We talk a lot about the wiki community on our blog and elsewhere because we really feel part of it.  We wanted to give you an idea of where we feel like we belong in this community.  This isn’t a complete chart of wiki relationships, or even our own relationships.  The version below leaves out Tikatu, who has been involved with TVTropes, Girl Genius Wiki and Wikipedia as a contributor.

Lots of connected parts. AboutUs, wikiHow, Wikipedia, EncyclopediaDramatica, Wikia all have play an important role in shaping our policies, our concept of content organization and adding content.  We talk to founders, contributors, assist on many of the wikis on this. 

Our admin staff loves the wiki community.  They are a helpful bunch, both in terms of content, back end issues, information structuring, etc.  Which gets to our point: We floated our proposal to merge with the on the foundation mailing list.  One of the issues that came up was our copyright policy.  At the time that we implemented it, we had talked to several people in the wiki community, wanted some sort of copyright protection from automated scrapers, etc.  We were leery of creative commons licenses because we didn’t necessarily think that they would offer us the protection that we might want.

But the discussion on the mailing list… has a point.  Even if we don’t make the move to WMF (which both sides need to want, where we both feel like compromises can be made to help each of our missions), we still need to address our copyright policy.  When I last had a serious conversation with Wikia about being acquired, Angela indicated that this would be pretty simple to change: Just do it.  (We would have had to change our policy to match the copyrights used by Wikia.)  This mostly seemed to entail: Announce the change, give time for people to comment or disagree, address edits made by those who don’t consent to the change, then just make the change.

Is it that simple?  And if we do change, what sort of copyright policy should we adopt?  We just don’t want to make such a change without really thinking it through because we don’t want a repeat of the problems that Transformers Wiki went through.  Have other wikis made copyright changes?  How did they handle it?  What are problems that wikis have faced using different licenses?

Fan History feels like it is at this point where, in order to further our mission, we need to expand our contributor base a bit. We’ve talked amongst our admin team about methods to do that. One solution that we’ve been considering is to find a for-profit company or a non-profit that would help us with our mission. Rejection from one for profit wiki related company. Now we’re talking to WMF. Before we did that, we contacted a few people inside the organization who gave us the same feedback: Most projects of this type come from inside of existing WMF projects. Most of them were not aware of projects outside WMF that had been brought into the fold.

If we were serious about this, we would need to float it on the mailing list.  We did and our proposal can be found at here. If you want to join the list, details are here.  The initial feedback is interesting and has given us a lot of food for thought.  If you have any feedback that you want to give us, please drop a comment here.

Apologizes for writing quality.  This is stream of consciousness.

I love Wikia and I love Mahalo.  Both do interesting things in the wiki community, are fascinating to watch and offer important lessons to people running their own wikis.  Jason from Mahalo would really like to recruit Wikia contributors for Mahalo.  He’s offering a financial incentive to switch. 

It isn’t necessarily the right approach.  First, most Wikia wikis are not about individuals but rather groups.  He should be focused on pulling the whole admin team over to Wikia.  Second, he’s talking about contributors to his wiki earning revenue on a page by page basis.  Wikia wikis are complex and have a huge number of pages, or at the least the ones Jason should be trying to recruit. He’s only offering a single page solution, not a multipage solution. He’s also not offering an option to port the content from Wikia to their own user controlled subdomain. 

If I’m mad at Wikia and my community on my wiki is also mad at Wikia and we want to leave, Jason can’t get us because there is no option to port from Wikia to Mahalo.  (I’m also not certain that Mahalo could do this if they wanted to.  The licenses between the two may not be compatible.)  If there is no porting, I’m pretty much stuck on Wikia.  (Why leave Wikia?)  If I do want to leave and my community wants to leave, we might be able to do it easily if we’re talking a limited subset of pages.  (Less than 500 is easy enough to copy and paste over.  [Wiki farms like yourwiki.net can help you move things over easily too.])   Mahalo is not even going to be a consideration because you get even less control community wise and content wise on Mahalo than you do with Wikia. 

Porting over from Wikia to Mahalo is even more problematic.  I might have my wiki about Twilight that has 20 pages.  I might be tired of Wikia because the ads are annoying and I like the idea of making money off content.  Wikia isn’t ever going to do that.  Can I move it to Mahalo?  Probably not.  On Wikia, I could create my special Twilight wiki because Wikia allows duplicate wikis around the same topic.  Mahalo is a bit like Wikipedia and it doesn’t seem designed that way.  The pages that will do best for that subject are going to be the obvious ones.  In the case of Twilight, that will be the Twilight page.  100 people can’t profit off Twilight and can’t curate it.  Communicating with the community editing it, another major plus for Wikia, is difficult.  The nature of Mahalo thus locks  out those power mad Wikia users who create small specific wikis around subject areas where there is already a bigger wiki on Wikia.

The money aspect is going to turn off a number of potential Wikia users.  If I’m a huge Twihard, I’m going to obsessively create content about Twilight because I LOVE TWILIGHT! ZOMG! THE SPARKLY VAMPIRES! I LOVE THEM!  My motivation is going to be based less on monetary return and more on my obsessive love and expressing it.  I’m going to look for like minded people.  Wikia is a turn on because it is a venue where I can create a clear product of my obsession and meet other like minded fans.  (Go Team Edward!)  Mahalo has limited interaction and money just cheapens my love.  Twihards and other obsessive fans are ones Jason should be courting because they produce loads of content for free because they are so obsessed.  In a number of cases, highly motivated fans who love the source create high quality content.  (See Wikipedia.)  Those folks are needed as fans as the pages they create will become great resources for people to cite.  Fans who create for money often think differently or misunderstand their audience, creating less desirable content.

If Jason wants to effectively market to unhappy Wikia users, he’s got to find a better solution.  His current methods are just off the mark.  Money needs to be de-emphasized, community more emphasized and he needs to demonstrate to the community he is courting that he is trust worthy and that users will have community control and content control, that he’ll support leaders in those community while putting monetization as a secondary goal.  I just don’t know if doing that is something that would be compatible with Mahalo’s goals as the two appear to be catering to different audiences.

I love wikis.  I love wikis in the way that people go “Lulz! You treat wikis like too much serious buziness!”  When there are conversations about wikis that I can participate in and watch, I like to do that. I can learn a lot about what makes other wikis successful, how that can be applied to our own wiki work on Fan History, see  if our experiences on Fan History can help other wikis be more successful.  With that in mind, I’ve been trying to attend some of the organized chats in #wikimedia-strategy, which are for trying to help create a long term strategic plan for the Foundation.  These are some of my thoughts having been involved with two of those.

