fanlore | Recent Entries

I entered the basic information on this, but I don't remember who first twittered about it on Tuesday. Can someone go update the entry with that information? I also set all the links up as external references, but it might be better to make the footnote-type links.

cin1607

So I was cruising around Fanlore looking at some of the proposals for challenge topics and hit the Newsletter page and saw that it was a stub. And then I looked at the Newletter Communities subpage and saw that it was a sea of red! There are over 100 newsletters listed on the page, but only a handful actually have any information in the wiki. Most are just empty pages. There are links to the actual newsletters associated with almost all of them, which will be helpful, but we really don't want all of the information about these (for me, at least) absolutely critical fannish resources to be dependent on the permanence of an external link!

This should be an easy fix and there are enough fandoms listed, I'm sure there's something for everyone. Let's create proper pages for these newsletters! Here's a handy template that will create the nifty Community Profile box for you. Start with that, and as for the rest, see what you can discover. Who founded it and when? Who maintains it now? Is it inclusive or exclusive? How are they gathering their links? Does it have any particular quirks or controversies? Is the journal defunct? What happened? And if you're in a fandom and you have a newsletter that's not listed, by all means add it!

Let's see what we can get done this week. Next Wednesday, we'll tackle something new. :)

Current Mood: energetic

sherrold

I'm very excited that there's a new committee and some new attention being paid to it, and I love the new ideas rolling out.

But.

Personally, I'm not really to start talking Fanlore up in my LJ/DW and encouraging other people to play. I don't think it's time to start weekly activities, yet, either.

I think it's foolish to start pulling a bunch of new volunteers in while there are some specific issues that need to be addressed, and specific processes that need to be put in place. There are questions strewn through administrative talk pages all over the place. Let's get so many of those answered, and a FAQ going, first.

Otherwise, I fear it will be like the first flush of excitement all over again. A lot of enthusiasum, gradually eroded by the lack of clarity and answers.

Though, maybe an early volunteer task is, going through the old admin talk pages and rolling up the big open questions... I might even volunteer to work on that if I thought there was someone to read and start working through the list once we'd compiled it.

2nd early volunteer task, while I'm on a role: make a list of other fannish wikis, and steal (where appropriate) their good ideas (not their articles: cool features of their home pages, ideas for recognizing their volunteers, etc..

mrs_potatohead

Right now, folks coming to Fanlore see a lot of words, text that doesn't change and isn't that interesting.

A new user might poke at the templates along the left side, something not intuitive and not very interesting. Or that user might type something into the search box, navigating the "go" and "find" function AND the dodgy search engine to find something that interests her or him. That's a lot of hurdles for the casual visitor, a person that may be enticed into staying and contributing. :-)

I'd like to see a prominent section on the front page that adds some enticement to go further. Perhaps a box, right up front, that has "quick links" to things like: glossary terms, vidding, conventions, fanzines, fandoms, awards, publishers, fans/people...

Plus, it would be nice to have some visual on the front page, even if it changes just once a month. It doesn't need to be anything with text, even, perhaps a teaser to a page: a convention program, a logo, a cartoon...

I don't know enough about Fanlore to know if these things are possible, but I think something along this line would be a good idea.

MPH

Current Location: in a cold, cold snowy clime sitting in front of a woodstove

cin1607

Hey all!

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Cin and I’m new on the wiki committee this year. *waves* I see that back in September,

ratcreature made a brilliant suggestion that we post themed challenges to this comm to stir up more regular waves of activity and enthusiasm and updates to the wiki. Plus, it would give us good excuses to go poke our fannish friends and say, “Hey! They’re talking about X on

fanlore this week. Do you remember that? Let’s create/update a page for that on the wiki!” I love the idea! I intend to grab that ball and run with it!

If you check out the original thread, you’ll see a lot of good suggestions already, but I’d like to spend a little time before I throw out the first official challenge and do some brainstorming. What would you like to see? What would work? What might not? At this point, I’ve seen:

What was your first fandom?

What was your first fandom community?

Focus on conventions.

Focus on holiday exchanges.

Did you come into fandom between (pick a span of dates)? Which fandom? Do you remember X event from then? (“It was May, 1999. Ricky Martin was at the top of the music charts, and The Phantom Menace ate fandom!”)

