Fanlore's Journal

Announcement: Fanlore Advanced Editors

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 20:00:39 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

We’re excited to announce a new way to contribute to Fanlore: Advanced Editors!

What is an Advanced Editor?
Advanced Editors are editors who have made significant contributions to Fanlore and have special editing privileges: They can move and delete pages. Advanced Editors are not official Fanlore volunteers. There are no requirements or duties attached to the status, just more editing power!

( More under the cut )

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Main Page - feedback request

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 02:48:23 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

As mentioned in some of our updates from earlier this year, we've updated the Fanlore main page! We hope this version helps new users find help and other relevant info more easily. The design change is still very much open to suggestions — if you have ideas, please add a comment to the talk page or contact us via email.

We're still working on three sections we'd like to add to the new main page. First, a 'help wanted' section will link a few stubs that need work and rotate regularly. Next, 'featured article' and 'featured image' sections, which will spotlight each week one article that editors deem thorough and helpful enough and one image with interesting description and source information.

Here's the process we're considering for the nomination and election of featured articles and images. Please let us know what you think via talk page comment or email!

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March Update: Full Steam Ahead!

Sun, 26 Mar 2017 21:17:26 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Hello everybody!

This month we’ve been super busy preparing for April Showers that start next week and we hope you are as excited for the event as we are. April Showers is an annual event where we celebrate fannish history by spotlighting a different fandom every day of the month. If you want to participate but aren’t sure how or where to start, we prepared a short help page with a lot of useful tips!

After a feedback period, we also implemented the Japanese version of Fanlore’s image policy and purpose aimed at non-English speaking doujinshi creators. It was a true labor of love and we’re really happy it’s finally online.

In other good news, we’ve mentioned in our February Update that the Wayback Machine stopped archiving AO3 links and now we are thrilled to let you know that the problem has been solved! You can learn more about the situation here.

After we implemented the new and improved New Visitor Portal, we started working on the new revamped Main Page. After brainstorming, we came up with a new draft, which you can see here. As always, we welcome any and all feedback as we work on the details. Feel free to leave your comments in the talk page of the draft or using our contact form!

As of March 26, Fanlore has 41,353 articles, which have undergone 719,987 revisions. If you're up for doing one more, why not log in? See you on Recent Changes!

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The Fanlore Committee is looking for your feedback!

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 19:22:37 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Some time ago, the Fanlore committee was approached with concerns that non-English speaking doujinshi creators might misunderstand Fanlore’s image policy (or be completely unaware of it, if they stumble upon the site randomly) and think that we allow the upload of full unauthorized scans of doujinshi.

To ease their minds and explain more about Fanlore’s policies, we drafted an explanation and had it translated into Japanese.

The explanation is as follows:

Fanlore's purpose and image policy

The purpose of the Fanlore wiki is to give fans a place to record information about their fannish activities and communities. Fanlore is an information site, not an online gallery or a place to post entire fanworks. Things like uploading a scan of a whole doujinshi or a translated scan of a whole doujinshi are absolutely not allowed on Fanlore. Links and pictures on Fanlore have to be relevant to an article, and there must always be attribution for the fan artist.

This wiki is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works, a US-based non-profit organization with members from all over the world that works to support fans. Among many other activities, the OTW provides information about the law to fans, creates software for archiving fanworks in the form of the Archive of Our Own, and publishes academic works about fans. The purpose of the Fanlore wiki is to give fans a place to record information about fan culture and history. Like all other OTW projects, the wiki is a not-for-profit project that is created entirely by fannish volunteers of many nationalities.

Many contributors to this wiki talk about Japanese fans and fanworks, and some also link to Japanese websites and post pictures such as covers of doujinshi they love. Fanlore uses the same linking and image policies as, for instance, the US version of Wikipedia. On the English-language internet, it's normal to link to any website without asking permission, and sometimes also to re-upload images of other people's work in limited ways. US copyright law also has a "fair use" clause that says copyrighted works can be re-used without permission under some circumstances, for instance news reporting, education, or parody. This fair use clause is very important to US fans, because many fans and researchers believe that the fair use clause makes it legal to create fanworks in the US.

Because preserving the fair use clause is so important for fans, Fanlore must allow fans to link to any website or upload a picture from fanart like illustrations and doujinshi, if that picture is relevant to the wiki article they're writing. If part of a fanwork is shown on Fanlore, the fanwork's original license does not change. The person who created the picture does not lose any legal rights they had to their work or its use.

If a Fanlore user has added an image from your fanwork in a way that you're uncomfortable with, please contact the Fanlore administrators, and we will do everything we can to help. If the image was added in a way that's consistent with the fair use clause, it may be impossible for the Fanlore administrators to remove it entirely. But even in such a case, we can also change the size of the image, upload a different version, crop the image, or remove identifying information from it.