One discussion involved how wikiNews had issues.  The project isn’t viewed as credible enough for use by Wikipedia users.  WikiNews finds it hard to get quality articles and attract a lot of good editors because the project’s rules were created almost fully formed; these guidelines can be confusing, intimidating in terms of attracting new contributors, aren’t always clear and involve a lot of tedious hierarchy for news to point where it seems pointless to try.  To get around those issues, a lot of people just put the news on Wikipedia… because Wikipedia gets a lot of praise for how well they cover issues such as that.  This situation makes the one on wikiNews even worse.  The news on Wikipedia in many cases has a limited shelf life, where old news related articles like Balloon Boy will get deleted.  From my perspective, this is clearly a problem that needs to be addressed.

Another discussion involved why people weren’t editing Wikipedia.  One of my arguments was because some people had problems with other contributors, who they felt were rude and actively discouraging new people from contributing.  I’ve heard this from several people, saw it mentioned on my LiveJournal friends list, and it is one of my own issues.  Some one in the chat challenged this as not true.  There was a side discussion involving that, which devolved.  My understanding though is that there has not been a study to determine why people are not contributing to Wikipedia.

There was another discussion about the need for a WYSIWYG editor to be included in Mediawiki.  The consensus amongst developers appears to be that you cannot do that  with Mediawiki.  The other problem is that Mediawiki cannot do real time editing.  (Though people are trying to create extensions plugging in Google Wave to allow for real time collaborative editing on MediaWiki.)  Some people thought that Mediawiki’s software had pushed as many limits as it could; was it now time to scrap the software and create new software that could meet changing needs like real time editing and a WYSIWYG editor?  Developers seemed inclined to lean this way.

A separate discussion involved the question of: Is real time editing something that Wikipedia projects really need?  For high volume articles and Wikinews where timeliness is important, the answer appeared to be yes.  The people in the chat who appeared to be most loudly advocating a position that it is needed for a wider variety of articles were power contributors.  They did acknowledge that for the vast majority of articles, there won’t ever be two people editing an article to make it an issue.

A question was raised on the role of the Foundation supporting wiki related conferences.  The Foundation plans to continue this as a form of outreach.   There is not consensus of if they should be doing more support for conferences or if they should be working with other organizations for fund those conferences.

One issue that was some what contentious was that some people felt that most of the suggestions on the strategy wiki were dumb, stupid and never going to happen.  At least one individual felt that these suggestions should be deleted.  The representative from the foundation suggested instead that volunteers should use the reader feedback section to discuss  why those things won’t happen.  This didn’t really make some people happy as they felt it made it difficult to have  a real plan with all that junk there.  I tried to point out that in terms of a strategic plan that different people have different things they want/need to get out of Wikipedia so some of the things they desire may be a matter of perspective and slamming people’s good faith efforts wasn’t the best way to get quality feedback.

Some other things were mentioned that I will try to blog about at a later date.

During the past few days, we’ve been working on trying to visualize our organizational patterns on Fan History in order to understand our own patterns, how we conceptualize fandom, to check for organizational consistency, create tools to help users understand our organizational patterns, to identify areas where we lack stub content. This is our second post in this series. This one is about fan fiction archives.

Thus, we’re creating mindmaps like the one below that do that. The purpose isn’t to get a complete tree. (Some of the categories have 10, 50, 200 different sub categories. It isn’t timely.) It is to get enough of one to do the above. The one below is one of these mind maps. It looks at how we conceptualize blogs. Click on it for the link to the full size.

The structure isn’t complete for a lot of fandom specific categories.  That’s because for some things, there are over fifty categories.  Some of these were chosen as a representative sample.  I tried to put at least eight subcategories in those cases. 

What strikes me as obvious is the lack of FanFiction.Net appearing in more places.  If there is a category for it, which I’m almost certain there is, it wasn’t linked here.  That needs to be addressed.  Sugar Quill for Harry Potter also deserves its own subcategories.  We need subcategories for archives where we have user lists.  We’re also short on archives for sports and theater and actors.  The actor related archives might have been hidden or minimized because for a while, we didn’t really know how to organize them.  We also didn’t get many actor fan fiction related archives when we did our geocities preservation work. 

The Adult Fan Fiction archives section isn’t built really well and really lends itself to other questions, like should we be separating out archives with adult content into their own separate hierarchy?  And if we should, should we also be labeling articles that the sites, pages, concepts in question may deal with adult concepts?  Added to that, AdultFanFiction.Net isn’t included in that category at all so if the category should be there, AdultFanFiction.Net needs to be included.  (Unrelated, I would really love to do something like we did for Inuyasha-fiction.net and FanFiction.Net and YuleTide in terms of stories and people articles.)

There are a lot of multifandom fan fiction archives covering different genres and mediums.  This includes FanLib, AdultFanFiction.Net, MediaMiner.Org, and FanNation.  They are listed in multiple places like Comics fan fiction archives, Movie fan fiction archives, Television fan fiction archives.  The problem is that they are listed along side categories like Batman fan fiction archives, Harry Potter fan fiction archives, Charlie’s Angels fan fiction archives, Wonder Woman archives.  This, to me, doesn’t feel intuitive but I’m not sure how else to categorize these large massive multifandom sites and make them findable for people looking for fandom specific archives that they represent.  Maybe that’s more of an issue for articles, where we include these archives on the article pages?  It needs more thinking and some one to implement.

If you have any feedback on this tree, any questions about how it developed, we would love your feedback. Do the organic patterns we’ve developed make sense? Is this construction too artificial? Is it not logical? And if you’re really motivated, we’ve really like that feedback on the relevant talk pages for those categories.

During the past few days, we’ve been working on trying to visualize our organizational patterns on Fan History in order to understand our own patterns, how we conceptualize fandom, to check for organizational consistency, create tools to help users understand our organizational patterns, to identify areas where we lack stub content. 

Thus, we’re creating mindmaps like the one below that do that.  The purpose isn’t to get a complete tree.  (Some of the categories have 10, 50, 200 different sub categories.  It isn’t timely.)  It is to get enough of one to do the above.  The one below is one of these mind maps.  It looks at how we conceptualize blogs.    Click on it for the link to the full size

For blogs, we tend to organize by fandom type (music, sports, actors), by social networking site, by blogging site, by bloggers.  The inclusion of American bloggers on the top level probably isn’t the best place for it and later, some one should probably move that down into Bloggers -> Bloggers by country -> American bloggers.  LiveJournal is actually much deeper than you’re seeing here.  As we post others part of our tree, that might become a bit more obvious.

