Fanlore's Journal

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!

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!

The Wiki committee has had a busy month working on the usual outside requests (we admit, we do still have a bit of a backlog!), our internal documentation, and some exciting new projects!

First, thank you to those who came to our July editing chat! Among other things, we discussed old school slash, ambitious pages, and Fanlore's own site graphics. (Did you know that we have no copy of Fanlore's original header from when the site was in beta? Fanlore's Fanlore article has been updated to include some of our historical graphics, but we would love to see more of Fanlore's own history preserved! If you were around during Fanlore's early days please do share your memories of the site, and if you happen to have any old images or screenshots we'd love those too!)

During the editing chat we also discovered a couple of old Fanlore-themed icons created by the wonderful kylara that had never been added to our graphics page. The page has now been updated to include them, and (as with all the graphics on that page) you are very welcome to use them!

In other news, we have received reports that some newly-created pages aren't being properly indexed by Fanlore's search engine. We're looking into this, and in the meantime you may want to use Google to supplement your Fanlore searches (see Fanlore's help page for more info).

What's to come?

Wiki has been busy planning Fanlore's annual Stub September challenge! See the the official announcement for more information, and stay tuned for the first of the weekly themes this weekend!

To celebrate Stub September and also provide an opportunity for new editors to ask questions, we will be holding an editing party on Saturday, September 12th at 17:00 UTC (what time is that in my timezone?) in the Fanlore chat room.

As of September 1st, 2015, Fanlore has 35,761 articles which have undergone 613,239 edits. We hope to see you on the Recent Changes page!

May has been a busy month behind the scenes, and while we're not yet ready to talk about some of our ongoing projects (nobody wants to jinx anything), here are some things we are happy to share with you!

As you probably know from our earlier announcement, The Library of Congress will be archiving Fanlore as part of their American Folklife Center's ongoing digital culture web archiving project.

We were also busy planning a new month-long challenge that will take place in June and will concentrate on creating new pages. Tune in for June Bloom (official announcement coming tomorrow)! Or, as it was being affectionately referred to for the majority of May: "How does this not have a Fanlore page yet?!?!" month. We're sure many people will be able to relate to that sentiment.

Finally, as of May 31, 2015, Fanlore has 34,531 articles which have undergone 598,263 edits. Will we reach 35,000 articles during June challege? That's up to you!

In the meantime, we hope to see you more on the Recent Changes page!

What the Wiki committee did in March

The Wiki committee is very happy to welcome three new staffers! Highlander_II, SoyAlex, and Squidgie joined us in our latest round of recruitment.
( Introductions below the cut. )

The committee also has a new Board liaison, Soledad Griffin. We'll do our best to utilize her experience as chair of Internationalization & Outreach.


In addition to recruitment, we prepared for April Showers, a month-long event involving both Fanlore and AO3 during which various fandoms will be highlighted, To kick off the challenge, we will have an editing chat this Saturday, April 4, at 4pm UTC. See this post for more details.

Systems also performed some server maintenance in March; Fanlore may experience brief periods of downtime between 8am to 8pm UTC on Friday, April 3rd (when is that in my timezone?) in order to complete it.

Now that we have a bigger team we're busy brainstorming what else we'll be able to do, and we're excited about the possibilities.

We had a relatively quiet November, with only a handful of outside requests and issues. However, we have several important staffing announcements:

We're very happy to announce that jsparc will serve as co-chair of the Wiki committee alongside Tiyire. jsparc joined the Wiki committee last year and has been a Fanlore editor (as User:Sparcicle) since 2010. Functionally, this doesn't really change anything about the way the committee works, but we are discussing ways to create a clearer internal structure in the not too distant future.

We also have a lovely new Communications liaison, Pip! Keep a look out for Pip on the fanlore_news Twitter.

Lastly, we are sorry to announce the retirement of Willowcabins from the Wiki committee. The committee currently has seven members, plus two liaisons. You can see the full committee here.

In December, we have several behind-the-scenes projects to finish up before the new year, and will continue to work on improving our internal structure and documentation as well as dealing with whatever outside requests we get.

After it was made clear to us that it would be appreciated we're attempting to give more regular - ideally monthly - updates of what the Wiki committee is doing again. (Although as you can see they will probably usually be a bit late...)

Stub September was a great success! Thank you very much for your contributions. We don't have any numbers, but many pages in many different fandoms were expanded on. We also held an editing chat, a quick summary of which can be found here.

Fanlore got many new users this month, which we're very happy about. Welcome!
If you have questions or need any help, you can either ask on Fanlore's talk pages (found under "Discussion" on every page's upper left corner) or contact the gardeners or us.

Unfortunately our liaison from the Communications committee left, so our Twitter account might be a little less active for now.

Internally we dealt with the usual outside requests and background stuff, including an identity protection case, and discovered a mass editing tool that will make that process much easier for us in the future.

For October we are preparing for an OTW fund drive, an exciting announcement, finally fulfilling a request from Legal, filling some more holes in our documentation, and dealing with whatever outside requests we get.