If you have any questions or comments about Fanlore, or about the way your fanworks are represented on Fanlore, don't hesitate to contact the wiki administrators. You can use this form to send us a message in Japanese or English. (If you write to us in Japanese, it may take us a little longer to reply because our Japanese volunteers need to translate your message.)

We look forward to hearing from you! If you'd like to write about your experiences as a fan or make corrections to Fanlore articles, please go here to make a free account and add your voice.

Fanloreの目的と画像利用ポリシーについて

Fanlore wikiは様々な作品のファンのために提供された、ファン活動やファンコミュニティに関する情報を記録する場であり、オンラインギャラリーや、ファン作品の内容まるごとを投稿するためのサイトとは違います。目的はあくまで情報の記録であり、当wikiでは同人誌全体をスキャンした画像や、スキャンした同人誌を翻訳した画像をアップロードする行為を固く禁じています。記事への掲載が許可されるのは記事内容に関連のあるリンクまたは画像のみで、画像の著作権はいつでも必ず、作者であるファンアーティストに帰属します。

Fanlore wikiプロジェクトは変形的作品のためのNPO （OTW)によって運営されています。OTWは世界中にメンバーを持つアメリカ合衆国を拠点とした非営利団体で、あらゆる作品のファンをサポートするために活動しています。なかでも代表的なプロジェクトに、ファンに対する法律関係の情報提供、AO3に投稿されたファン作品を保存するためのソフトウェア作成、ファンに関する学術的ジャーナルの発行などがあります。FanloreもまたOTWの他のプロジェクトと同様に、様々な国のファンからなるボランティアによって制作された非営利プロジェクトであり、ファンのみなさんにファン文化とその歴史に関する情報を記録する場を提供することを目的として運営されています。

Fanlore wikiでは、日本のファンやファンがつくった作品についてに多くの編集者が記事の投稿や編集、議論などを行っています。そのため、日本のウェブサイトへのリンクが含まれている記事や、編集者お気に入りの同人誌の表紙画像がアップロードされている記事も少なくありません。リンクと画像の扱いに関して、Fanloreはウィキペディアの米国版に適用されているものと同じルールを守っています。英語圏のインターネット上においてウェブサイトに無断でリンクを貼ることは違法ではなく、一部の条件下では他人によって作成された画像であっても、その作者に断りを取らずに再アップロードすることができるのです。米著作権法の「フェアユース」条項においても、ニュース報道、教育、またはパロディが目的であるケースにおいて、著作物の再利用は合法とされています。アメリカ合衆国のファンやファン創作研究者の多くはファン創作を合法だと考えていますが、その根拠となっているのがこのフェアユースです。そのためアメリカのファンたちにとって、フェアユースはとても重要な法律です。

フェアユースの権利を守ることは、ファンにとって非常に重要な意味を持っています。そのためFanloreには記事のトピックに関連する限りにおいて、任意ウェブサイトのリンク掲載や、イラストや同人誌のようなファンイラストの一部アップロードを許可する義務があります。ファン作品の一部がFanloreに掲載されたとしても作品の元の著作権が変更されることはなく、作品やその使用に関する法的権利はすべて画像の作成者に帰属します。

あなたのファン作品がFanloreユーザーがよってアップロードされたことを不快に感じられた場合は、Fanloreの管理者までご連絡いただければ全力でサポートさせていただきます。ただし、画像のアップロードがフェアユース条項に照らして問題のない方法でアップロードされていた場合には、画像の完全な削除ができないこともありえます。しかしそういった場合でも、画像サイズの変更やアップロード画像の差し替え、画像のトリミング、作成者を識別できる情報の削除といった手段で対応することは可能です。

Fanloreそのもの、またはFanlore上に表示された皆様のファン作品についてご意見・ご質問等がありましたら、こちらのフォームからFanloreの管理者までお気軽にご連絡下さい。メッセージは日本語、英語のどちらでもご送信いただけます。（ただし日本語で送っていただいた場合、翻訳ボランティアにメッセージを翻訳してもらう必要があるため、返信までに少々お時間をいただく場合があります。）

ご意見、ご感想はいつでもお待ちしております！ファンとしての経験を活かしてFanloreの記事を書きたい、Fanloreの記事を修正したいという方は、無料アカウントを作成してぜひ編集にご参加ください。

We plan to post both English and Japanese versions on a separate/dedicated Fanlore page. It will be linked to from the main image policy page as well as in the doujinshi infobox template to ensure that Japanese fans will be able to see it.

Before the page goes up on Fanlore, we want to hear from the fans!