A lot of the blogs that we have are generally listed around a topic.  We have few fandom specific categories for blogs like that.  It would be nice to see that expanded, to have blogs listed beyond the ones present on social networking sites.

If you have any feedback on this tree, any questions about how it developed, we would love your feedback.  Do the organic patterns we’ve developed make sense?  Is this construction too artificial?  Is it not logical?  And if you’re really motivated, we’ve really like that feedback on the relevant talk pages for those categories.

I read McNiche: On the perils of scaling down a mass model a day or two ago and it has been bothering me ever since.

There was an observation or two about WikiCity that made me really think about Fan History and some of our automated content creation:

How many of those millions of “Web site pages” do you think was ever touched by a real person? And how many will ever be seen by a single person?

About 700,000 of Fan History’s 808,000 articles were created using automated methods that didn’t have a Fan History admin manually curating information.  We did this for FanFiction.Net people articles, for episode articles, for musician/band related articles.  I’d guess that of those 700,000 articles created by bots, roughly 50,000 have been touched by human hands.

Last month, there were 37,272 pages were viewed a total of 176,272 times.   That 37,272 works out to roughly 4% of our pages being accessed in October 2009.  Year to date, 183,755 pages were viewed a total of 1,786,830 times.  This works out to 22% of all our articles being accessed this year.  (Which basically supposes that only articles on the main name space were accessed.)  That doesn’t feel all that impressive.  We’d really, really like to improve on that.  It is one of our goals.  That and to get more people to edit pages that were created through automation.

The article talks about how scaling down these projects might be the best option because of all those dead pages that aren’t touched by human hands.  I’m just not sure for some large scale wiki projects that rely on automation like Fan History or AboutUs would benefit from this sort of thinking.  One of the things we’ve found on Fan History is that by having a large number of consistently formatted articles about certain topics is that we’ve been able to increase our number of contributors and have been able to get people to edit those articles.  It also helps with modeling; new contributors are able to look at those articles and create ones of their own.  We see this happen on a daily basis on Fan History: People discover articles about themselves or groups they are involved with and improve an article.  The article gets curated.  After that happens, the person doing it frequently links to it, tells others about it and then their friends go and create articles about their interests OR edit existing articles.  With out that automation, that wouldn’t happen.  If we were better at self promoting, our particular situation would improve and we’d have more people editing and curating and reporting and documenting.  The problem isn’t the automation; the problem is our ability to get others involved.

… admit no mistake, do not make yourself vulnerable to others, always be on the offensive, don’t admit to character flaws or weakness. We are taught that if you do, you will suffer the consequences for years. We are taught, through example, that if you admit mistakes and are vulnerable, others will exploit these weakness for their own fannish benefit.

I’m writing this entry mostly in response to a series of tweets by Ben Parr, a writer for Mashable. Our perspectives differ because of our place online and our own experiences. I’d love to believe “@BenParr @purplepopple My philosophy has always been “let the haters come,” because I believe in what I do and prove it with my actions.” I believe in what I’m doing. I believe in it a lot. I’m committed to what I’m doing and am always looking for ways to improve. I just do not like to publicly own my faults because I just have moments when I can’t because I’ve seen what fandom haters are capable of. I don’t just don’t have the energy to deal with the ramifications of the shit that could come down the pike if some hater took issue with me.

Check out some of the shit that Cassandra Clare, Supernatural fans, Smallville fans, Blake’s 7 fans, X-Files fans and science fiction fans are capable of. Contacting employers, contacting family, threatening to kill people and talking about how they deserve to be sexually assaulted, cracking passwords, contacting webhosts to report them for alleged Terms of Service Violations, contacting a show’s producers and actors to blast them for another set of fans’s actions. Most of the most egregious behavior doesn’t get documented out of fear of both sides going after the document-er for getting the story wrong.

I want to characterize these actions as fail fandom but it isn’t. Fail fandom is generally about some one taking offensive at something some one did or said or implied. Sure, yeah, the subtext of fail fandom is often about a power play in fandom but at the onset, it generally doesn’t look that way.

A lot of this is really banal stuff. Do you ship Clark/Chloe? Well fuck you. I hate your ship with a fiery passion. You’re in my space. Let me find some ways to cause you pain. Hey! You wrote Supernatural incest fic? I hate that crap! I know what to do! You made the mistake of linking your real name and your fannish name so I’ll contact your family and let them know what you are up to online! Oh hey! You challenged my status in the Harry Potter fandom and I need my status to be higher so I can be closer to JK Rowling. Let me teach you a lesson, because I know you work in school, by letting them know what sort of material you read. It doesn’t matter that I read it too because I don’t work with kids. You like Doggett from X-Files? That’s unforgivable because MSR is the only good thing from X-Files and because you’re too stupid to get that, I’ll just do a DDoS on your network connection. I want the freedom to write sexually graphic rape because of artistic freedom. You don’t like that and hey you’re a rape victim? Awesome! Because you know how you tried to repress my artistic expression? I’m going to intentionally trigger you! Those examples are all variations of real incidents.

And then we come back to the first part of this post: Media fandom on LiveJournal (and its clones like Dreamwidth Studios)teaches us not to be vulnerable, to self criticize, to admit to our weaknesses. In some places, in some communities, you want to admit and own your weakness, your vulnerabilities and where you can improve. I’ve found that in the wiki community outside Wikipedia, this generally is the norm. On Twitter and in social media communities filled with social media professionals, it is also good to be able articulate those. Fandom differs to a degree though. In a wiki, we should all be working towards a greater good. In social media, you want to be honest with your clients, to be continually learning and you’re aware of the professional repercussions for being an asshole, and a moron that engages in personal attacks on people outside of the scope of the content. Fandom doesn’t have those considerations of greater good or professional gain.

Fandom has other considerations because, for most of us, fandom is a hobby. People have goals for fandom: Having fun, getting feedback on their stories, enjoying the porn, being fawned over for their most awesome fanvids and fanart, writing extensive meta analysis because they love to do that, to fantasize about Eli Roth getting off on your nudie pics, trying to get a professional publishing career, using their fanac as a vehicle to meet actors and producers, trying to influence the writers and directors and actors to write the book or show like they want it to be written. Some of these inherently set fans into conflict with each other. If you are in a fandom to get close to the powers that be, well only so many people can. If you are in a fandom because of a character, actor or ship, there is only so much time that those can be given; people with different preferences are going to be in conflict as they try to persuade producers to focus on their desires. For fan fiction writers and readers and vid watchers, there is only so much time in a day, only so much feedback that can be given; conflict happens in the struggle to maximize the feedback and to support our favorite artists. The greater good in fandom only seems to happen when there is something that threatens the institution around which the fandom is based like a show ending.

