So, the Wongery has been publically accessible for three years now, and... it's still nowhere near where we'd hoped it would be. (Technically, this past Monday was the three-year anniversary... I meant to make this post then, but I'm a bit late.)

I'd said in the last post (way back in May... aargh, we really haven't been keeping up the site) that "we've been putting things in order so that we can finally start making the regular updates we'd for so long intended and for so long not done". Well, it's still not done... that announcement was maybe a bit premature. We still hope to get to the point we have the time and opportunity to make regular updates, but we're not there yet. Soon, but I won't make any promises as to how soon.

In the meantime, though, there is one thing we are going to do, and it's what's referred to in the title of this post. No, we're not rebooting the entire site (I'm not even entirely sure what that means). But we are rebooting one of the site features. A feature that we launched soon after the site itself, but that we... probably shouldn't have.

Namely, the World of the Week.

We've been meaning to get caught up with the World of the Week, have a few future posts partly done and other planned... but when we're as far behind as we are, "catching up" is probably unrealistic. Better just to reboot from scratch, especially since, well, it's not like the site has a lot of visitors anyway, so it's not like anyone's going to miss it.

That doesn't mean we're going to delete the World of the Week entries that are already there. We're just going to redate them to the new year, and then pick up where they leave off. (And maybe update them as applicable... there's definitely an update needed for the very first World of the Week, Snaiad, anyway, given that at the time it was first posted the Snaiad website was offline, and, well, it's now finally back.)

There is one thing on the current World of the Week entries, though, that we are going to remove. But first, a brief digression.

I and the rest of the Grandmaster Wongers have a lot of partially written articles saved in various levels of completion, with of course the intent of eventually finishing and posting them. Most of these articles are intended for the Central Wongery mainspace, but I also have some in-progress articles intended for the projectspace of both the Central Wongery and the Public Wongery. One of these articles deals with copyrights (yes, at the time of this writing that's a redlink because the article doesn't exist yet, but I'll link to it anyway), and addresses a number of copyright myths. I'm not going to copy the whole article here, or even a large excerpt; I hope to have the whole thing posted relatively soon anyway. But I will quote below the final paragraph of the copyright myths section:

You may conclude based on all this that the Wongery is itself violating copyrights by using externally acquired images on the World of the Week pages without asking the artists' permission. And, well, technically you'd be right. We are hypocrites. We're operating under the assumption (or at least the hope) that the creators of the art we've "borrowed" won't mind our use of it, especially since we credit and link to the source... but we haven't actually asked them, and so by using their art without permission we are technically violating copyright, whether we credit the original source or not. In any case, the World of the Week is a very minor side part of the Wongery site, and one we wouldn't be terribly upset if it disappeared entirely. The Central Wongery, the Public Wongery, and the Private Wongeries are the core of the site—the Central Wongery especially—and for those we have much higher standards. (That being said, once we have the money and means to do so, we do intend to commission original art for the Worlds of the Week to replace the current images.)

But you know what? That third sentence is right. We are being hypocrites by using (manipulated versions of) existing artworks without getting the artists' permission. And I'm not comfortable with that. So the World of the Week title images are going. Yes, I know the pages won't look as nice without the pictures, but we don't have the money right now to commission art for them, and I'm not okay with going on violating copyright by using images without permission. Someday, when we do have the money, we'll get art done for them... but in the meantime, well, we can live without it.

So, anyway, the World of the Week will be relaunched starting in the new year. And the rest of the site... seriously, we're working on it. There'll be some progress made... eventually.