At first glance, my inclination would be recycle bin the proposal, but after reading comments, I think there is some merit to the proposal. I would support bringing this in and expanding it to cover group dynamics (Wikitribes). This project could be valuable to sociology and psychology as it provides information on groups and their mindsets. Also, I would think that the information could be easily brought over to Wikipedia and used to beef up articles on notable fan groups.

________________________________ From: Jon Davis wiki@konsoletek.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, November 18, 2009 11:58:24 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family

While Laura kinda forgot it, for those that don't feel like scrolling and cant operate google.  FanHistory can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/

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).

I think it is worth sticking the proposal on Meta, but I think if FH were to join the WMF, it should have an expanded focus.  I'm not sure what that expansion should be, maybe all popculture, not just fandom itself.  Lets look at what Wikipedia is not, that people want to post or do post (And gets removed) and see if we can be worked into FH.

-Jon Disclaimer: I was an admin on FanHistory for a while.

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:53, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:

Erik suggested I post this to the list for further discussion.

Sincerely, Laura Hale

*Introduction* Fan History Wiki is a project dedicated to documenting the history of fan communities, and to a lesser extent, documenting the history of online communities, popular culture and the tools that go to support these. The purpose of this document is to provide a general overview of Fan History, and to explain why this project would be a good fit for the Wikimedia Foundation.

*Proposal* *About Fan History* Fan History is a wiki that runs on Mediawiki.  It currently gets about 60,000 visitors a month, has over 820,000 articles, and a small but dedicated contributor base.  Laura Hale created it in May 2006 as a means of centralizing existing information, and getting more people involved in the process of documenting the history of fandom.

Current objectives for the project include:

• Document the history of fan communities.
• Preserve the history of fandom, especially in areas that are deemed at

risk like Geocities.

• Provide academics operating in fandom starting points for additional

research and to provide academics with comprehensive data sets.

• Provide members of fandom a resource to find links to communities in

fandom, and explain parts of the culture in those communities to help them adapt to them. *  Provide members of fandom a tool to promote their work, their projects, charity efforts by fans.

• Provide members of fandom a platform to share stories about what happened

in fandom so that important incidents won't be forgotten.

• Provide a comprehensive directory for fandom that anyone can edit. This

is necessary because of increased fragmentation in a web 2.0 world, and as members of fandom transition away from various services because of downtime, problems with policy, etc. It is also necessary because a lot of time in fandom trying to track down authors and artists who disappeared and in trying to locate fanworks that have disappeared. *  Provide companies that deal with fandom a source to locate fandom communities, understand how fandom functions, identify current issues in certain fandoms, give examples of how certain issues were dealt with, etc. By knowing that information, they can better interact with and cater to fandom's specific needs.

• Reasons why Fan History Wiki would be a good fit for WMF:*

• WMF is trying to be more female friendly in terms of developing its

contributor base. Fan History's primary contributor base and audience is female.             * A largely female audience is a historical truth for popular culture fandom based around movies, and television. The audience around manga and anime is becoming increasingly female.  In most areas, the academics entering the field are female. Major popular culture obsession items at the moment where there is a large female base include Twilight, Harry Potter, Star Trek.               * Fan History’s inclusion amongst foundation projects can be a selling point for outreach in that area.  If needing to point to a similar female dominated group doing similar work, the Organization for Transformative Works can be cited.

• Our scope allows for more esoteric information that could not be included

in Wikipedia, Wikiversity or Wikinews that would still help work towards a greater good.             * The WMF Foundation supports quality resources that anyone can edit. Fan History is primarily a cultural historical anthropology project dedicated to documenting the history of fandom.               * People have tried to do such research on Wikipedia in the past but it frequently gets deleted because of the lack of research, it is original research or it isn’t notable.  In terms of popular culture studies, Fan History provides a place to do that.

• Fan History being part of the Foundation would allow closer relationships

with the science fiction community, the academic community and others with a vested interest in the topic.             * We’re already being used as an academic source in some places because the research we do on the wiki is not being done by anyone else. With more attention and increased awareness, this can be increased.  That attention and use should reflect back on other WMF projects to justify those sources as credible.           * Fan History can be used as leverage to develop relationships with programs like the Popular Culture studies work done at USC and MIT.           * This would be a big step towards getting professional historians and cultural anthropologists to using Wikipedia related projects more.  Some would like such a platform to do their own work and are hesitant to do it on more commercial sites like Wikia.

• Fan History’s preservation work would foster good will, improve

credibility of WMF projects, generate additional press and help WMF in creating good relationships with other organizations.             * We are doing important preservation work related to sites that are closing like Geocities and have identified other sites at risk like Tripod and Angelfire where we need to start working.  Most of the work being done preservation wise focuses on just saving the raw content, not screencapping and putting this work into its historical context.  There is no competition in that context.