Because of fandom existing as a state of conflict, because LiveJournal fandom is dominated by women, people bring in the personal and unrelated. The attacker looks for vulnerabilities. They look for places where they can exploit your weakness in order to push you out of fandom, to get you to stop being in conflict with them and to further their own agenda.

That’s my takeaway from fandom. Those are the lessons I have learned. So while I think it is good to be able to articulate your weakness in social media, as a journalist, as a historian, as an entrepreneur, I have trouble with that because I cannot unlearn overnight what I spent over ten years learning and having reinforced on a daily basis. (Thanks White Collar fandom and Smallville fandom for this week’s lesson.)

This week I did a conference call with wikiHow. All users were invited to attend and the call was advertised on wikiHow’s forums and in their chat room. I like these things a lot. (I just felt a bit uncomfortable “attending” as I am not an active contributor. I mostly hang out on chat and edit when asked. I’m there for great wiki community support and because I believe in their project.) It is interesting to hear part of their call and to get insight into their thought process for implementing features and design. I don’t get to do as much of that with Fan History because we lack the technical skills. The parts that I participated in talked about things like placement of how to contribute on their main page, how to offer live support, if their current chat room is an effective option, how to advertise that. There was also some mention of the new skin. If you’re a contributor to wikiHow, or want to see how a large wiki works, try to get in on another one of their calls.

Before I go further with this post, I want to publicly apologize to Fan History’s awesome tech guy, emufarmers. Through my own actions, I dragged him into this little drama. I wish I hadn’t as I respect him more than that.

James Mitchell and Juris Informatica is looking to hire a Mediawiki Administrator. I found out about this when Elizabeth Peterson contacted me on LinkedIn about this position, asked me if I might be interested in the position, and if I could e-mail answers to those questions to them. Parts of the section above those questions set off alarm bells, like being paid on commission but this type of job is not a paid on commission one. Because I wanted that sort of professional experience, I applied. I got called back with in about 10 minutes, before I even got an e-mail.

Weird. But whatever. I’ve had that sort of contact for a job interview before.

The guy who called me was not Elizabeth Peterson. It was James Mitchell. He wanted some one who had a bit more tech side. I’d thought, based on my resume, my LinkedIn profile, that it was pretty obvious that I didn’t have that and that from the personal LinkedIn solicitation, they would have known this already. Nope. Not true.

Whatever though. He wanted to know who I worked with at Fan History to do our tech stuff. I told him who. It was indicated to me that he would only work with me if my tech guy was on board to do work, so I gave him that information so he could contact my most awesome tech guy. (Rude on my part. Sorry emufarmers.)

I then got in touch with my awesome tech guy and a few professional acquaintances. One of them pointed out that WOW! Mr. James Mitchell, the guy who runs a legal website, asked an illegal hiring question: Am I married? Do I have children?

Another pointed out that the guy talked about working on commission based on getting leads for lawyers where they win a settlement. (Read: Work for free for a long time on some one’s site, where the pay out might not be for two years if the case goes quickly. Get zilch in the mean time because your time isn’t realy worth anything.) And he wants you to be independent finacially… while he’s busy not paying you:

Entrepreneurial Mindset. Obviously anyone who joins us has to be somewhat entrepreneurial, in that they receive a cut of revenues. We look for people that realize that even when you sell your time for $75 or $150 an hour, you are still a slave to the clock and you are never going to make serious money. We want people who are financially ambitious, who are looking to retire five years from now, and realize that by obtaining equity in highly profitable Web sites, one can reasonably soon end the tyranny of working for clients.

Financial Resources. They can afford an entrepreneurial work situation, both financially and psychologically — i.e. they can afford to work without a salary and instead receive a percentage of the profits of the Web sites they participate in. Our partners need to have some level of financial stability in their lives. Our approach involves some level of delayed gratification in exchange of extraordinary wealth down the road. (Note — Our partners do not invest any money, as the Firm pays all expenses. They do invest their time.)

If this was a sales job, cool! But the indication was that this was for content development. (Which is in itself a form of sales, but a different type of sales. And most sites I know that sell based on traffic you generate for them don’t pay off 1, 2, 5 or even 10 years down the road.)

All flags but I talked with Fan History’s tech guy and the working professionals I knew. I figured I could stomach the illegal hiring question issue, the reads like an arrogant ass… if he would be flexible enough to pay me a base salary based on time instead of that. If he is so sure that this is going to make millions, if he really needs my expertise, then it would be doable.

Except when he called me back, the first thing he did was insult my team member. Sorry. No. “I want you to do business with me. I want you to work for me. So you know what? I’m going to insult the people you do business with, and put them down.” Because that is how professionals work and how they get business.

He went through his spiel while I patiently listened. He’s going to scrape Wikipedia. He can do this legally he informed me. No one is really going to notice that he did that. They’ll just go ga ga over his content and because they are non-college educated people (because they are the ones with the biggest legal problems who are going to use the Internet and too stupid to realize that his content is Wikipedia duplicate content), they will be more likely to go with one of his lawyer leads as a result.

Which ignores the fact that Google doesn’t like duplicate content, punishes some scrapes like that, etc. It also engenders ill will from the wider wiki community. It slaps at your own credibility because you can’t create that type of content.

The conversation went on about how easy it was to automatically create content like that. Awesomeness. Then he told me how he happened to contact me: He or some one he hired built a bot to scrape all the members of the groups that mentioned Mediawiki on LinkedIn. Then an account was set up to automatically contact all those people to let them know about the job, using personalization to make it seem as if a person contacted them. It sounded like he was saying thatElizabeth Peterson didn’t actually exist. Special. That sort of usage of LinkedIn activity sounds kind of unethical and black hat. I like my SEO and other online activities to be white hat.

Did I mention that somewhere along the line he asked me about my personal life? My living situation? If I was married or if I was involved with some one? He repeatedly the illegal question that appeared on the application. He wants to make sure that you don’t have them so that when you’re taking a shower, his example, you will be thinking about your work and how you are going to make him and yourself a lot of money.