If you are a member of the Japanese fandom, or know somebody who is knowledgeable about doujinshi, please read through the note and let us know if it addresses all the concerns one might have.

Spread the word among your Japanese friends on social media and ask for their input as well. If they are uncomfortable communicating with us in English, please let them know they can leave us comments in Japanese.

If you don’t want to leave comments here, you can always email us your thoughts at wiki@transformativeworks.org

For the next two weeks, we will be gathering input from everybody before proceeding with implementation. Thank you in advance for all the help, and see you on Recent Changes!

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February Update: Looking for new potential staffers

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 23:07:35 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Hi, everyone,

In the past few weeks, we've done some small changes, including improving our New Visitors Portal and increasing the frequency of news posted to the Fanlore main page. We're also starting to prepare for the upcoming April Showers celebration.

This week, we're recruiting for new Fanlore committee staffers. These volunteers are responsible for dealing with various behind the scenes stuff to ensure that Fanlore runs smoothly. They respond to questions and complaints; help draft and improve Fanlore policies, categories, and tutorials; assist Fanlore gardeners and other editors; promote Fanlore; and do their best to improve it and plan ahead. No extensive experience is required—only reliability, teamwork, and an interest in fannish history and Fanlore in particular.

If you think you might be interested, please check out the position details and fill out a volunteer application on our website. Join us!

Lastly, an important note: the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has stopped archiving all links to our sister project, the Archive of Our Own. There are several of these on Fanlore, and we of course strongly believe the Archive should be preserved, so we, in addition to the AO3 development team and the OTW Board, are doing our best to reach out to the Internet Archive team and learn the reason for this error.

As of February 22, Fanlore has 40,970 articles, which have undergone 714,168 revisions. If you're up for doing one more, why not log in? See you on Recent Changes!

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January Update from the Fanlore Committee

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 21:11:03 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Hello everybody and welcome to 2017!

Hope you have your New Year’s resolutions ready. Our own 2017 plans include a lot of reviewing and improving of Fanlore to make sure it’s as accessible as possible. We’re starting off with redesigning of the Main Page as well as the New Visitor Portal.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

new draft of the Portal page

the old version

the Talk page

the talk page

Please remember, your input is incredibly valuable; not only due to your fandom knowledge (which we hope you’ll share on the various Fanlore pages), but also because sometimes, two heads are better than one. With that mind, try checking out recent questions asked in various Fanlore talk pages. Your voice and opinion matters more than you think!

As of January 22, 2017, Fanlore has 40,734 articles which have undergone 709,760 edits. See you on Recent Changes!

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Updates from the Fanlore committee

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 17:08:20 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Apologies for the radio silence! Things have been quiet in the committee, but we're back, and we've been doing some internal reshuffling and changing some things up to help Fanlore be more organized and responsive. Please let us know what you think!

Gardeners as OTW volunteers

One structural change we're undergoing is transitioning Fanlore gardeners to become OTW volunteers. This doesn't change what gardeners do in practice, but it will give us more tools to keep in touch as a group and provide training to new gardeners. We're contacting each gardener as part of this transition—if you haven't received an email yet, please email us as soon as possible.

Please share your thoughts

We'd like to hear your thoughts about what Fanlore's biggest challenges and priorities are, to help define what our next steps should be. What do you think we should change? Which Fanlore issues need addressing the most urgently? Please reply to this short survey if you can!

Guest post about Library of Congress archival

Check out this post with Nicole Sayor, head of the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center, talking about the Web Cultures collection, which Fanlore is a part of, and their work.

Image upload form change

The image upload form has been edited so that the default box is pre-filled with the image summary template. We hope that's helpful to everyone!

In other news…

We're renaming the Wiki committee to "Fanlore committee" for clarity.

The committee has a new acting chair, Priscilla. Jsparc is staying on a staffer, and Tiyire has left the committee.

Other recent personnel changes: Doro is moving from staffer to gardener; SoyAlex is returning as a staffer; Oxymora is also joining as a staffer. Say hi if you see them around!

We're still editing Fanlore to fit these changes, by the way, so apologies if you notice pages that are out of date in the next few days.

As of November 15, 2016, Fanlore has 40,120 articles, which have undergone 697,626 edits. See you on Recent Changes!

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Updates from the Wiki Committee

Tue, 03 May 2016 06:11:50 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

MediaWiki upgrade updates!

We've resolved most of the bugs resulting from the MediaWiki upgrade last week, and are working hard to tie up the remaining loose ends. Thank you to everyone who sent in information! We will be following up on each report individually, and if you notice any other issues, please let us know!

