In the latest edition of the Wikipedia Signpost — Wikipedia’s community “newspaper” — contributor Mabeenot conducts a neat interview with editors from WikiProject Horror.

For those unfamiliar with the term WikiProject, it refers to an ad hoc committee of Wikipedia editors who collaborate on the development of articles by topic, according to their interests. Or, as the WikiProject page itself begins:

A WikiProject is a project to manage a specific topic or family of topics within Wikipedia. It is composed of a collection of pages and a group of editors who use those pages to collaborate on encyclopedic work.

I consider myself a member of WikiProject Oregon, although I tend to follow my own muse and rarely pitch in on assigned tasks (though I should) and was a member of WikiProject The Wire, until most of those articles were sufficiently developed and the project slowed down considerably.

That, actually, is the point of this blog post: speaking purely on an anecdotal level, it seems that more than a few WikiProjects I visit are dreadfully slow, if not actual ghost towns: questions are posted and not answered for days, or longer, and discussions may be very infrequent. Obviously, I stipulate that some research is necessary to determine the whether my experience is representative or not; I may just do that.

Meantime, I leave you with an excerpt from the aforementioned interview. Here’s Bignole, asked about difficulties involved in keeping the project active:

Bignole: The problem with keeping a project active is based primarily on how many members you have that are still editing. Many of the WikiProject Horror members no longer edit on Wikipedia, or simply do not edit for extended periods of time. Horror is a very special field, and one not as many people have a taste for. Thus, something as broad as “Film” is easier to keep active because it covers so many different forms and genres and thus attracts a more diverse field of editors who have an interest in those topics. As much as horror extends beyond simply horror film (e.g., books, games, etc.), the reality is that the primary coverage this project has provided. It’s the area that garners the most attention, as I said before, because film is a very popular medium. Just, finding active editors interested specifically in the horror aspect of any medium can sometimes be difficult. At one time the project has had upwards of 200 members, but even quite a few of the ones currently listed as “Active” have not truly been active editing any article for over a year. So, staying active in general is probably one of the biggest difficulties to keeping this project active. Though, like any great horror villain, this project seems to refuse to die and drags itself out of the mud every so often for a few more scares.

Horror fan yourself? Got a few spare cycles to donate? By all means, head on over to WikiProject Horror and lend a hand.