James Mitchell really wanted me to do content creation for him to generate leads. I’m passionate about many things but making money and generating content with that as the soul focus is not my passion. (And most of the books about start ups I’ve read talk about how successful ones are where people are passionate about what they do, not passionate about making money for the sake of making money.) I expressed to him that I was concerned that he would, you know, rip me off with payments. I would only work for salary. He assured me that he wouldn’t rip me off. I could trust him. Why? Because he needs me to make him money so he has no incentive to rip me off. (If I’m going to make you millions, why can’t you salary me? It is a sure thing for you and you can underpay me the value of those leads.)

Wrong answer dude. So let’s review the lessons on how to not hire a Mediawiki Administrator:

• Ask hiring questions that are illegal;
• Insult team members of the person you are hiring, persons that the person you are hiring thinks highly of;

• Ask the person to do work for you with the promise they will be paid for the leads they generate that could be, by your own admission, years down the line because of how the legal system works;

• Admit to ethically dubious behavior as part of your business plan;

• Tell some one that you have no incentive to rip you off because you need them to make you money.

The take away? Do not interview with James Mitchell.

We’re still looking for help with our Geocities preservation project as it heads into its final days. One new tool we have to make it easier for you to contribute is Fanfox. It is a Firefox extension that loads as a sidebar tool. It has a list of urls, and the page title for that url. You click on the url in the upper left hand corner of the sidebar. In the main page space, the url loads. Look at the page, fill out the form in the sidebar and click submit! There. You’ve helped preserve the history of a page located on Geocities.

If you’re really interested, let us know and we’ll add a lot more urls. We just haven’t so far as we haven’t wanted to take time away from our other Geocities work.

Why Fan History won’t be moving to Wikia any time soon

I’ve written several variations of this post with varying tones and purposes. Some of these drafts have gone in to several pages. I’m posting this rather simply because in the end, it really is simple.

I’d like to preface this with I have nothing but respect for Wikia. They have done some fantastic things for the wider wiki community. They’ve released several extensions that have been useful to the Mediawiki community. Wikia has sponsored several wiki conferences. Their community is helpful in terms of learning how to handle different situations in the wiki community. They host a lot of unique content that cannot be found elsewhere. They’ve helped expand the definition of what wikis are capable of doing.

But Fan History will not be moving to Wikia any time soon because Wikia wants to own Fan History. We would have to change our license, remove our business plan, give up control of the community, could not leave, would have to give Wikia our domains, etc. When Wikia has approached Fan History LLC about acquiring it, Wikia has generally used the approach of treating the acquiring of Fan History like it should be a hosting decision for Fan History LLC and downplayed the ownership issues. While we love Wikia and some of the things that Wikia has done for the wider wiki community, we do not appreciate their approach in this regard.

Fan History is a business. We are incorporated as a single entity LLC. We have a business plan. We have an intern and are currently looking for more. We have been seeking funding to grow the wiki, improve our back end, integrate and improve FanworksFinder, create related products. We have hired developers to do work for us. We attend professional networking events. We try to keep our actions on the wiki professional and businesslike, rather than purely fannish and hobby like.

If Wikia were to acquire Fan History, it would be great for their business. Fan History Wiki would take Wikia from about 3.2 million pages to 4 million pages. Fan History has the potential to create an organizational structure for Wikia’s entertainment and sports wikis. Fan History is set up to easily promote Wikia’s other content inside of our own. We have a large amount of content that could have its SEO optimized quickly, with the right team, that would significantly improve its current traffic. Fan History has a number of articles in content areas that advertisers would be happy to have ads placed on. Many of these content pages are for areas where Fan History LLC has little competition in terms of potential audience. Long and short, Fan History has a lot going for it that would really, really help Wikia on several levels. We would be cheap to host, cheap to maintain, would require little staff involvement as there is an active and dedicated admin staff. We’re aware of out potential monetary and PR value to Wikia. All of this could help Wikia’s bottom line.

Fan History is a business. We identify as a business. We are registered with the state of Illinois as a business. We do not feel that Wikia has approached us, in their talks about hosting (acquiring) us, as a business acquisition. Their representatives have minimized our real business concerns as not important, or that they are irrelevant to Wikia acquiring us. (Even as these things are central to our business plan, and to our identity in the community which we operate.) They want to us to utilize their free hosting, putting us in a situation where we can help their bottom line. They want us to hand over our business to them, for free. If they want to acquire us, they need to treat us as a business and make a serious acquisition offer. Any other approach is an insult.

You know, I spend a lot of time hanging out in #wikihow on Freenode and they’ve been talking about this for almost two weeks now… I haven’t thought to mention it so I feel kind of guilty. wikiHow has a charity drive going on during September 2009. wikiHow will sponsor a book for a child in Africa every time a registered user writes a new article. It’s pretty simple and there are lots of how-to articles that need to be written on the site: How to write Harry Potter fan fiction, how to ask some one if you can include their original character in your work, how to cope when your fan fiction has been plagiarized, how to post fan fiction on Quizilla, how to be a Chicago Red Stars fan, how to make a Twilight fanvid… all just a few I can think of off the top of my head. Below are a few more details from their site which can be found at http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Books-For-Africa:

wikiHow has an educational mission. We are creating the world’s how-to manual to provide a practical education to millions of people around the world. Every time you write an article, patrol an edit, add a photo, you are helping to provide a practical education to someone else. wikiHow is also a “hybrid organization,” unlike many for-profit corporations, we are always looking for innovative ways to serve the social good in accordance with our mission. With that in mind, we’ve decided to experiment with a one-month program that more directly extends our educational mission to children in need whom we aren’t reaching via our website.

So here is the experiment: For the month of September, wikiHow will sponsor a book for a child in Africa every time a registered user writes a new article. In addition, we will sponsor extra books for the author and new article booster if a new article receives a rising star.

Why children in Africa? Africa is experiencing a book famine — school kids lack basic supplies and they are in need of textbooks and reference works. It is not uncommon for ten kids to share one textbook, or for children to practice their lessons in the sand since they do not have pencils and paper (here is a more explanatory article from CNN talking about the book famine in Africa).

While Fan History isn’t hosted on Wikia, we still love what they do. They are home to some of the best fandom wikis on the Internet for small fandoms and large fandoms. They have Wookipedia, Halopedia, The Muppet Wiki, Chuck Wiki, Creatures Wiki, Darthipedia, Hellboy Wiki, Lostpedia, Saturday Night Live Wiki, Stargate FanProd, and Yu-Gi-Oh Card Maker Wiki to just name a few.  If you don’t have the expertise to do your own Mediawiki install, aren’t as familiar with wikis as you could be so want something that is easy to use from the onset?  They are a great option.

