Fanlore's Journal

We celebrate fannish history every day at Fanlore, but April is traditionally the time that we reissue our invitation to share your old fandom faves and your personal fannish history.

Though we usually hold an April Showers of Fannish History event at Fanlore and AO3, the OTW has come to the org-wide decision that it's time for the traditional event to come to an end. We are all sad to see it go, but we believe that the challenge in its current format--involving choosing thirty different fandoms to highlight on each day in April--is something that we've outgrown, and a fandom-a-day challenge no longer best serves Fanlore.

Even though there is no formal challenge this year, let us take this opportunity to encourage you to share your fannish history! If you haven't done so already, add a "Fannish History" section to your Fanlore user page (and if you don't have a Fanlore account, make one)! Go through your old bookmarks and create stubs or add additional information about you old favorite fanworks and fansites! Help us work to preserve fannish history all year round.

We would also like to announce an April Editing Party! Join us on Sunday, April 24th at 16:00 UTC (when is that in my timezone?) in the Fanlore chatroom to chat about fannish history and your current editing projects.

In other news, the Wiki Committee has a lot of overdue announcements for you! Look for one coming in the next couple of days, and we'll resume our monthly newsletters starting at the beginning of May.

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!

As part of our Stub September challenge, the Wiki Committee will be holding an editing party in the Fanlore chat room on Saturday, 12 September at 17:00 UTC (What time is that where I live?).

Come hang out with other Fanlore editors, get help with your first wiki edits, or talk about your Stub September edits and plans! Fanlore staff will be present to answer any questions about Fanlore editing and will be happy to assist new users. Everyone is welcome!

We hope to see you there!

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 February 23rd.

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, 21 February at 17:00 UTC (What time is that where I live?). We hope to see you there!

You are cordially invited to an editing chat for questions, discussions, or just to talk about Fanlore editing on Saturday, October 11, 2014 from 6:30 to 8:30pm UTC (what time is that in my timezone?), in the Fanlore chat room on Campfire.

Come join Wiki staffers, gardeners and fellow editors and find out more about how you can help develop the entries on Fanlore!

As part of our Stub September challenge, the Wiki Committee will be holding an editing party in the Fanlore chat room on Sunday, 14 September at 19:00 UTC (What time is that where I live?).

Come hang out with other Fanlore editors, get help with your first wiki edits, or talk about your Stub September edits and plans! Fanlore staff will be present to answer any questions about Fanlore editing and will be happy to assist new users. Everyone is welcome!

We hope to see you there!

As part of the OTW's 2014 April Showers, the Wiki Committee invites you to a Fanlore editing chat in the Fanlore chat room on Saturday, 19 April at 20:00 UTC (What time is that where I live?).

Come hang out with other Fanlore editors, get help with your first wiki edits, or discuss new content ideas for the April Showers fandoms so far or any other Fanlore pages! Fanlore staff will be present to answer any questions about Fanlore editing and will be happy to assist new users. Everyone is welcome!

We hope to see you there!