Resources from Presenters:
http://zinewiki.com/
https://zinecat.org/

Session Notes: 
Potential Action Items:

1. Who is hosting the site? Alex will ask Allen.
2. Milo and Jenna will check in with Jerianne.
3. Form a task force for zinewiki dev
4. Plan an editathon for zinewiki

Milo and Jenna have been tagged as responsible for ZineWiki, and need a lot of help. It’s obvious that currently the database has issues, and it needs to be repaired. The web page’s CSS is broken, and the database isn’t generating the site like it should. The site also needs to be moved to new hosting so that folks who have more time to work with it can work on it.

Jerianne Thompson and Denny are currently hosting, and Denny was previously doing most of the tech stuff, but currently they are having vision issues and can’t keep up with the site. Also it’s constantly getting hacked, and spammed with fake accounts, and in general the site needs tech people to step up to help. There was a suggestion to move hosting to DigitalOcean. 

Current site uses the MediaWiki suite, which includes WikiBase. The wiki could be used to both structure articles and well as serve as entity descriptions of zinesters, genre, titles, etc. There are current experiments in libraries with WikiBase to serve these purposes. We need to determine if we want to create our own ontology, thesaurus or base it off existing ones, like the GSSO? Also, long term, but there are methods to store data so that it can be used in the future, but is  protected now to keep private, personal data secure until those security concerns are no longer relevant. 

ZineWiki has been very useful for catalogers and cataloging. It was started by a couple of zinesters, Alan and a friend. Dan Halligan was a very active contributor and took it over with Jerrianne after the folks who started it left for other projects. There was a contribution boom for a few years, but it’s not as busy now, and is having issues. Someone needs to step in and get it up and running again. There are still active contributors. There is work happening on other platforms that isn’t being captured by ZineWiki, like on Facebook, and it would be great if that information was captured. ZineWiki needs people to add pictures and add data. 

Right now, ZineWiki moderates all contributions. This is in response to heavy spam issues. The Zine Union Catalog is hoping that ZineWiki can serve as a name and authority record, but has gone in a different direction with its catalog in the past decade. 6-7 years ago, it was suggested that ZineWiki act as an external authority record. For example, when you click on an author you could get more information from ZineWiki. This was from before the wiki broke down. 

It would be great if there were easy, obvious ways for people without a lot of technical skills to contribute. Everytime it was suggested an edit-a-thon should happen somewhere down the road, after stabilizing.