And they are doing something pretty damned cool. …  That I need to actually go out about setting up myself later.  Wikia has an answers site.  It’s pretty good but like a lot of answer sites, it doesn’t always feel like it has the niche audience for certain questions I might want answered.  (Ever tried looking for help finding a specific Twilight story on Yahoo!Answers?  It can be an impossible endeavor.)  What Wikia is doing is allowing people to create niche specific answer sites using the framework they developed for WikiaAnswers.  The part that excites me more is that for the person maintaining the answer site, they are giving half the revenue the wiki earns through Google Ads.  It is a way of giving back to the community that does the work in providing answers and to encourage you to help build up  your answers site to make it more useful for the community.  Often, the people in fandom who build awesome fandom resources don’t get the recognition they deserve.  More often than not, they don’t get compensation for their work and go in to large amounts of debt running their sites.  What they are doing means that fans can potentially get something for what they are doing and, for those who are cash strapped, can justify their fanac a bit more.

So yeah.  If that interests you, get in touch with them to find out more.

There are two things that Fan History Wiki loves: The fan community and the wiki community. The people in both are awesome and they keep us going. We love to give shout outs and mentions to anyone in those community who asks us and that we think could use support when they appear on our radar.

Over on Twitter, wikisgnpost mentioned the wikileaks could use some help. If you haven’t heard of wikileaks, check them out. They are great when it comes to sharing information that the public should know. They need some monetary assistance to keep going with their mission. On their donate page, they give the following info so you can help them complete their mission:

To contribute via bank transfer, please specify our account at the Wau Holland Foundation (a German charity which handles our tax deductability).

Wau Holland Stiftung, Germany

Commerzbank Kassel, bank number (BLZ) 52040021, Account number (Konto) 277281204

(or you can use IBAN: DE46520400210277281204, BIC: COBADEFF520)

To confirm, or contribute by VISA, Mastercard, cheque, Ukash, Moneybookers or other means, please contact wl-supporters@wikileaks.org . Contributions may be tax deductible, depending on your country.

If you are interested in showing your support with a grant, matched contribution, bequest, interest free loan, or have any other questions, please write to wl-supporters@wikileaks.org or wl-supporters@sunshinepress.org

Donate server space

If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, write to wl-tech@ljsf.org

Donate legal assistance

Individuals or organizations wishing to donate lawyer time write to wl-legal@ljsf.org

WikiLeaks would like to thank the following 18 steadfast supporters:

1. Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press (RCFP)
2. The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE)
3. The Associated Press – (AP) world wide news agency, based in New York
4. Citizen Media Law Project
5. The E.W Scripps Company – newspapers, TV, cable TV etc.
6. Gannet Co. Inc – the largest publisher of newspapers in the USA, including USA Today
7. The Heast Corporation – media conglomerate which publishes the San Francisco Chronicle
8. The Los Angeles Times
9. National Newspaper Association (NNA)
10. Newspaper Association of America (NAA)
11. The Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA)
12. The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) 13. Public Citizen – founded by Ralph Nader
14. together with the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC) 15. The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)
16. the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
17. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
18. Jordan McCorckle, the University of Texas

I originally wrote this for another purpose. I thought it might be interesting to people on my FList in regards to how we run Fan History, how we have gone about doing certain things, what has worked and what hasn’t worked. This has been slightly modified to be more applicable for a wider audience.

Fan History, like other small wikis and multifandom projects, has had a problem with community identity. Most of our contributors don’t as Fan History community members or members of fandom. Instead, they identify as say Batman fans, Harry Potter fans, Twilight fans. This is a problem that we have been working to solve, even as we try to increase identity and participation inside those specific communities. We’ve been most successful at creating identity by doing two things: Having content that interests people that is not specific to any one fan community and by creating large amounts of content that help demonstrate the size and scope of the whole fan community. We’ve found that both solutions, in terms of content development, have been rather successful. Fan History has covered several fandom kerfluffles that have brought brand awareness. The kerfluffles cross fandom lines in terms of interest, principally due to the large number of people involved. Fan History also has worked to improve our definition pages. These articles connect fandoms by offering definitions from different communities, give examples from across fandom and link to panfannish discussions regarding the terms. People can really begin to see how various fandoms are connected. As a result of these kerfluffles and terminology articles, our visitors have poked around a fair amount. We’ve also blown out our content, going from representing roughly 3,000 fandoms a year ago to representing over 36,000 now. We’ve added a over 25,000 articles about specific pieces of fan fiction, added over 50,000 articles about episodes of television, and added over 50,000 articles about LiveJournal community users. All of these articles have helped the fan community understand that Fan History is for them, that it covers topics that are relevant to them, that it is easy to plug in their own knowledge in to our framework with out fear. Both of these strategies have been successful in their own ways. Definition and kerfluffles ways have helped foster a greater sense of fannish community in the whole of the fannish community. They have helped to increase our traffic and our brand identity. Blowing out our content has not necessarily been as successful in terms of fostering community development inside and outside the wiki. It has helped some with our brand identity and it has with our conversion rates in getting people to contribute to the wiki. These solutions, going hand in hand, have really been successful for us.

Beyond content development, we’ve tried several things to encourage community development and to increase the number of edits that an individual makes. For a while, we tried to welcome new members and individually thank IP addresses that contributed to Fan History. We also tried barn stars. These strategies weren’t very successful in terms of converting a one time or occasional editor in to a regular editor. Our admin team discussed the situation, brain stormed ideas where we could be more effective at community building and helping our contributors; in response, we changed tactics. Our policy became to look more closely at specific edits and monitor for certain types and then respond to offer assistance that addresses those edits. One example involves articles about fan fiction writers. In some cases, they have changed their pen names. When we see edits that indicate that they have changed their names, we offer to help them do that or see clarification as to what they are trying to do. We have found that doing to leads to additional edits to an article to improve it once those changes are made and that the individual will frequently come back to more regularly update the article.

When you’re working on a wiki with a small community, you frequently know the one or two other contributors. You were might have brought them on board. It can sometimes be easier to just send them an IM, a text message, drop them an e-mail. This was a problem that we were occassionally facing on Fan History. Our admin team has become rather close. We often feel like we know what other admins are thinking and respond accordingly. We’ve discussed how this can be bad for a wiki. Our communication channels are not transparent when we do that. It might appear like our admin team is a clique, where our first goal is to maintain our status on the wiki and in the wider fan community. The team made a commitment to using talk pages to discuss all manner of things that we are doing. This includes how to avoid drama that may reflect poorly on us, what sort of content we want to develop, issues with templates, where we need a bot to be run to fix spelling or categorization issues and more. We tried to make sure that in discussions with contributors that more administrators were engaging the community. We tried to balance that so it wouldn’t look like we were dog piling on our contributors. This has been rather successful. Our engagement on the wiki has help our community relations outside the wiki because people can see what we are doing, have the tools to more fairly evaluate our decision making processes and members of the broader fannish community feel like they can approach on wiki or off to deal with concerns that they may have regarding our content. It has also helped internally by improving our communications with users, by making it easier to implement contributor feedback and by fostering a sense of internal community.

