Remember when I said about a week and a half ago that the next blog post would be up "tomorrow or the next day"? Ha ha, what a merry jest that was. Good times, good times.
(I am not getting things done.)
So, as of today there are three hundred and thirty six articles posted on the Central Wongery, not counting redirects and disambiguation pages. This is, frankly, a pathetically paltry number compared to the number of articles we'd hoped to have before launch. We'll try to get that number up before hard launch; a thousand articles before next January may be a bit unrealistic, but at least five hundred should be doable. (That is, five hundred total articles, not five hundred new articles; as much as we'd like to have the latter, it's unlikely to happen.)
But while there are many fewer articles currently up than we'd prefer, there are even fewer illustrations—by orders of magnitude. That is to say, the number of images scattered among those three hundred and thirty six articles is precisely four. Three public domain images obtained from Wikimedia Commons and one vector image made by Oscqr in Adobe Illustrator.
(In case you're curious, the four articles currently blessed with images are Earth, ellogy, Gremory, and tree.)
Why doesn't the Wongery have more art? Don't we want to have all the articles illustrated? Don't we understand how much more appealing illustrations would make the Central Wongery, and how much it would help people to become interested in and get a feel for the creatures, characters, and concepts descried therein?
Well, sure, of course we want the Wongery to be fully illustrated, but unfortunately it's not as easy as that.
The thing is, while we can find public domain illustrations suitable for some of the articles that deal with real-world topics, that won't apply to most of the articles on the Wongery. Most articles will need custom art... and none of the Grandmaster Wongers are artists. I mean, I myself have dabbled in drawing, even tried making my own webcomic in the early 2000s (though I didn't keep it up for long, and it's not currently online)... but I certainly don't produce professional-level work. To get acceptable illustrations for the Wongery, we're going to have to pay artists to produce them. Though really, even if one of the Grandmaster Wongers were a professional artist, we'd probably still want to pay artists to produce the illustrations; creating art is time-consuming, and the Grandmaster Wongers' time is limited, and we'd prefer to focus on the writing; while art would be nice, as far as I'm concerned the text of the articles is the most important part. Still, that doesn't mean illustrations aren't important, and that we don't want to have them made.
So why haven't we done so? Well, the most obvious reason is that we just don't have the money to pay artists at the moment. Hopefully if some of my other plans pay off we will in the future, but right now we don't. (Couldn't we find some desperate artist willing to produce art for us for the exposure? Well, I mean, maybe, theoretically, but I wouldn't want to exploit artists like that, or encourage that sort of behavior, so I don't consider that an option.)
But even if we did have the money to pay artists, we wouldn't want to commission art right now. Why not? Because we want to have our hard launch all at once, on one specific day. Sure, the site's been publicly accessible for more than ten years now, but having gone this long without its getting notice, we're leaning into that and would like to keep it on the down low (another phrase I don't think I've ever used before) until the hard launch in 2024. Contacting artists to produce illustrations for articles would likely interfere with that.
That being said, could we ask artists for art and... not tell them what it's for? That's an option, and one I've considered. However, ideally I'd like to let artists pick what article they're most interested in illustrating, and... that's obviously not something I can do without showing them the articles. Still, that's not absolutely necessary, and maybe we can gauge artists' general interests and pick articles that may fit them.
The other obvious option is, of course, to wait to commission any art until after the hard launch. This has the advantage that artists will be able to look through the wiki and choose what they want to illustrate, but has the obvious disadvantage that the art won't be there at the time of the hard launch. So... is that better or worse? I don't know.
We could also combine these two options, approach a few artists beforehand so there's some original art at the hard launch but then wait to open the floodgates (another phrase I'm not sure I've used before) and go hog wild (a phrase I definitely haven't used before and I'm not sure why I'm using now) with art until after the hard launch. Which... may be what we'll end up doing? I don't know. We've still got almost eleven months till the hard launch, so this isn't a decision we have to make right now. Still, one way or another, there will eventually be illustrations for Wongery articles; that is one of the many, many items on our collective to-do list.