About the StopMo Wiki

This Stopmo wiki was begun by Boy Oyng. The goal was to make a resource that would serve beginners and professionals alike. At the risk of committing a tautology: For lack of interest, it failed. So now it's just going to be a site where stuff about stop motion animation and whatever else hits the Boy Oyng fancy will get posted.

But you can still post articles. If Boy Oyng thinks they just don't fit, they'll disappear. Below are the original pipe dreams... er, that should be "guidelines" for articles. Just for giggles.

Tone and Style. Clear, friendly, relatively informal, accurate writing, please.

Articles: Closed vs Open. When it appears that a subject is adequately addressed, we may lock it down. Such lock-downs would, however, be subject to appeal.

Authorship Credit. Although it seems to go against the supposed spirit of standard Wiki, in some cases we won't mind if a writer wants to receive authorship credit for an article, or to part of an article. We would especially encourage this when the content is highly subjective and the article contains well-expressed opinions. We may combine separate articles into one page, maintaining authorship credit where appropriate. By necessity, such pages would have to be locked down so that no one can alter a credited writer's work.

Editing. Open articles are obviously subject to editing in a Wiki. When editing, please make an effort to discuss changes in advance as much as possible, be respectful, and aim to move an article forward in depth or clarity. .

Amateur/Newbie vs Professional. We hope that this Wiki can be useful for experienced and inexperienced animators alike. If this becomes a robust resource, we may wish to tag or mark articles as appropriate for newbies or for the more experienced. We don't want newbies to have to wade through dense paragraphs discussing intricacies of video field dominance, for example, nor should experienced animators have to wade through "My puppet keeps falling over" level articles. How we organize and demarcate these distinctions, however, I don't yet know. Ideas?

Visuals. Obviously, stop-motion is a visual medium. If you can include visual materials in articles, that would be wonderful. We believe that including stills or short bits from movies is permissable under "Fair Use" standards, but it makes sense that we credit those materials and include links directing readers to places they may purchase the work from which we take stills. If we're going to use materials as examples for teaching and critical purposes, the least we can do is give the creators of those materials a chance to make money.

When appropriate, include examples of your own work, by all means, and give yourself some credit. If the community determines that your use is inappropriate, don't feel bad if it doesn't stay up.

External Links. There are a lot of good tutorials out there in WWW-land. Please link to them in articles.