Focus on specific fandoms, or specific fandom events. (“Hey X-Files slash fans, do you remember the “Kiss heard ‘round the world?”)

I think we can have a lot of fun with this! Start lobbing ideas. I’ll take notes and if we get a bundle, I’ll do a poll and we can hopefully get the first up and running next week. :)

Current Mood: excited

ratcreature

The wiki has been loading slow quite often for me, but now it won't load at all, and yesterday evening the same thing happened. Do others have the same problem or is this just me? :(

ETA: Of course now just as I posted it loads again, but I'd be still interested if there is some underlying problems for this repeated non-responsiveness I experience.

ratcreature

There must be a way to have some kind of bot to do routine maintenance tasks that don't take any thought at all. Like when you make a new fan profile, and the fan is not consistently wikilinked, and the fan is prolific, manually inserting wikilinks to connect the article properly just sucks. Really sucks. I've inserted the same four brackets in dozens and dozens of pages just checking a few names. It took hours and is a task that requires no thought at all. (I'm not talking about difficult things like spotting variances or such just wikilinks that match exactly.) You run a search on the title of the article, go to the result list, check the first article for "is the first instance of this string in double brackets?" if yes, do nothing, if no add the brackets and go to the next result, and do the same over and over and over again. Couldn't there be some kind of maintenance bot checking this for all newly created articles and maybe the old ones in batches or something?

Current Mood: disgruntled

facetofcathy

Edited to add, January 11, 2010: I did some tweaking to the usage section of the page. I tied the dictionary cite into the part about aca usage, so that it now clearly says that the fan fiction usage is correct in academia and American publishing. I shamelessly borrowed some phrasing from this conversation. I found some cites, but there is no cite for the idea that the fan fiction usage denotes aca or noob anywhere other than here, and the talk page itself. Anyone got one?

Go check it out and edit that page or something else while you're there--if the urge hits, that is.

------------------------------

As I found out on the OTW news site, fan fiction has hit the dictionary. There is a discussion on the Fan Fiction page from a while back about usage on the page itself, and about what that usage says about the person using the, er, usage.

We could really use (had to, sorry) some fresh opinions, and even some cites on this.

Should the Fan Fiction page use the term fanfiction, or fan fiction? Does writing it as fan fiction make people think you're a noob or even an acafan in disguise? Should I have made this a poll?

Opinions here, or on the talk page at Fanlore would be appreciated.

melina

On behalf of Michelle:

I’ve had a Fanlore account for pretty much all the time the wiki was up, but I’ve found I’m not editing as much as I want to. Or as much as I could. One of the reasons for this is my general laziness. I always plan to edit, but when I actually sit down to do so, my brain goes all blank and I fail to come up with a coherent thought. It’s most frustrating.

The other reason is one I would like to discuss here, because I feel a lot of people are struggling with it. Despite their general interest in the wiki, they don’t work on it. I’ve tried to come up with a few explanations why that is and would like to hear your thoughts on it. Basically, I think Fanlore’s problem is to engage people enough to care, sign up and edit. Only, the "engaging" isn’t happening for various reasons.

* Fanlore is still in beta. That in itself might make potential user reluctant to join in. A beta suggests a site that is unstable, that might just go away without further notice. There’s no stability here, you don’t want to make yourself feel at home in such a place. My question would be: Why is the wiki still in beta? Is it the code? Is it the policies? When will that change? And why is that not communicated somewhere?

* The Front Page. It’s boring. Actually, I think this calls for a capitalization: It’s BORING. The wiki has been up for over a year and nothing has happened on the front page. Okay, the link to the DW Comm was added, but that’s hardly a groundbreaking thing. And a very rudimentary news page was added as well, but it doesn’t actually give you any useful info. What about the policy change for fanwork titles? Why did that not go up there? Have you looked at a random wiki lately? Have you seen what’s going on on their front pages? Article of the day, author of the day, this day in history. There is *so* much you could do with a front page, even when a wiki is small. Fandom of the Day. Fannish Person of the Day. Author of the Day. And yet Fanlore totally disregards this opportunity. Why?