One major issue still outstanding is a problem with page titles containing non-Latin characters or certain punctuation not displaying correctly. This problem is also responsible for the "Database errors" that sometimes appear on other pages linking to them. In order to resolve this, we'll be doing some work on our internal database today, May 3rd, in the evening UTC. During that time, there will be another one- or two-hour window when editing will be turned off, but there should be no downtime.

UPDATE: The database maintenance has been completed successfully, and the character encoding issues have been resolved! Most affected pages have been automatically changed to their correct titles, but there are a few cases (e.g. some titles consisting entirely of Cyrillic, Japanese, or Greek characters) that will need to be moved manually. If you see any pages that still need updating, let us know!

You may have also noticed that the Fanlore Search now has an autocomplete feature! We had some issues with the autocomplete function in the past (which caused it to negatively affect site speed and performance), but the recent upgrades have made several improvements, so we have turned the autocomplete back on on a trial basis. Please let us know if you notice any lags or performance issues with the site!

We will continue to post updates and additional information about the changes and Fanlore's new features, so watch this space!

In other news...

The Wiki Committee has been hard at work on a number of other internal projects and outside requests. We are also working to improve our internal documentation and procedures.

Since our last update, Sierra W. has stepped down from the Wiki Committee, bring our current committee to a total of 7 members. Sierra will remain a Fanlore editor and a Gardener, so look out for her around the wiki!

We would also like to thank everyone who donated or spread the word about the OTW's April Membership Drive! It's fans like you who keep Fanlore and the other OTW projects running, and we are very grateful. If you missed it, remember that you can donate to the OTW at any time!

As of May 2nd, 2016, Fanlore has 38,226 articles which have undergone 663,180 edits. We hope to see you on the (updated!) Recent Changes page!

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Fanlore's MediaWiki upgrade is complete!

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 04:42:07 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Fanlore's upgrade to MediaWiki version 1.26.2 has been successfully completed!

As described in our last post, you will see some aesthetic and functional changes to Fanlore with this new update.

We have also deployed three new MediaWiki extensions: Disambiguator, MobileFrontend, and Thanks. More information about these new features will be posted soon. We are also still looking into the VisualEditor extension, and will be inviting the Fanlore Gardeners to help with testing and feedback before the feature goes live.

Please let us know if you experience any problems with the upgraded site, either in the comments below or via our contact form. We are already aware of and investigating a few small formatting and behavioral bugs, and we will have updates for you soon.

Many thanks to Emufarmers for all his hard work on the upgrade!

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MediaWiki Upgrade!

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 06:46:25 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

The Wiki Committee has an important announcement!

We will be upgrading Fanlore's MediaWiki software on the evening (UTC) of Tuesday, April 26th. If everything goes according to plan, there should be no downtime, but you will not be able to edit Fanlore for a few hours.

Why the upgrade?
MediaWiki is the software Fanlore and many other wikis, including Wikipedia, are built on.

Fanlore is currently using MediaWiki version 1.19.3, which was released way back in 2012. This version is no longer supported by MediaWiki, which means that we will miss out on security and other critical updates.

We believe that it is important for Fanlore to be upgraded to the latest stable version of the MediaWiki software, version 1.26.2.

What will change?
In addition to bug fixes and performance and security improvements, MediaWiki 1.26 will provide Fanlore with several new tools and features, including:

Spam protection improvements
Category pages can be moved!
Changes to RecentChanges to remove the clutter (several edits to one page can be collapsed)
Live page preview when editing (optional, via preferences)
Detailed page information (action=info), including the number of users watching a particular page (for example, see the page info for a Wikipedia page)

You can see the release notes at MediaWiki.org for a complete list of changes.

A note on Fanlore's hit counters
The newest version of MediaWiki will remove page hit counters, including those found at the end of each article ("This page has been accessed XXX times."), Special:PopularPages, and the "Most Viewed Pages" section of Special:Statistics.

There is an extension we could add to preserve the hit counters, but unfortunately Fanlore's hit counters are not accurate, and the new extension wouldn't fix them. This is because our server is behind a reverse proxy, which caches pages in their processed form and serves them to visitors. This means that MediaWiki never actually sees most requests, so the total hit count we do see is inaccurate and misleading. Therefore, we will not be adding the extension, and this unfortunately means the end of hit counters and Special:PopularPages on Fanlore.

Adding Extensions
The MediaWiki upgrade will give us the option to add a number of new extensions to Fanlore to add new features and further customize the wiki.

In order to ensure that the MediaWiki upgrade goes as smoothly as possible, new extensions will be added only after the upgrade is complete. However, we would like to invite you to start thinking about what extensions you would like to see on Fanlore, and to let us know your thoughts.

