise funds to keep the database up.
Again, life happens, and Lucia had to step down as admin. Amid more technical difficulties, the database was moved to my own private server for a year. There were some growing pains, as the tiki software had to be updated. The fandom was fabulous at coming together and hand-fixing thousands of pages worth of scrambled text. In 2015 the fandom was also very generous to donate enough money to move the TakaWiki to its own server again at last and to pay for the server space for several years.
Which brings us to now! Only months away from the 10th anniversary of our fandom database. :D
To be honest, we haven't made any great changes to the structure of the database since it began, and it is surely time to do so. Tiki code has a lot more functionality, so I'm going to be looking into ways to incorporate that (check out the comments section on this page!). Beyond that, though, I'd love to hear what you all think about sections that may not seem necessary, or should change, or things you would like added.
For example, I am removing the requirement that users must be logged in to access the translations. While it made sense 10 years ago when the Revue was a bit more leery of what it allowed online, I think it's no longer necessary. (Incidentally, if you have a translation up that you do NOT want visible to the general public, please let me know and I will make the changes back to the original permissions level.)
Speaking of translations, I know there are a LOT more out there floating about in cyber-space. If you know any translators, please ask them to consider linking their translations to our translation pages. If they're interested but can't/don't want to do it directly, they can drop me a message or post in the forums.
And our links page is outrageously out-of-date, so if you have any changes you'd like to make to it, please do!
Lately, I think a lot of new fans have been a bit intimidated by the thought of editing a tiki. Please believe me when I say that the fans who started it knew nothing about tiki whatsoever. It's a learning process, but it isn't as scary as it may look at first glance. If you think you might be interested in contributing to the TakaWiki, but don't know where to start, please check out the Introduction and Rules section, which has several helpful pages about how to edit tiki and a fabulous practice page you can mess with without fear of damaging anything. ;)
Even if you don't want to edit anything directly, keeping a keen eye out and dropping a note in the forums or to the admin if you see something that looks off is a GREAT help, believe me.
Finally, does anyone have any ideas on what we can do to celebrate 10 years? It seems like such an amazing milestone to let slip by without marking it somehow....
- Jen ❤❤❤