Fanlore's Journal

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 )

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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!