Some extensions that have been previously requested and the Wiki Committee will be looking into include:

Disambiguator - The new version of MediaWiki will remove Special:Disambiguations by default, but this will add it back, plus a couple of new tools relating to disambiguation pages.
VisualEditor - A rich-text editor for wikis that gives editors an alternative to cumbersome wiki formatting.
MobileFrontend - Provides a toggle-able mobile-friendly layout for Fanlore.
Thanks - Kudos for Fanlore! Allows logged-in users to thank others for individual edits.

Let us know if you have thoughts on the above extensions or have suggestions for other extensions that might benefit Fanlore!

We're very excited for this upgrade, and hope you are too! Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

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What the Wiki committee did in October and November

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 02:56:55 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

The Wiki Committee has been busy the past two months! We apologize for missing the November newsletter, but we now have a number of updates for you:

Changes to the OTW Board of Directors

As some of you may have heard, the current OTW Board has resigned, effective December 15th. Despite these changes, all of the OTW's projects, including Fanlore, the Archive of Our Own, and Transformative Works and Cultures are operating normally. The Board certainly plays an important role in the management of the OTW, but their role is more focused on oversight and administration – it’s truly our volunteers who keep Fanlore going, and we’re all eternally grateful for their continued dedication and hard work!

For more information, you can read the most recent update from the 2016 Board members-elect, and the Fanlore article on the 2015 Board Election and aftermath, which provides a great background. Thank you to everyone who has been working on it! Further additions and perspectives are welcome, as always.

Fanlore technical issues

Some editors may have noticed slowdowns and error messages on Fanlore at the end of October. These were further symptoms of the site issues that affected AO3, which the OTW's hard-working Systems team were able to identify and resolve for the time being. You can read a report of the incident here at AO3 News.

There have also been issues with Fanlore's search engine recently - thank you to those who brought the problems to our attention! Unfortunately, it looks like our search index auto-updating isn't working as it should, so some search results have been out-of-date. We're still looking into the cause of the problem, but for now we've set the search index to fully update once per week. This means that you won't be able to search during the 2 minutes per week that it takes to update, but at least the index won't ever be more than a week out-of-date.

In other search engine news, we've increased the maximum number of search results returned from 1000 to 3000 results. The limit is to prevent undue strain on the servers when e.g. people search the wiki for "fan" (this gives 15,682 hits in the main namespace, if you're curious!). We believe the new limit will be more than enough for the majority of searches. For more about searching Fanlore, see Help:Searching.

Fanlore editing projects & category discussions

Earlier this month, editors started a discussion about renaming the Celebrities & Real People category. There is no consensus yet and more input is welcome.

Fanlore also has a shiny new Statistics category for Fandom Statistics and editors have been working on documenting a massive meta discussion on Tumblr about the history of fandom. In anticipation of the new Star Wars movie, editors have also been working on the Star Wars The Phantom Menace pages because back in 1999 it was the fandom that ate fandom. So if you are in the mood for a walk down memory lane, check out the pages in the Star Wars TPM Websites, Archives or Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan Fanfiction category.

What other Fanlore editing projects have you been working on?

Monthly editing chats

The Wiki Committee would like to to hold and attend more regular public editing chats, in order to increase transparency and communication between the committee and Fanlore editors. To this end, we will hold an editing chat before at least one of our twice-monthly committee meetings going forward.

The next editing party will be on on Sunday, December 13th at 17:00 UTC (what time is that in my timezone?) in the Fanlore chat room.

We know that these times might not work for everyone, so we encourage Fanlore editors to arrange their own editing parties! Anyone is welcome to choose a time for an editing party and announce it by posting to this Dreamwidth community. You can also ping fanlore_news to re-tweet editing party announcements. We hope that this way editors in all timezones can be accommodated!

What's to come?

In December, the Wiki Committee will continue to work on outstanding tasks and respond to outside queries, and hopes to finish up some other behind-the-scenes projects before the new year.

As of December 3rd, 2015, Fanlore has 36,785 articles which have undergone 635,750 edits. We hope to see you on the Recent Changes page!

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Upcoming Downtime

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 03:24:30 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Fanlore will be offline for approximately one hour this Sunday, July 5th beginning at 6:45am UTC (What time is that where I live?) while we perform some server maintenance and firewall upgrades.

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Downtime & Server Upgrade Updates

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 05:47:24 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

You may have noticed some brief downtime this week, when AO3 needed to do some emergency database maintenance. Luckily, Systems was able to finish up database work on Thursday without any additional downtime \o/.

This was not related to our server upgrade earlier this month, which was successful and gave us plenty of new disk space. We are still working on transferring over our spambot-prevention tools, so if you've noticed a minor uptick in spam on the wiki not to worry, things will be back to normal shortly.

We should be downtime-free for the foreseeable future, but, as always, contact the Wiki committee if you experience any problems with the site.