Wikis tend to need to define the size and scope of their mission, how to create content to meet their mission, policy creation and how they will enforce their policies. Much of this involves internal decision making that will have an impact on external factors. If the scope is too big, it will be hard to develop content or make the project feel overwhelming. If it is too small, the wiki may turn into a pet project that doesn’t have a large possible pool of contributors to draw from. If they create content with complex templates when they are first starting off, that may prove a barrier to entry for some people who read the content. If the wiki policy is too restrictive, people may not feel like they can contribute because they don’t want to break the rules, understand complex categorization policies or how to create stub articles that are acceptable. If it is too open, there is the potential for a lot of drama as people seek to dominate in certain places by sheer force of will. These are issues that we’ve been working on with Fan History. We’ve worked on policies with both the internal community and external community in mind. The point of the policies has always been to serve the community that exists on the wiki, to serve the information and make it as best as we can, and to be accessible and culturally appropriate when dealing with external critics. For content, we defined our scope and then went the automated route to create stub content to make it clear where the borders of our scope was. According to occasional contributors we’ve surveyed informally, it made the wiki feel less scary as they had base content to start from and they had many examples they could pull from regarding what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. For policy, we made a point of having policy discussions on the wiki and rationalizing those steps so that future wiki users could understand our thought processes. While a well developed community of users does not exist, we went outside the community to our acquaintances who were occasional editors. We surveyed their opinions, incorporated their comments in to our discussion. We invited them to participate in the discussion on the wiki. We also listened to external criticism regarding policies and incorporated that feedback as we developed our policy. The results of this that we are the most proud of involve our deletion policy found at http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Article_deletion . Community develop on wikis for ones that don’t have the good fortune to go viral is hard. This is a lesson that we’ve learned at Fan History.

It takes a great deal of work to be successful. It can be especially challenging to build a community because for wikis, it is often easy to overlook community aspects because wikis so often focus on content. We’ve learned that it takes building content with the idea of how random contributors will feel comfortable editing, actively engaging contributors in a way that will solicit a response, being transparent in terms of what the admin team is doing to avoid feelings of cliques, making organizational patterns easy to understand so as not to confuse your contributor base, not being too harsh when enforcing policies, and thinking about what your internal community building will mean in the wider community that your wiki is part of. We hope that you can take our lessons and learn from them as you develop a community on your own wiki.

I was reading my friends list on LiveJournal and found this post by Derik Smith of Transformers Wiki. The post discusses the Transformers Wiki ’s to switch their license from GFDL to CC-BY-SA3.  It then looks like the copyright holder took advantage of new license and what it allows to incorporate content from the Transformers Wiki into an advertisement for an official comic.   The wiki subsequently changed their license to prevent such an occurrence from happening again.  The post is well worth reading and does a much better job at explaining the particulars.  So yes, go forth and read it: http://deriksmith.livejournal.com/45915.html

A few days ago, wikiFur completed their move from Wikia to their own servers. It apparently was a long and difficult process, which is why most wikis hosted there don’t leave. Where did they move? They provided details on their news page, saying:

The English WikiFur is now hosted on a high-bandwidth server offered by French WikiFur administrator Timduru.

This server is currently used to stream the Funday PawPet Show and FursuitTV. It also hosts a variety of fursuit and animal-related websites and galleries, including WikiFur’s other language projects. Its resources (network bandwidth, CPU time, memory and storage) are not taxed by its current operations; there should be plenty for the English WikiFur even in the middle of its current streaming duties.

(For geeks: The server is a Conroe 3040 dual-core system with 4GB RAM, 1TB+500GB+250GB disks, a 40Mbit/sec+ transfer rate and a 3TB/month maximum bandwidth usage, of which about half is currently available. It runs FreeBSD 7.1, and is hosted by ThePlanet in Austin, Texas.)

Several other options were considered, including commercial shared web hosting and virtual machines. The use of an existing dedicated server under the control of a WikiFur administrator won out, for reasons of easy administration, features, cost, and potential for future expansion.

They have an excellent tech team with GreenReaper as their lead so they are unlikely to have problems that another wiki that moved off Wikia had. wikiFur provides a valuable service to the furry fandom and I wish them nothing but the best. I hope that with their new location they can continue being the bedrock to the community that they were before the move.

We’ve been busy watching our recent changes on Fan History. An incident recently came up and we had a fair amount of behind the scenes discussion on how to handle it. After exploring our possible actions, we analyzed where our desires to take these actions came from. They can best be summarized as follows:

1. Desire to thoroughly document a topic, be completely truthful, provide multiple perspectives and be as unbiased as possible.
2. Desire to behave ethically, enforce our policies in an ethical and consistent way, and to adhere to the norms of the community of which we are a member.
3. Desire to avoid drama, possible negative publicity for the wiki, and personal attacks aimed at our admin staff.

This situation is one that many other wikis are likely to deal with. The problem with these motivations is that plan of action for each requires a different response. The plan of actions will have different outcomes when implemented. The desire for the first will almost certainly run afoul of the third one. The desire for the second one could likely piss off both sides who will see you as negating the first one and resulting in the third one not being met. It is a messy situation to be in. When you’re faced with a similar situation, our advice is to write down the pros and cons of implementing a strategy based on each desire. Examine those pros and cons and then implement the solution that will allow you to sleep at night. There is no right answer.

It is down.  We know.  The folks who run Encyclopedia Dramatica is down.   They have been hard at work bringing it up.   Please be patient and give them time.   If you want updatesm you might want to check out their chat room on IRC.

While at it, yourwiki has been a bit slow as some one uploaded over 1,500 images this week.  They are hard at work too.

This is another case of being a bit sloth like.   I promised to plug WhatPort80 and it has taken me a while to do that.  WhatPort80 is another wiki site.  On their about page, they describe themselves as:

WhatPort80 is a collection of internet information for your reading pleasure. All material submitted should be work safe. Any non-worksafe images or language will be deleted. If you’d like to contribute to a wiki that allows Non-worksafe content, Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica may be more to your liking.

