wikiloops news march 2018

Hello there, friends of wikiloops, greeting you from wikiloops central!
Today I'd like to catch up on recent news around the wikiloops project. As you will see, we have been working on quite a list of different tasks to make wikiloops a little better.
Time seems to be racing by in 2018, and it is only twenty days from now that wikiloops will celebrate seven years of uptime on April 1st 2018.
[b]One thing has not changed in seven years:[/b]
wikiloops is still all about working together, and as you will notice as I go over the many small side projects that we have been involved with, all of them go back to some community members initiative.

So, what have we been up to?

Annual transparency report 2017 published

One of my tasks on the beginning of the new year was to dig up all kinds of statistic data to be able to present that in the [url=https://www.wikiloops.com/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=1691]6th annual transparency report[/url].
Getting all the relevant numbers together and displaying them in smart visualizations had me busy for about a week, and I can only recommend to have a look at the resulting report if you have some interest in where we stand with the wikiloops project today.
Summarized to one sentence the report comes down to: "wikiloops is still on its way to becoming a truly independent crowd-funded network, but the chance of celebrating the projects independence day are looking quite promising."

wikiloops ambassadors on a roll

It is one of the never ending tasks to try to get musicians to notice this place called wikiloops.
One benefit of last years development investments is that there is a little more room to take care of this task, and we have been able to "get the word" out with the help of several people:

As already mentioned in a previous blog post, we have developed a [url=https://wordpress.org/plugins/wikiloops-track-player/]wordpress-plug-in[/url] with the help of [b]jmrukkers[/b], which allows embedding wikiloops tracks in wordpress blogs and by oEmbed standard.
Thanks to [b]Wade[/b], this new feature got quickly noticed on some Saxophone forums which are now allowing our player, turning these forums into outposts of wikiloops - and leading to some new horn players appearing on wikiloops.

Another collaboration to get noticed by more musicians lead to an article about wikiloops in the American GuitarChalk magazine, which you may read [url=https://www.guitarchalk.com/online-collaborations-daily-practice-routine/]here[/url]. Thanks to Bobby from GuitarChalk, and to wikiloops member [b]cmdr_chill[/b], who wrote and submitted the article.
At the same time, we have been working on the long-due wikipedia article about wikiloops, and with the help of [b]Liesching[/b] and his student Michael, we have come closer to that milestone - the article in the german wikipedia is still awaiting review, so keep your fingers crossed for us on this one.
Now, after titling this paragraph with "wikiloops ambassadors", I feel it should be stated that this is not some kind of status we are assigning.
Everybody is welcome to join our efforts to get people to notice wikiloops.
Small things like [b]Dadinators[/b] introduction to wikiloops on some surf-rock related website or the friendly people who suggest wikiloops in musicians forums, the "social web" or in their own blogs (thanks to [b]wjl[/b] and [b]Jypeka[/b]) do make a lot of difference!

In the process of thinking about how people get to know and enjoy wikiloops, I ended up realizing:
The only person alive who has ever visited wikiloops.com without having either found it on google or some other website is me, the whole rest of you only ended up here because someone recommended wikiloops (which does affect wikiloops presence in google search results as well).
That is why I cannot stop praising those who do help on that task - if people express gratitude for what they have discovered for themselves on wikiloops, then anyone who ever appeared as a wikiloops "ambassador" deserves a share of that credit.

Platform improvements in early 2018

As you may have noticed, we've been touching up some areas on wikiloops lately.
Most will have noticed the "Your followers get to see your new showcase pictures on their newsfeeds" update, and those who ever clicked on one of those images will have discovered the [b]newly designed Gallery[/b] page. It's a small improvement, but I'm happy to see that is being used quite a lot, and the mix of instrument and art photos I have come across so far gives another insight on the creativity of some of our fellow members. I do like that.

The second recent construction site on wikiloops has been the forum, to which the new category "[b]Lyrics Library[/b]" has finally been added. Thanks again to [b]Jane, Tu, Michael[/b] and [b]ellouidir[/b] who all helped to establish this new area of collaboration on wikiloops.

If you happen to be a lyric writer, or someone who already has a lot of vocal tracks in his wikiloops bank and wouldn't mind offering his or her own lyrics via the Lyric Library, please do have a look at the introduction post on the Lyrics collaboration project [url=https://www.wikiloops.com/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=1722]here[/url].

Most recently, I finally got around to touching up the looks of this blog, too. I hope you like the new looks!

Please show some wiki-love on the social networks

As you will have noticed, we have added quite a lot of "social share" buttons on all kinds of pages to motivate our visitors (including YOU!) to share wikiloops stuff on the social networks - which is in some ways related to what I said about the wikiloops ambassadors earlier.
Should you be on facebook or twitter, please [b]join the wikiloops "followers"[/b] on there, sadly the whole wikiloops project is being judged by the popularity of our social web pages, so, I'd appreciate your clicks if you hang around on these networks.

Last, don't forget to check in for the [url=https://www.wikiloops.com/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=1653]wikiloops member meeting 2018[/url] if you are planning to join us!

Let me say thanks for he quite fantastic soundtrack of this years beginning you guys and girls have been providing - I still can't help but feel very blissed listening to tracks on wikiloops.
When I started out seven years ago, I would have never imagined to be this privileged to host the kind of musicians in my studio that are now collaborating on wikiloops.

Traditional end-of-post statistics:
Today, there are:
104,529 tracks online
52,308 members registered
305 supporting members