* In lieu with the front page is the problem of giving visitors the chance to discover content. A good front page would make that easier. It would give you lots of interesting links to click and in the best of possible worlds you would just dig yourself deeper and deeper into the wiki. Instead, the only way to discover content at the moment is by search, by recent changes and by random page.

* Communication. I think it isn’t happening enough. Or if it’s happening, it’s happening in the wrong places. The wiki committee members should be easier to find (at the moment: front page: beta: committee) and it should be made clear what the committee actually does. The OTW newsletters are kind of vague in that regard. I’m assuming the committee is doing something worthwile, but I have no facts to back that up.

* Users offer ideas, everyone likes them and still nothing happens. As evidenced here (http://fanlore.dreamwidth.org/7275.html). This conversation is from September and has had no visible results. I do think this user is hitting the target. The wiki needs something like "Add you favourite author day" or "Fill out a stub week". It would help give the wiki and the users a focus.

* I've had the same experience on a conversation leading nowehere on the issue page, where I asked about policies for images (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore_talk:Issues). The wiki is in desperate need of more eyecandy and I’m convinced it would help to give people a guideline where to put them. "We’re working on it", was the reply. That was in April.

* A minor problem with the DW comm: It would be helpful to see right away who is actually associated with the wiki. It’s nice that discussion happens there, but it would be good to know whether the discussion is happening with another user, with a gardener or with an admin.

Michelle
http://michelle.fancrone.net
http://fanlore.org/wiki/User:Michelle

aethel

msilverstar posted a while back about drafting a guide for categories, since there isn't one yet. Meanwhile, I've been running around the wiki, adding and removing categories according to my own interpretation of what they mean. But sometimes I just have no clue.

So! I thought I would collect my thoughts in one place and see what other people think. Here are a few of my working definitions of categories, along with questions and hair-pulling:

Discussion - articles about the art of fannish discussion (e.g. glossary terms like "meta"), plus articles about discussion forums (newsgroups, lj comms, e-lists, etc.). This one had me pulling my hair out for MONTHS. Do you include the discussion theme articles like "Misogyny in Fandom"--that don't take place just once, but over and over and over--in this category? I removed this type of article from the category, but only based on my own gut feeling.

Debate - articles about particular discussions of a controversial nature. All-out flamewars not based on any particular theme listed in the debate category would fall under Fandom Occurrences instead (although several pages count as both an occurrence and a debate).

Fiction Writing - all fanfiction and many zine articles, all e-lists/newsgroups/lj comms where fic is posted, plus the article called "Fan Fiction" and other glossary terms related to the creation and enjoyment of fic.

Non-fiction Writing - any article about the art of fannish non-fiction writing generally (e.g. glossary terms) AND any article describing a particular piece of non-fiction. Articles about wikis or discussion forums aren't currently assigned this category, so should we clarify that "Non-fiction Writing" applies to discrete pieces written by one or a limited number of fans? And should it be applied to non-wiki websites that are canon/fandom resources (see Yoxley Old Place and Argo and Bliss)?

ANOTHER QUESTION: where do articles about rec pages go? Recommendations and reviews are themselves non-fiction, but are *about* fiction.

Print Media and Zines are fairly straightforward, but are there any articles in "Print Media" that are not also "zines"? Convention program(me)s? What else? I suspect these articles will drown in the sea of zines if we don't add another category for them.

Offline Spaces - should this category be applied to conventions? Most (although not all: see out-of-con.txt) conventions are offline spaces, yet they are not listed here. What say you? (ETA: Actually, some conventions are here.)

Fan Activities vs. Fan Communities - Lots of articles have both of these categories and nothing else. To me, this suggests a need for another subcategory. An additional problem is that almost any fanac could be labeled a community or vice versa: for any fanac, it takes a group of people to do it or appreciate it or use it or talk about it. Fan communities are all based on a shared activity by definition! We need to draw the line somewhere, or these categories will be useless. When someone looks at the category page for fan communities, which articles do we want them to see?

ratcreature

There are media missing in the source text categories. I mentioned this a while ago on a category talk page, but no discussion or category expansion with more media types followed, and I just noticed again when I added a fandom. Currently the options are "Anime", "Books & Literature", "Cartoons", "Comics", "Film", "Games", "Manga", "Music", "Real People" and "Television".