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Brief downtime January 2nd

Sun, 28 Dec 2014 22:59:46 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Some of you may have noticed some problems accessing Fanlore this past month. To fix this, the OTW Systems committee will move Fanlore to a new server. For this reason there will be a downtime on January 2nd, starting from 7am UTC (What time is that in my timezone?), that may last a few hours.

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EmailUser Problems with Yahoo!

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 18:34:07 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

It has come to our attention that Fanlore's "Email User" feature (Special:EmailUser) is currently not working for users with Yahoo! email addresses. Unfortunately, this means that if you have a Yahoo! address registered with Fanlore and have attempted to use this feature within the last several weeks, your message may not have gone through.

This affects only users sending messages through the Email User feature; Yahoo! addresses should receive these and other Fanlore emails without issue. If you are currently using a Yahoo! email address at Fanlore, we recommend changing your email address under your user preferences.

This issue is not isolated to Fanlore, and affects many other wikis and mailing lists. (See here for some of the technical details.) Because this is a problem on Yahoo!'s end, there may not be much we can do, though we will continue to search for workarounds.

Please let us know if you are experiencing any other issues with sending or receiving Fanlore emails. We will be sure to keep you apprised of any updates.

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New Wiki committee members

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 19:26:10 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

The Wiki committee is excited to welcome two new members:

- Emma S. Tyler (Emma S. Tyler)
- Willowcabins (Willowcabins)

With eight members (plus two liaisons) we currently have one of the largest Wiki committees yet. We are looking forward to finding out what we can accomplish together.

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Recruiting new committee members & chat

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 19:00:43 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Are you interested in how Fanlore works behind the scenes? The Wiki committee is recruiting!

Wiki staff members are responsible for the day-to-day work of the Wiki committee. We respond to questions and complaints; shape Fanlore policies, categories, and tutorials; assist the gardeners; try to promote Fanlore; plan larger projects, and generally try to be as helpful as possible. No special experience is required, only the ability to work in a team and an interest in fannish history and Fanlore in particular.

If you are interested, please take a look at the volunteers page. Applications will be open until June 30th.

If you're not interested in a staff position, but would like to be a gardener, please contact the Wiki Committee.

To answer any questions you might have about volunteering, questions about Fanlore and editing in general, or to chat with fellow editors, we invite you to the Fanlore chat room on Saturday, 28 June at 14:00 UTC (What time is that where I live?). We hope to see you there!

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Fanlore - End of the Year/Annual Review Post

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 20:31:55 GMT

Posted by: fanloremod

Dear Fanlore readers, editors, and gardeners,

The 2013 OTW term has ended (a while ago - sorry this is late), and we wanted to take the opportunity to say THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to Fanlore this year, talked about it with friends, offered encouragement, and made this site great. Fanlore has over 27,000 articles today; that's over 5,000 more than this time last year. We recently passed half a million edits! You are all fantastic. Please go and take a look at all the great content our editors added this year and consider adding a little something while you're there!

Some things the Wiki committee did this year to help:

revised our recruitment process, our training for newcomers, and our internal documentation and procedures

worked on technical problems

dealt with identity protection and fair use concerns

responded to a variety of other outside requests/concerns

A big shout-out to our excellent gardeners, who help us in so many ways and without whom we could not keep this site running.

A few updates on things:

The Strategic planning committee has released the report on Wiki/Fanlore and you can read about it here.

We are still on lookout for a designer to help us redesign Fanlore. Don't forget to keep an eye on staffer recruitments.

We have not made any progress on the Fanlore forums because we did not have the capacity, but we have not forgotten about them.

We are planning to further improve our internal documentation and the help and introduction pages on Fanlore, as well as communication and outreach.

This year, the Wiki Committee was happy to welcome jsparc and Sierra as new members:

jsparc (jsparc) has been a Fanlore editor since 2010 and a Fanlore Gardener since 2012, and is excited to now join the Wiki Committee. She has been involved with fandom since the early 2000s, when she discovered Harry Potter fandom, and since then has been part of a variety of other fandoms. You can find her on Fanlore as User:Sparcicle.

Sierra W. has been interested in Fanlore since 2012, when she wrote a paper on Fanlore as a digital archive for graduate school. She's been a fan for a long time but didn't join the wider fan community until she got into Sherlock in 2012. She's excited to contribute to Fanlore and to the OTW in any way she can. You can find her on Fanlore as User:Cerignola.

As you can see, we have several open projects to finish for next term. With the addition of our new staffers, we hope to get them sorted as soon as possible, but it is very important to ensure that Wiki can keep up with the work, and we hope that you will continue to be patient with us while we finish sorting out these matters. That said, we are optimistic that we will become even more efficient next term as a result.

