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

[Laura Hale]

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.