There is no category for stage productions like musicals, plays and such, something I noticed when creating a stub for Phantom of the Opera, which admittedly also was a novel, and there are films, but the musical version is rather prominent in its fandom. And I guess there could be the view that musicals could fit under "music" and plays under "literature" with no need for extra categories, but the former is not quite the same as fandom for bands and such, and not only music and the latter isn't quite like book fandoms, so having some sort of stage option would be nice, IMO. Especially if we make distinctions like "comics" and "manga" and "cartoons" and "anime" to acknowledge differences between western and Japanese incarnations of the same medium, so the categories are not minimized in number by design. Also there is no radio category either, and there are fandoms with audio play incarnations, as I noticed for The Tomorrow People. I added "audio" as category, but that is not actually a subcategory of fandom by source text.

franzeska

So, I was working on the Shounen article, and I wanted to make a point about the whole genre vs. demographic thing. (In Japan, "shounen" = comics aimed at boys; in English-speaking fandom, "shounen" = that Dragonball stuff.) I was thinking that a nice, sortable table would be just the thing to organize the list of popular series people had already come up with, but in creating it, I noticed two things:

First, I was expecting the list to mostly be titles that ran in Shounen Jump (a very major magazine responsible for a lot of the unified genre elements that make English-speaking fandom consider shounen a genre). I was not expecting 100% of them to be from there! Surely there are some other popular series that aren't. Detective Conan/Case Closed isn't (and I'll go add it when I finish this post), but I'd love it if anyone could think of some others to add. Here's the popular series section of the shounen article.

Second, I knew of sortable tables from Wikipedia, so I just assumed I could do them on Fanlore. However, when I looked at the editing help pages, they weren't mentioned. Does this mean they're not allowed? Or does this just mean we need more documentation? I copied the formatting from Wikipedia (which has extensive documentation on the subject), and it shows up fine on Fanlore.

Wikipedia's page on sorting and sortable tables
Fanlore's page on tables

sqbr

A while ago (before Fanlore) I was curious about the difference between fandoms by country and couldn't find much information. I came across some interesting information today about Russian fandom and decided I'd help out anyone else interested in the subject by adding it to Fanlore..and couldn't find any pages about Russian (or Russian language) fandom.

I decided to make a page following the template of some other country or language specific fandom page..and couldn't find any. The closest was tags about the country a work is set in, which is really not the same thing.

So: is there a template/example for this sort of thing I'm missing? If not, should there be one? There's been lots of discussion on metafandom about fandom in non-English-speaking countries which I think would make for interesting reading and I imagine it could be helpful to have links for non-English speaking fans to find each other. I also think that specifying when things are country specific would help avoid the "Fandom=American/English speaking fandom" thing. Also there's a lot of Japan/Japanese specific topics which it seems logical to have a Category for.

I'm still very new to editing the wiki and feel like this sort of thing should be done in a proper consistent way so am uncomfortable just chucking a page together based off my best judgement, especially since all I have to add to the page is a few links and "this is a stub".

The links about russian fandom, for anyone who's interested or feels like making a page:
http://henryjenkins.org/2007/07/oh_those_russians_the_not_so_m.html
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/07/oh_those_russians_the_not_so_m_1.html
http://ruff.fanrus.com/

msilverstar

The Furry_Fandom entry is a tiny little stub. I know nothing of the fandom, and it would be nice to have something more to link to. Anyone?

lian

I wondered if it wouldn't make sense to promote major policy changes to the news blurb on the front page -- the fanworks renaming policy has quite an impact on the wiki (okay, mainly on gardener clean-up, heh), but old-format articles are being created all the time because except for this community, I've not seen the change advertised anywhere. What do you think -- what should News be used for?

aethel

By my estimation, we have two days until GeoCities gets deleted, and

meg_r's spreadsheet of fansites to-be-rescued is still pretty long. So ... which should be done first? I see a lot of personal fansites, some of which may not contain more than a few pictures and links. I also see a lot of sites that have been indexed by the Way Back Machine. Are there any major/popular fansites on GeoCities that haven't been documented yet and are not in the Way Back Machine?

