laura at fanhistory
Nov 18, 2009, 6:09 PM
Post #11 of 17
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Re: Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
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Rather than reply to multiple posts, I'm just going to reply to several
all at once.
As a cavaet, when I say our in the context of Fan History, I am
primarily talking from the perspective of our admin team. We have
probably five really regular contributors and about 10 people who drop
in once a month, every month. The vast majority of people edit once and
do not edit again. When we have tried to solicit feedback from the
wider community before, we haven't always gotten it unless we approached
people one on one.
Pharos said:
>Why not call it "Wikitribes" and extend the concept to other
>subcultures and microhistories of small communities?
This isn't something that our team would necessarily be opposed to. We'd
just want more information on how it would be implemented because our rules
and policies are specifically taylored to deal with some of the internal
politics of fan communities.
http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Rules ,
http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistory.com:Philosophy ,
http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Article_deletion ,
http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Multiple_perspectives ,
http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Be_a_Fan_History_Reporter are articles
that give an idea as to how our policies work and our core philosophy.
That said, there is a lot of room in our general scope. We have had a few
bands use articles to talk about themselves. (We even encourage this to a
degree.) Our end focus tends to be on fans. Thus, there is room to talk
about artists and musical movements in our existing structure so long as
that can eventually be circled back to deal with the fan community.
Jon Davis said:
>As for my brief view of this, I think it is an idea that definitely has
>merit. The biggest concern I would have voiced was NPOV and while FH
wasn't
>run under NPOV, they've done a fairly decent job of keeping it to a minimum
>or keeping to MPOV (from what Laura tells me).
Our ideal is to strive towards Neutral Point of View. It just isn't always
feasible and we'd rather be up front about that. There are places where
people are not going to be neutral. Outside of fandom, there are issues
with terminology like pro-abortion vs. pro-choice where people dispute the
neutrality of those terms and no one is really happy. In the fan community,
this can be extra challenging because many times the people doing the
reporting are personally involved in the events AND WE ENCOURAGE THIS. So
when you get two people on the side of an event, they are not necessarily
going to agree on what events took place or what view to cast on them.
What we've done is in areas where we know this is a problem, or where people
edit to include first person personal narratives, is to label a section
MPOV, http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Multiple_perspectives . The long
term goal then is to take that first hand account and integrate it as
neutrally as we can into the history. Thus, the two function together.
This doesn't always work. http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Russet_Noon is an
example. The author of Russet Noon inserted her own perspective. (The
author of Russet Noon was eventually banned for blanking.) There just isn't
a neutral way that the community can accept her perspective, especially when
she was making claims that our Check User show and tell (with permission
from the contributors in question) could prove wrong. Her reality just
didn't mesh and she was ... yeah. There are challenges to telling history
inside small communities where participants have a vested interest in how
they cast their involvement. We tried to find solutions that would work for
the history we were telling given the audience and subject.
Sage Rosse wrote:
>Obviously one of the core reasons ("Fan History is a business") must
>have changed between when Laura wrote that (September 20) and now.
>And (without knowing anything about how discussions with Wikia went
>beyond that blog post) I presume the possibility of joining Wikia is
>still open.
The possibility of working with Wikia is always open. It just isn't likely
to happen. They would have to make concessions to get us that they won't
make. There are concessions with Wikia that we just won't make.
On the flip side, there are concessions that we won't make for Wikia that we
would almost definitely be willing to make for WMF.
I don't know how much things have changed per say. I do know that we
established key areas that we need to work on, that our staff doesn't feel
like we can do on our own at this time. We feel that WMF can help us in
those areas. Some of this change was a result of our Geocities effort and a
few other reasons.
Sage Rosse wrote:
>If Fan History became part of
>Wikimedia, it would be time to admit that, in some ways, Wikia and WMF
>are now competitors.
I would disagree. I like Wikia. I like what they do in many ways. For
projects with specific missions that could be argued for a greater good,
like historical preservation or cultural studies, Wikia just isn't a good
fit. They don't necessarily have the tools to help specific communities
with their needs, don't have the resources to devote to those projects,
etc. They don't need the because their audience doesn't need them, or if
they did, they would be chosing other options already.
Jon Davis wrote:
>Why not merge that proposal and FH
>into one. It would give those wanting their entertainment fix (that isn't
>"allowed" on Wikipedia) a headstart of 800k articles, and a vibrant
>community.
