[Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family

Wed Nov 18 19:58:24 UTC 2009

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 at 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.
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-- 
Jon
[[User:ShakataGaNai]]
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This has been a test of the emergency sig system.