ETA: See also IO9's Greatest Science Fiction Sites We'll Miss on GeoCities

ETA Oct. 28: Check out www.reocities.com. So far, it has good coverage of Area51.

christycorr

Hey there!

mrsvelvetears and

oxymoron have joined the Fanlore staff—they volunteered to rewrite and flesh out the Help and Policy pages, making them more thorough and user-friendly.

We're looking forward to plenty of debates on all sorts of structure and organization matters with you all—Fanlore's bound to grow even more efficient and tidy once they're done. Welcome, Anne and Kerstin! Good luck, and get ready for a lot of work! :)

christycorr

Having discussed the concerns

ratcreature and Mrs. Potato Head voiced in this post, and given the excellent points they made regarding searching, artists, and authors' name changes, the Fanlore committee agreed to change our policy on fanwork articles' titles: Story Title - Author will be changed to Story Title, with disambiguation pages created as needed.

I'll be going though the wiki myself over the next few days and moving all the pages; if anyone wants to give a hand—especially with changing mentions to fanworks in other pages to each article's new title—your help would be much appreciated! :D

msilverstar

I came back and tried to use categories and I can't remember how they should go. This Categories page covers too much ground, theory, some examples, and then meta (adding categories).

In the Wiki spirit, I'd like to write a simple, friendly "How to Add Categories" page, simplified and with tons of examples. But I'm going to need people to double-check me, as I'm not the least bit sure I am getting them right.

Also the stern bit at the bottom of every edit box is undoubtedly disconcerting people, I'd like to reword it and link to the friendly page.

And it occured to me, maybe just offer reassurance that they don't have to do categories, the gardeners will take care of those? Because we want their fandom info by far, more than cataloging expertise.

morgandawn

Posting this here at the request of a non-DW member who is working hard on Fanlore fanzine entries. She tells me she's in contact with the Fanlore Gardeners, but thought that others may be witnessing similar issues.

PS. Yes, she has entered thousands of fanzines since July. Amazing.

Edited PPS. In re-reading her entry, it occurs to me that adding an author's name to every fanzine novel when there are no existing duplicates is overkill. It is a good tool *when* there *are* duplicates - but it seems (if I read her comments correctly) it causes problems when used in every case as the 'norm'.

"Hey, Can I just have folks revisit this decision to put the name of an author's name on the title page [of every fanzine novel]? I think it's creating a lot of problems.

: makes it difficult for a user to search for the name of a novel she or he wants to find. Most folks don't make a distinction between "search" and "go." And even knowing the difference and then using them doesn't get the information needed. The odd search engine just snarls all this up even more.

: makes it difficult to accurately enter information, creating duplicates and worse

: creates problems down the road when (1) one enters a novel without knowing the author and then locates the author later, this causes confusion and makes more work, (2) one uses a pre-1995 name with initials and then finds out the full name can be used after all (3) one uses a name that later turns out to be one the author says she or he doesn't want used. Every single one of these instances require some fancy footwork and duplications of a lot of effort.

: brings up the political issues of putting an author on the title header but not the artist, which I've been told if the art is "noteworthy" then the artist should also be included, difficult for the same reasons as author names, but also because one often doesn't have the cover on hand AND is also asked to decide what's noteworthy and what isn't

: and why a single author on a novel, but not a single author anthology? It seems awfully arbitrary.

Can folks revisit this decision? I mean, I've added thousands of zines in the last six weeks (revising all of them will be a big headache) but I've still got thousands and thousands to go. Why not nip this now? Please?

Mrs. Potato Head"

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Fanlore's Journal

Wait Wait Don't Eat Me

Challenge: Newsletters!

I love Fanlore!

suggestions for the front page

A mini-introduction and a call for brainstorming!

loading problems

I wish tedious things were more automated in the wiki

Opinions wanted!

From the open ID/anonymous thread

Categories: this week's theme, apparently

source text sub-categories

Sorted Tables, Wiki formatting in general

Fandom by country/language?

furries?

News on front page

GeoCities Rescue Project...

Two new documentation writers join the Fanlore staff!

"Title - Author" page titles

categories so confusing

author's name on the title page [of every fanzine novel]

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February 2010

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