I haven't looked at the specific proposal... but yes, we are a great big
huge potential resource for entertainment. We have about 54,000 articles
about episodes of television, 3,000 or so articles about anime and manga. I
just worry that Fan History merging over with the idea of making it into an
Enterainment wiki run by WMF wouldn't be in the best interest for
information on Fan History. It could zap the credibility as a legitimate
resource for academics looking for information on fan cultures, etc.
geni wrote:
>I apologise for top posting but I wish to respond to your post in full
>while making the absolute show stopper clear. You wiki is not under a
>free license nor can it's content be released under a free license
>without an impractical degree of effort
If our copyright policy makes this a no go, then it makes it a no go. When
we were first created, we were a bit paranoid about people who sale making
off with our content. When you're a small wiki with a niche audience and
have competing interests with others? We talked to people in the wiki
community about what our options were given our concerns at that time. The
advice we got at the time was to use a version of
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWikiCopyright and that's what we
went with.
So yeah. If that makes this a no go and we can't change it, then thank you
for your time. We appreciate the consideration. We'll try to get some one
to help us address this issue so that even if not with WMF, we can move
forward.
John Vandenberg wrote:
>Users don't always appreciate being documented on another website,
>because it takes control away from them and the site with which that
>have participated:
We looked around for ways to increase our visibility in the fan community,
to save us from doing a lot of tedious work by hand, etc. We also later
talked to the people at AboutUs on how they handle articles like that. We
consulted with folks from wikiFur. Heck, we even talked to the people
EncyclopediaDramatica. We looked at how Wikipedia handled these issues.
We came up with a policy that works for us:
http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Article_deletion . We have over 500,000
articles like the one you mentioned. We have had 204 requests in the past
18 months. That's 0.04% of the total articles involved.
In comparison, we probably have had about 2,500 articles of that sort edited
at some point. The articles that haven't been updated have been cited in
several cases to help with plagiarism disputes in fan communities, and to
track down what happened to authors. They are also used as self promotional
tools by the fans being written about.
From a historical point of view, these articles serve to help identify
microtrends and encourage greater engagement by the fan community. If you
know that you have 500 fans of Dark Shadows who were active during the
1990s, that they wrote stories for other fandoms, you can use those micro
patterns to track what they are doing, explain patterns that develop
elsewhere. These articles while not seemingly important in and of
themselves provide data that can have other uses.
Specifically regarding the article you linked to, at any point, some one can
edit the article to say "By [[Such and such a date]], this author had
deleted their account on [[FanFiction.Net]]." Deletion patterns are still
patterns and important ones to understand. (Especially if you can figure
out why those patterns exist.)
For us, Fan History is about preserving, documenting and writing fandom
history. To this end, Fan History:
* Does not have a requirement for article notability.
o The belief is that all the little details help to give a
complete and more accurate picture of what is going on and what went on in
fandom.
o The belief is intentionally excluding information can be seen as
assigning value statements to fandom. As a history wiki focused primarily on
documenting history, we don't feel that is our place to do that. It is the
place of others.
o The belief is if minor information becomes too tedious, segments
can be moved to other pages to tell histories of subfandom in larger fandom
communities. Example: Premiere dates are found on many fandom pages. They
include international dates for release. If this information becomes too
much, it can be moved to another page: Angel movie premiere date for Germany
and other German X-Men fandom info can be moved from the X-Men page to a
page called Angel fandom in Germany.
o The belief is that little examples of activity can later be
written into a more prose type article which can contextualize those events,
to make them appear less random. Those little details might be emblematic of
bigger trends that won't be visible until you have a whole lot of them.
o The belief is that little details can be moved off an article,
if they aren't important. Information should also be moved, rather than
removed. This belief is reinforced in our rules.
* Does not have a have a list of people, fandoms and topics that cannot
be mentioned.
o The belief is that such a list would make it difficult to
accurately present a history of fandom.
o The belief is that cross checking such a list would create an
unreasonable burden on wiki administrators and other contributors by
requiring that they cross check such a list every time an edit was made.
o The belief is that would run counter to the wiki spirit.
* Reserves the right to not delete articles about people and events.
o The belief is that doing this may involve forms of historical
revisionism and that some events need to be told, outweighing the need for
requests to delete.
* Is about telling fandom history from the point of view of fans, by
using a perspective that defines fandom internally, rather than externally.
o The belief is that the method for critiquing ourselves is the
most appropriate way to share this history.
o The belief is that external methods for critiquing fandom may
involve theoretical models that do not work in practice or that may be
rejected by large parts of fandom.
o The the belief is that fans are the most knowledgeable about
their own history and can best put events in fandom into historical context.
As for surviving the move to WMF, if Fan History would need that much
content culled in order to be a WMF project, then we would probably decline
because we believe that such content is important to our mission. That's
life. Not everything works out like you want it. We'd love to explore this
further because we believe it could help both projects but if there are no
goes, then there are no goes.
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
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