• Our preservation work would help improve credibility, as we become more

of a primary source resource.  It is easier to cite that work in ways that people cannot cite Wikipedia.             * The Internet Archive and other projects received a lot positive press because of their preservation efforts.             * Preservation efforts open up opportunities to work with university programs, and other non-profits that have a vested interest in saving that information.

• Fan History’s content lends itself to multi-language support and greater

unity across languages.           * We currently do not have separate multi-languages but we have enough content about other languages that can be stubbed on their own language subdomains that we can start at least 20.           * Large community of Russians, Germans, Poles and Spanish speakers who are interested in the topic who currently lack a quality resource.           * Language integration across the project would help WMF create a more unified community concept beyond individual language projects.

*What Fan History needs from WMF:*

• Improved back end support.
• Help increasing our base audience of contributors.
• Financial security.
• The continued ability to work towards our objectives.

*What Fan History offers beyond good fit:*

• Policies that have been tested to work inside the larger community that

meet different standards.

• Scalable policies that have been tested so there should not be huge

problems coming on board.

• An all female admin staff at the onset.
• Few copyright problems.  While we have some copyrighted images, we could

dump almost all and not lose anything substantive.

• A huge scope.  We cover over 37,000 fan communities representing

television, movies, music, video games, anime, manga, actors, theater, radio, science fiction, cartoons, comics and sports.

*Compromises Fan History is happy to make:*

• Change our copyright from

http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistory.com:Copyrights to the same policy used by WMF.

• Remove images with problematic copyright issues.

*Conclusion* Fan History would be a good fit for helping the Wikimedia Foundation in terms of helping the Foundation meet some of its goals towards providing information, helping establish credibility and gaining a more female contributor base. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I don't think that the WMF "acquiring" FanHistory would make them a competitor with Wikia, after all, Meta already has a propsosal for a "Wikitainment" ( http://wmf4.me/EFf2D ) which goes to show that the WMF community wants something like this. 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.

-Jon

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:00, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.comragesoss%2Bwikipedia@gmail.com

wrote:

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:

...

Fan History would be a good fit for helping the Wikimedia Foundation in terms of helping the Foundation meet some of its goals towards providing information, helping establish credibility and gaining a more female contributor base.

I for one think Fan History is a great project, and an example of the kinds of areas Wikimedia should be branching out towards.

A related issue worth thinking about...

Laura has blogged earlier about why Fan History wouldn't join Wikia: http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=963

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.

So the question is, what difference does it make for a wiki and its community to be part of a non-profit set of projects versus an ad-supported for-profit one? Quite a bit, I would say, in the long-term strategic sense of spreading a free culture movement based on sharing and collaboration. If Fan History became part of Wikimedia, it would be time to admit that, in some ways, Wikia and WMF are now competitors.

-Sage

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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

Laura,

Thanks for your work on the proposal. I hadn't looked at fanhistory in any detail before, and enjoyed discovering it's lifecycle through your blog.

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:51 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:

I may not have time to respond to your comments in detail, but I think it is important to say that I appreciate the way that you are approaching this.

Critical analysis of the potential "import" of this project is much easier if the project has a well defined mission, and the project leaders are only interested in the migration if it is a good fit within the WMF mission.

I agree with John here. Your approach and proposal are greatly appreciated. Educational projects aimed at educating others, providing material for future research, or gathering useful knowledge are certainly ones we should give consideration to adopting. The copyright issues is a sticking point, as geni notes -- I strongly recommend that you look into changing your license, regardless of the result of this proposal, so that you can better work with other projects in the future.

SJ

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 2:15 AM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:

Even if the license change applied only to material started after the present, it would make future collaboration possible

Based on what I have seen, the majority of the pages have been only edited by a few people who could agree to relicense their contributions.

i.e. they may only end up with 600K pages relicensed, which is better than starting from scratch.

-- John Vandenberg

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:

So the question is, what difference does it make for a wiki and its community to be part of a non-profit set of projects versus an ad-supported for-profit one?  Quite a bit, I would say, in the long-term strategic sense of spreading a free culture movement based on sharing and collaboration.  If Fan History became part of Wikimedia, it would be time to admit that, in some ways, Wikia and WMF are now competitors.

These are exactly the kinds of questions that the Expanding Content Task Force is exploring for the strategic planning process:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Expanding_Content

The underlying question is, when should Wikimedia say yes to projects that want to become part of the Wikimedia universe? Answering this question will make it clear what to do with proposals like Laura's (which, in turn, makes an excellent, concrete example to help us think through the higher-level question).

=Eugene