Fanlore forums

[aethel]

Wiki editing is fun and a fannish activity like any other. Sharing and discussing what we love is part of what we do as fans, and there are many fans who might love Fanlore if they had the chance to get to know the wiki and the community surrounding it. Right now doing that on Fanlore is difficult for people new to wiki editing, and even experienced editors sometimes feel alone in what they are doing.

Therefore, there is one thing we hope to get off the ground this year, and it’s one many of you have asked for: a wiki forum.

It could be a place where people:

- introduce themselves / get to know one another / chat informally
- ask questions about wiki editing, and answer one anothers’ questions
- collaborate/brainstorm on and squee about wiki pages
- ask questions about Fanlore policies, and receive answers from Fanlore Wiki Committee members
- find previously answered questions without having to de-lurk

Since late last term, there have also been discussions within the OTW (our parent organization) about establishing public org-wide forums and how to incorporate the desired Fanlore forum into that structure. But rather than wait on org-wide forums, we thought Fanlore could more quickly and easily set up a forum hosted by a third party.

Currently, we are looking at Vanilla Forums for hosting. It has several advantages: you could sign in with other accounts (twitter, google, fb), we could have a custom domain name, and we would be able to move it to our own servers without losing content if we needed to. Most importantly, it appears to be the only viable option for accessible forum software, but if someone familiar with accessibility issues can offer alternative suggestions, please let us know.

Once we have a Fanlore forum, we might be able to add other OTW spaces (for example an AO3 forum) to the existing account at a later date.

Now we want to hear from you:

- What do you hope to see in a forum? What would make you want to use it? (What would put you off from using it?)
- Which topics and threads would you like to have?
- Some ideas: FAQ, introduction thread, compilation of talk page discussions, pages in progress, announcements, news, fannish history discussions, suggestions, gardeners, …

At present, the wiki committee doesn’t have experience setting up or running a forum, so input from anyone with forum expertise would be appreciated and fans willing to help as a moderator would be welcomed with open arms.

We’re in the early stages of planning, so really, any sort of input is appreciated!

Comments

[unjapanologist]

collaborate/brainstorm on and squee about wiki pages
ompilation of talk page discussions
fannish history discussions
suggestions

All of these would be awesome! Actually, this ties in rather well with an idea that lian and I very briefly mulled over a while ago - a sort of OTW "book club" for discussion about fandom-related books and meta. That notion has been churning around in my head ever since, and now that you mention the above as possible things to do on the Fanlore forums, I wonder if the forums wouldn't be an awesome place to have a "book club" on.

*thinking out loud here* For instance, someone who's read Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and wants to highlight or discuss some of it could make a forum post about it. People could discuss and/or add their own impressions/ideas/interesting quotes/etc. The Fanlore page for the book could link back to the discussion, and/or someone could summarize the discussion on the Fanlore page. Books without Fanlore pages could have one made by the poster or whoever else feels up for that. In that way, the forum would help generate content for Fanlore, too.

This wouldn't have to be limited to books, of course. Any sort of meta/anything with a Fanlore page would be up for grabs. There's the talk pages for discussing articles right now, but those really aren't ideal for this sort of thing: they're not very visible, and participating isn't easy for new people. Ideally, this sort of "book club"-ish fun chatting-about-meta thing would turn into a lasting resource for people who don't want to delurk but are interested in finding new fandom-related reading material. Having everything on a forum with lots of topics, a semblance of organization, and easy participation via twitter/google/fb could make a huge difference in making these chats about Fanlore content into a great resource.

It could also turn into a Help location for people who are looking for a certain kind of meta can ask for recs (e.g. "Looking for something in English on Taiwanese fandom please" or "The list of legal analysis articles on Fanlore is damn long, can someone tell me which of those talks about legal issue X?"). Or where people who want to read something but can't find it because it's out of print or behind an institutional paywall can get help.

Establishing the Fanlore forums as a discussion space for wiki pages, talk page discussions, fannish history discussions, suggestions and so on, like you suggest, could also help Fanlore tie in more effectively with the other resource-building efforts of the OTW -like the vidding and TWC bibliographies. I bet a lot of people don't even know about those, and they contain great stuff that could inspire a lot of Fanlore content. And and... Ahem. Sorry. I got into Fanlore fairly recently and am full of joy and enthusiasm.

Glancing at the features page of Vanilla Forums, I think the following functionality would be nice:

-Some forum things I keep missing in other non-forum places where good discussion goes on, like on DW or LJ, or the volunteer forums: bumping of threads with new replies, users sigs (seems like you can even turn their visibility off in VF, which many people will probably like) and of course icons.
-Badges, hell yeah. I would want ALL the badges.
-Giving users the chance to flag spam and trolling for the mods sounds really cool.
-Is it possible to have some kind of threading of replies to a certain comment? I guess not, but even without that, VF looks like it has a lot of neat communication functionality (like the User Mentions thing that alerts people when they're mentioned, or the Q&A thing).

[lian]

You mean, sort of like "book club" / fanfic club" / "AMV club" /"podfic club"? I find the goals of the club idea a little fuzzy though -- if the aim is to generate content for Fanlore, then that would shape the discussion differently than if it was just all free-form or for knowledge generation (e.g. if we had a book club on "PHP for Dummies".) I'm also not sure how pertintent "prompting" is for Fanlore -- sort of, generating "fresh" opinion specifically for compiling into an article vs. documenting what occurs "naturally"/unprompted (b/c with the latter you ghave sampling bias, but with the former you have like... selection bias?). So I really believe the primary goal of the book club needs to be made clear -- I still think it's a great idea, I'm just not sure if it isn't a bit too general for Fanlore forums specifically.


Now on to take a closer look at Vanilla Forums :)

[unjapanologist]

Nah, what I was thinking of is mainly that I really want a place to chat with people about fandom-related meta ;) Seriously. I read/gather so many books and articles and meta posts all the time, tweeting and bookmarking and annotating and whatnot, and I see other people doing the same, and yet so much of all that is fleeting and hard to recover for others who might benefit from, say, hearing about the latest legal analysis re:fic. What I tweet is off the radar in a minute, what I save on Zotero is findable for academics but not for other fans, and so on. And so much of it is just broadcasting when discussions would be a lot more fun (and useful for all). I think it would be great if we could make a space for discussing meta (books to whatnot) that's more accessible and easily searched than, for instance, a personal DW journal. Given that Fanlore is pretty much based on talking about fandom and making a resource that's accessible for as many people as possibly, no matter what platforms they're used to using, it feels like a really good fit for that kind of meta-related discussion to me.

And the nice thing about forums is that they preserve discussions in a lovely searchable way, meaning that as people have fun chatting and solving each other's problems, they end up making a lasting resource for others. Generating inspiration for Fanlore content definitely wouldn't be a primary aim, just a happy by-product in some cases. (As for prompting vs. documenting what occurs naturally - I'm not sure it matters where the inspiration for an article comes from?)

But yeah, if we're making a discussion space, we'd have to know what people would want to discuss before randomly making up things about what's off topic and what isn't. Because I also want to talk about how to learn PHP. I have an old copy of "PHP for Dummies", actually, but it didn't stick. Anyway, the goal of the book club should definitely be made clearer, but I do think it could fall within the realm of Fanlore-the-resource-on-fandom very nicely. And we don't have to start out huge or anything.

[lian]

That sounds as if it would lend itself well to a subforum then -- but one I think could also be migrated to a "general" OTW area once (heh, being optimistic) those are added, with a tie-in back to Fanlore.