Just to let everyone know, I’ve conducted the membership raffle and contacted the potential winners. Once I have heard back from them, then I’ll announce the final results of the raffle!

In the meantime, we will be holding another raffle on Friday, January 25, 2008! I’m working on the prizes right now for January’s drawing, but all I can say is expect some major cool prizes in February!

To become eligible, you must be a paying member of Battlestar Wiki and Battlestar Forum! Memberships only cost $10 USD so what are you waiting for?

Firstly, we hope that you have had a safe and merry holiday season thus far!

For those of you who didn’t read our previous blog, we are starting up a monthly raffle for our paying membership.

To kick this off, we’re auctioning off 1 (one) DVD copy of Battlestar Galactica: Razor and 1 (one) free year of membership to Battlestar Wiki and the Battlestar Forum.

The drawing will be held on the 28th, so anyone wanting to become a paying member between now and the 28th is free to do so, and you’ll be included in the drawing!

So say we all!

With this being the holidays, most of the admins/members will be with family and friends. If you are awaiting a response, please don’t be discouraged if it’s not answered right away by a chief (admin). We have a large group of users who can help your every need. Post all urgent attention requests, on the BW:CN page — and we will see it in due time. Have a fun and safe holiday season!

I’ve known about the following article for roughly two to three weeks now (time gets warped during the Holidays, so I’m not going to be committal here), but it’s an article on the Battlestar Wiki and Wiki Frakr written by Sarah Toton. You can read the article here.

As long-time visitors to the Wiki know, Toton previously gave a presentation on the Battlestar Wiki at MIT5 which caused a stir, resulting in pretty interesting feedback, at least in my view.

Anyway, I’ll post my reactions to it in the coming days, probably after Christmas. Maybe sooner. (Again, I’m not being committal here, with this time being the holidays.)

In the meantime, I encourage everyone to discuss the article either here, there, or at the Battlestar Forum.

Just an update on the header images… For those of you using the new red battlestar skin, they’re back! Plus we’ve added some comic book love as well, with more to come!

We were mentioned in the Press-Telegram of Long Beach, California, which itself was picked up by Wired.

Cool!

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve been working on a Membership Raffle. The setup for this is now complete, which you can see here.

For the month of December, we are raffling off:

• One (1) DVD copy of Battlestar Galactica: Razor ($19.99 USD value) OR a $20 USD gift certificate to the online retailer of your choosing.
• One (1) year extension to your membership to the Battlestar Wiki and Battlestar Forum.

How this works: Basically, once you donate $10 dollars to become a paying sponsor/member, you are entered into a raffle.  Each paying member is given a unique id number, which is then drawn by using random.org’s integer randomizer, which generates a random number between 1 and whatever the total number of paying members happens to be at the time of the drawing.

On the last full week of each month, we’ll have the drawing with the top/grand prize being drawn last. To make it fair, once you win any prize, you don’t get to win for another 12 months.

Of course, if there are any questions, comments, or concerns, I would love to hear them!

So say we all!

Joe!

Today is Joe’s 24th Birthday. From all of us who visit, have a happy a great birthday! P.S. Please look at today’s “character” image. Steelviper’s present to you!

Attention fan fic writers and fan content creators! Our sponsors at FanLib have created a new contest to celebrate the release of “Razor” on DVD!

Basically, submit a piece of fan fiction (whether written or filmed) based on the mission statement provided on the contest page, and be eligible to win one of many excellent prizes, including a HD-DVD player, DVD box sets of the series — and one lucky grand prize winner will receive an one-of-a-kind convention poster signed by Jamie Bamber, Katee Sackhoff, Kate Vernon and Tahmoh Penikett.

We’ve completed the optimizations to the Wiki’s various databases, which themselves were long overdue.

So things should be running much smoothly now than they were Tuesday, which is always a good thing.

Just to let everyone know, the wikis will be slow for a bit because Shane and I are doing some maintenance and Frak Media! work. It’s minor stuff, really, but it’s also stuff that’s gotta be done.

Since Tuesday isn’t a high-traffic day for us, and the fact that we both have this day available to us, we seized the moment. Go figure.

The following is my (Joe Beaudoin Jr.’s) own personal opinion… the opinion of my fellow contributors and chiefs may differ.

I’ve been asked by various people why we don’t have our own “mailing list” or “chat room”, or somewhere where Wiki contributors can hang out and discuss Wiki stuff, well, off-wiki. (Just recently, one of our contributors brought up having a “chat room” for contributors, so that was part of the impetus for this blog.)

I’ve also been asked why I’ve been resistant to deploying a forum and completely integrate that into Battlestar Wiki… I’ll reveal why.

I’ve come across this article that reveals what I’ve long suspected about Wikipedia, that it has behind-the-scenes mailing lists whereby top contributors discuss what they’re going to do on Wikipedia in terms of bans, edits, etc. Unfortunately, it uses such channels in a negative manner, which has its community (rightfully) in an uproar.

I’m not going to go into the reasons why we don’t have a chat room or a Battlestar Wiki mailing list, because such tools are ultimately unnecessary in light of the features that MediaWiki provides… moreover, it’s because of what is outlined in the article above.

Yet in the interests of full disclosure, I’ll reveal that we do have a “hidden” forum on Battlestar Forum. I will point out that it is for Frak Media productions, where we discuss new projects and discuss issues that legally (yeah, as in “the law”) can’t be discussed in the open for various reasons. We don’t make decisions on the direction of the Wiki’s content in said “hidden” forum and we sure as hell don’t make decisions there regarding banning people.

In this, I guess you can call me Captain Transparency, because I believe that things that grow in the dark tend to be bad, particularly if left to people without ethics or accountability.

At the same time, I will say that I find that sometimes there are conversations you have to have with people behind closed doors, because there are private, personal things that don’t need to be aired out for public scrutiny… So, really like anything else, it’s not what tools you use, it’s ultimately how you use them. After all, you can use a hammer to bang in a nail… or to smash someone’s skull in. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s secret mailing list seems to fall under the latter category.

And that’s sad for a tool that’s supposed to “not make people sad” or the “Internet not suck“.