If you're interested in helping us keep Fanlore running and expanding, please consider volunteering for Wiki! We will post more detailed explanations before recruiting opens again.

In short: THANK YOU for making Fanlore as fantastic as it is!

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Interested in being involved in Fanlore behind the scenes? Wiki is recruiting!

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:13:01 GMT

Posted by: tiyire

During the past few months the Wiki committee has not completed several projects that we wanted to complete and has not communicated with Fanlore users as much as we wanted to. There have been various reasons for this, including a shortage of personnel, overscheduled staffers, and unfinished past business. We sincerely apologize and are determined to do better.

We have worked on improving our internal documentation and training material and are now proud to say that we are able to open recruiting for new Wiki members. Specifically, we are looking for two staff members and one design specialist.

Staff members are responsible for the day-to-day work of the Wiki committee. We respond to questions and complaints; shape Fanlore policies, categories, and tutorials; assist the gardeners; try to promote Fanlore; plan larger projects, and generally try to be as helpful as possible. No special experience is required, only the ability to work in a team and an interest in fannish history and Fanlore in particular.

If you are interested, please take a look at the volunteers page.

We are also looking for a design specialist to create a new design and skin for Fanlore, with special emphasis on usability and accessibility. If you have experience with front-end web development and web design, please check out the volunteers page.

If you're not interested in a staff position, but would like to be a gardener, please contact the Wiki committee.

Applications for staff positions are due November 4th. If you have any questions about volunteering we'll be happy to answer them.

We are looking forward to working with our new members, and we hope that with their help we'll be able to continue moving Fanlore forward in the next year.

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OTW April Membership Drive

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:25:26 GMT

Posted by: tiyire

The OTW, Fanlore's parent organization, is currently running its biannual fundraiser and used the opportunity to emphasize how great Fanlore is.

Fanlore, a Love Story

A quick search for the term "love" on Fanlore brings up nearly 7,000 results. In comparison, the term "write" brings up just under 5,000 results, there are just over 2,000 uses of "vid," and "art" is mentioned roughly 6,500 times. This seems appropriate, as the heart of fandom is about loving something. We are fans because we pour our passion into something we love, whether it be a band, a video game, or a novel.

In the age of the internet, one great way to say you love something - aside from 'i <3 u,' that is - is to create a wiki about it. Fanlore, OTW's wiki, is a living record of all things fannish, dynamic and regularly changing. The "stories" that reside on Fanlore are ones told by fans whose love for a genre, work, fandom activity, or moment in fan history led them to create an entry and tell the story in their own words. Fanlore itself is the story beneath the story: it is the fan-run support structure that allows these stories to be stored and accessed by other fans.

The fan community deserves to see our tale told and to have somewhere we can use our own voice to tell the tale. Fanlore provides a place to do so, one cared for and maintained by fans themselves in yet another show of - you guessed it - love.

Help keep Fanlore growing and thriving - please donate today.

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Wiki News February 2013

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:12:15 GMT

Posted by: tiyire

The 2013 OTW term has begun! The current Wiki committee members are Tiyire (chair), Doro, and Emufarmers.
We are very happy to work with two excellent new liaisons from other committees: Alison from Volunteers & Recruiting, who helps us be more organized, and Agnieszka from Communications, who reanimated our twitter account. Check it out: fanlore_news. In addition, Maia Bobrowicz joined Ira Gladkova as our second Board liaison. Welcome!

Wiki is making progress working on our procedures and documentation and tying up loose ends from last year. We're talking with several committees about better cooperation and how they can help us with our projects for this term, and so far this works out great.

From time to time questions about Fanlore's Image Policy appear on other sites and in conversations, and we are aware that confusion exists on what takes place on Fanlore. We are concerned about this matter and want to balance, as well as we can, the desires of individuals with the overall mission of the Fanlore project to document and preserve fannish history.

We want to be responsive to people's concerns but these are not usually quick matters to address, as various parts of the organization need to be consulted when it comes to policy reviews and the impact of potential changes. What we can do more quickly we will. In the meantime, several editors have added missing templates and permission statuses to image files - thank you!

As per our image policy, images that are uploaded without the permission of the creator need to meet fair use rules. As with most open posting sites, Wiki can't check every upload; we make sure that fair use rules are met when we are contacted about specific images. Legal advises Wiki on fair use disputes brought before us and every case has been solved to the best of our ability. On that note, if you do have concerns about the use of one of your images, please follow the process laid out in the Image Policy.

Legal and Wiki will be in discussion in coming months regarding the image policy as part of our committee's overall review of procedures and documentation. The concerns that have been expressed by fanartists, fans, and other parties will certainly be considered as part of that process. We will be posting more about the results of that review and clarifications for editors when it becomes possible to do.

