Fanlore's Journal

Who's been watching the new season of Doctor Who? I've been pleased, and maybe a little surprised, at how much I've been enjoying Matt Smith's take on the Doctor. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that I'm a bit of a sucker for tweed and bow ties. :)

So I checked out the Doctor Who pages on Fanlore and for a fandom that's been around since the 60's and has had such a massive popular resurgence, those pages need a lot of fleshing out! Go check it out. The online fandom and fanfic subpages are crying for details. What about the Rose wars? How about Donna? We have a pattern for knitting the scarf, but not one for knitting the adipose that was so popular at the art auction at Con.txt a couple of years ago. Any notable vids? How did the tone of the fanfic change while the 10th Doctor was in the midst of his downward spiral of manpain?

There's lot we can do with these pages, both Old School Who fans and New Who fans alike, so let's play with this for a couple of weeks. Pick an area that strikes your fancy and have at it! :)

cesperanza once said to me that the cold, wet nose test of any fan (using the analogy of an obviously healthy puppy is one with a cold, wet nose) is their enthusiastic attempts to pimp other people into their fandoms. I think the cold, wet nose test of any fandom is the number of challenges, in the forms of fests, exchanges, big bangs, battles or what have you, that the fandom hosts in an effort to enthusiastically encourage participation in the fandom.

So in an attempt gauge our respective fandoms' health, the challenge this week is to create a new page for your fandom called "List of __Challenges" where the blank space will obviously be your fandom's name, and then start compiling lists and links of your fandom's various challenge-type events. You may, if you have a lot, want to sort them by headers, like General Fests & Exchanges, Holiday Specific, Pairing Specific, or whatever you think is appropriate for your fandom. We'll use the Community Profile template for this, like we did for the Newsletters. We would also like you add the [[Category:Challenges]] just to be consistent.

A number of fandom pages on the wiki already have a paragraph or so about some of the challenges in the fandom. If that's the case, just add a line to that paragraph that says something along the lines of "For a more extensive list of challenges, fest and exchanges, see the [[List of__Challenges]]."

This is a big challenge! There's a lot to do. But you won't have to look too hard to find the fandom challenges. We're not far past the tons of holiday fests from the winter holidays and now I'm seeing people starting to get ready for their fandoms' big bang challenges. There's always something happening. So let's see if we can round them up and give them a central home.

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. :)