CFAN's Fandom Glossary

[anenko]

I've been hit by a wave of nostalgia recently, and have been tossing up stubs on Fanlore for a lot of my old haunts--especially for the X-Men comics fandom (I couldn't believe that no one had already tackled CFAN!)

On my search for screencaps, I rediscovered CFAN's fandom glossary. I was thinking about moving over the information there to Fanlore, but wondered how useful people would actually find it. A lot of the terms are obsolete (so far as I know). I don't see "egoboo," "sillyfic," "feedback fic" or "archive fic" used these days.

Beyond that, I don't feel completely right copying CFAN's content (even rephrased and cited).

Opinions?

Comments

[kass]

Oh, man, I remember "egoboo"! I think it would be cool to have glossary entries for some of this lingo -- even if it's not in common usage anymore, it used to be, and that's part of what Fanlore is here to chronicle, imo.

[anenko]

Picking out which terms to save is a bit overwhelming, though. I remember a lot of the comic terms, but the Trek/Dr Who/RP stuff I have no idea about.

[zooey_glass]

Oh, I totally think this should be moved over wholesale, with a note that it was CFan's. It's totally a part of fandom history, and the fact that so many terms are already falling out of use is an excellent reason to save it!

[arduinna]

I still use "egoboo", I just use it on bookmarks I mark privately on delicious so no one can see that I'm, um, tagging egoboo. *kof* *shifty eyes*

Although I use it in conversation, as well, fwiw. (Hm - maybe LJ-based people don't use it because they're used to getting direct, public comments? So it's all just feedback? IDK. But to me, any rec of my work is egoboo.)

But also, I think a big part of Fanlore should be showing fandom as it was, as well as how it is, so I'm all for including terms even if they've fallen out of general usage.

Regarding copying the content over - it's definitions. I think it's totally fair game. If there's something that feels too much like you're taking something specifically that CFAN had come up with, rather than a general fannish term that could have been identified on a number of different sites in a similar way, you can always put a note on that you got the term/definition from CFAN with a link to Wayback.

But really, there were a lot of fannish glossaries around back in the day, so I'd be surprised if any given term wasn't on at least two or three different sites. I think it's safe to pull over, especially if it gets rephrased and/or cited.

[brownbetty]

Given that CFan's no longer actively maintained nor has a webmaster, I don't think it would be a bad idea to import a whole bunch, citing the origin, of course.

[cesperanza]

This. Think of it as part of the documentation of what CFan was, rather than about the terms in themselves, if you see what I mean. It's a snapshot of CFan's fannish culture at a certain moment in time!

[copracat]

Definitions of obsolete terms will help future fans translate old text.