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Fanlore end-of-term 2012 update

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 23:41:49 GMT

Posted by: tiyire

Dear Fanlore readers, editors, and gardeners,

The 2012 OTW term has officially ended, and we wanted to take the opportunity to say THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to Fanlore this year, talked about it with friends, offered encouragement, and made this site great. Fanlore has over 22,000 articles today; that's over 6,000 more than in July 2011, from when we have comparison data. You are all fantastic. Please go and take a look at all the great content our editors added this year!

Some things the Wiki committee did this year to help:

upgraded MediaWiki

fought spambots

created new categories, templates, and infoboxes

dealt with identity protection and fair use concerns

Before some of us go on holidays, a few updates on things:

MediaWiki upgrade: You might have noticed some changes since we had to revert back to the default skin after the upgrade to another version of MediaWiki. We hope to be able to come closer to our old design, but with term break and the holidays coming it's difficult to say when that will be. We are confident that the current design of Fanlore is good enough for now, but please tell us if you encounter any problems and we'll try to fix it.

Forums: We were planning to open a Fanlore forum this term – we already have the basic set-up – but the question of how, and who, to moderate it has delayed the process considerably. We will tackle this question again next term, hopefully with more success.

Categories: We are aware that there are several open proposals regarding categories at the moment. We are sorry that we didn't have the energy to follow up on all of them. We definitely haven't overlooked them, and these are also on next term's agenda.

Surveys: We don't know yet when we'll receive the results of the surveys from the Survey committee and from the Strategic Planning committee, but we will of course make them public when possible.

We are sorry to say that aethel, our Chair, will leave the committee next term. We are grateful for all her work and happy that she's staying on as a gardener and editor of Fanlore. Tiyire will take over as Chair of the committee.

As you can see, we already have several open projects to finish for next term. With the help of Volunteers & Recruiting we will also revise our recruitment process, our training for newcomers, and our internal documentation and procedures. This might take some time, but it is very important to ensure that Wiki can keep up with the work, and we hope that you will be patient with us while we sort out these internal matters. That said, we are optimistic that we will become even more efficient next term as a result.

If you're interested in helping us keep Fanlore running and expanding, please consider volunteering for Wiki next term! We will post more detailed explanations before recruiting opens again.

In short: THANK YOU for making Fanlore as fantastic as it is! <3

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Fanlore downtime

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 01:02:22 GMT

Posted by: aethel

During the last few days Fanlore users may have been experiencing temporary problems connecting to the site. The reason is that we have been running out of space on Fanlore's hard disk drive. In some ways this has been a good problem to have because it indicates how the site has been growing!

Our systems team did some short-term clean-up that should solve the problem for now, but they are also planning another maintenance operation on Wednesday, December 19, 6am UTC (What time is that where I live?) Fanlore will be offline for about an hour.

It's possible that between now and that next maintenance period you may still encounter some small problems. If so, please do report them to us, either on Dreamwidth or by a direct email to the Wiki staff.

We appreciate our users' patience as we experience these growing pains!

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Fanlore editing party

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 23:23:57 GMT

Posted by: tiyire

Another OTW term is ending and all of our volunteers and editors accomplished many great things this year working on Fanlore. To celebrate, the Wiki Committee is inviting you to join a Fanlore editing chat on December 16, 1300-1700 UTC in the Fanlore chat room (What time is that where I live?). Hang out and talk with other editors and volunteers while writing about your favorite new and old fandoms!

Wiki staffers will be present to answer questions about Fanlore editing and would be happy to see you there!

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What the Wiki Committee did in November

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 15:28:56 GMT

Posted by: tiyire

We finally upgraded Fanlore's MediaWiki version! You can find more information here. Not everything went according to plan and the new skin had to be removed temporarily, but we're working on it.

The Strategic Planning committee deployed their surveys for staff members, gardeners, and editors. As of a few days ago they received feedback from more than forty people. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey! It will provide us with valuable information about how to improve Fanlore and the Wiki committee in the future.

Categories were also discussed and modified, thanks to everyone who weighed in. Fanlore relies on its users to point out which categories they need, as the Wiki committee could never do this on its own, so please always feel free to make suggestions!

Additionally the Wiki committee is still working on two fair use cases together with Legal.

We are also already preparing for the next term. This OTW term officially ends on December 14. However, we will definitely try to eliminate all major problems with the new site before we (try to) take a break. We will still respond to urgent user queries and concerns like identity protection. However, if you have a new idea about categories or other things the Wiki committee should be doing, please consider waiting until the new term begins, which is scheduled to be in the middle of January. Wiki staff members have worked very hard this year and deserve a holiday!

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