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

Wed Nov 18 19:56:08 UTC 2009

Why the heck not?

My only concern would be that the topic of fan history might be a bit
specialized by itself.

Why not call it "Wikitribes" and extend the concept to other
subcultures and microhistories of small communities?

I know of someone working with the oral history of Philadelphia jazz
musicians, for example, who would probably be quite interested in
contributing to a wiki project such as this.

I think for too long we have shunted off some of our more interesting
proposals to Wikia, and a commercial environment that may not be
appropriately conducive for these projects.

Thanks,
Pharos

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 1:53 PM, 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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