No subject

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