They really push the limits of what is work safe and what is not because some images are highly suggestive using objects/fruit and flesh colored clothing.   Still, it is very damned cool and has a lot of great potential.  One article I really like is Lulz because I like the caption below the image.  The jokes feel accessible to me and where I am online.  Please check them out.

I  got the following e-mail and thought I would pass it along as the folks at Wagn are beyond awesome.

Will you help bring more attention to Wagn and healthy organizing patterns?

Here’s how to get the word out (links and resources below):

• Tell a Friend – Email someone who might use Wagn, or tell us whom to contact.
• Blog –  If you’re a blogger or FOB  (friend of bloggers), give Wagn a nod.
• Twitter — Tweet about Wagn (hashtag #wagn).  See what’s being said.  Follow @wagneer.
• Facebook –  Mention Wagn on your wall!  Join the Facebook group.
• Press — Know anyone in the press?  Send them the Press Release.  Referrals most welcome.

Thanks for being part of our launch!

– Ethan, Lew, and John

About Wagn

• Wagn 1.0 Press Release
• A few Wagn screenshots
• The Story Behind Wagn 1.0 (blog post)
• Wagn 1.0 tracking page
• RailsInside blog post about Wagn
• What’s being said about Wagn on Twitter
• Register for your own Wagn website online.

Wagn
Wagn is an open-source web tool for building thriving organizational patterns.  It’s so flexible that you can use it as a website, a work flow tracker, a collaborative work space, and a library integrated all into one — one login, one search bar, one home.  More information, including affordably hosted Wagn sites, is available at Wagn.org.

Wagn 1.0
Wagn, the pattern-driven wiki that RailsInside.com calls “revolutionary”, is announcing its 1.0 release.  With a handful of simple, powerful innovations, Wagn enhances wikis to allow rapid creation of collaborative, dynamic, patterned websites while keeping things simple and clean for casual users.  The 1.0 release adds considerable polish and robustness.

Grass Commons
Grass Commons is a 501(c)3 public education charity that helps build tools for a thrivable world.  Its Wagn project, originally designed for researching company and product impacts, received initial funding as a community knowledge tool in 2006 from Meyer Memorial Trust, Oregon’s largest private foundation. To learn more or contribute please visit grasscommons.org.

There are a couple of wikis who have been extremely supportive of Fan History. They include Wikia, AboutUs, wikiHow and EncyclopediaDramatica.

I was informed that EncyclopediaDramatica had some big cash flow problems, and they need your monetary support.  Yeah, they can be pretty wanktastic, mean and probably deserve some of the reputation they have… but as a wiki community, they can be pretty awesome and supportive of other wikis out there.  If you’re a member of the wider wiki community, please consider helping out.

A few days ago, I published a blog entry titled The problems FanLore faces are not unique: Learning from Fan History’s experience. In the course of editing it, we removed some bits that weren’t relevant to what we were responding to.  One bit I thought was still pretty interesting so, lo! The bit reappears here!

Fan History’s admins all been in fandom a long time, and sometimes this whole issue of doing crosstalk in an collaborative way that anyone can contribute can be intimidating.  In fandom, this just is not done.  With a piece of fan fiction, the process is solitary in creation and when the story is finished, there is no real questioning the process, questioning the organization, suggesting ways to improve the story.  It just isn’t something that is fundamental to our cultural practices.  People don’t ask “Why did you have Harry Potter doing that particular spell in that scene?  Could you use this spell instead?”  If they do that, it tends to be viewed as antagonstic, or questioning the author’s writing ability.  And on the off chance the author and their supporters do agree that something could have been done differently, most of the time the author doesn’t go back and change it.  And if they do?  The audience doesn’t generally go back and read it.  Our cultural practices from the fan community just don’t lend themselves to crosstalk as equals.

We at Fan History love wikis. And we love seeing wikis do well.  So when wikInvest sent us an e-mail asking people to vote for them to win a Webby, I thought I would pass it along so you can support other great wiki projects.

So go register and vote now!

At Fan History, we are always looking for ways to improve our content, increase contributions, and improve outreach to the greater community. As such, it is often useful to reflect inward on our own practices and to look outward, to look at other wikis, to see how they tackle these issues, as well as how they are perceived by the public.

Related to this continual practice of self-reflection and outward examination, Sidewinder recently brought a portion of this LiveJournal post regarding FanLore to our attention. It was instructive to go through and compare the problems that the two wikis have in common, and to enumerate the ways Fan History has been trying to deal with those problems ourselves. In some cases, the challenges are quite similar indeed, though our approaches to dealing with them differ. In other cases, the issues were ones we had confronted before and have worked hard in the past two years to improve upon.

http://nextian.livejournal.com/263577.html?format=light

To quote:

“On the one hand, Fanlore has a number of excellent, well-researched articles that are resources for discussions, fanworks, and historical projects. It is easy to edit, comes in multiple decent-looking skins, and has gardeners who are fantastically on the ball. On the other hand…

These are some of the things that FanLore has in common with Fan History. Both are excellent resources for the history of fandom, with some fandoms better represented than others on both. Fan History and FanLore have a number of different skins; Fan History has them available to registered members. Both wikis are easy to edit; Fan History’s templates are designed to give new editors a boost on organizing their materials. And both have “gardeners” or administrators who are involved and easy to contact.

My chief issue with Fanlore is that it is not, as it stands, a community project. There’s very little crosstalk,

Crosstalk takes effort and a commitment from those who are editing. It is why Fan History uses talk pages. It is why we ask people if they need help. It is why we create active talk pages to converse on how things are organized. These things need to be done openly, so that users can have input. We’ll admit that we aren’t always excellent at it… but we do try, and this is one area we have worked hard on improving. We know this is important to the success of a wiki.

Sometimes, crosstalk can be hindered on a wiki. We’ve found this to be a problem at times as some members of the fan community have had limited exposure to wikis. They don’t understand how wikis work. They might not understand the purpose – or even the existence – of a talk page. They might be used to a certain wiki or another project which doesn’t have the same idea of constantly sharing, constantly asking questions, constantly editing, constantly revising. There is a learning curve. As wiki administrators, we need remove those barriers to create crosstalk, to make the users aware of crosstalk. On Fan History, we’re still working on that.  Both FanLore and Fan History need to improve by using methods such as welcoming members, following up with one time contributors, and even changing the text on our talk tab – easy, since we’re using MediaWiki.

no central LJ comm,

We don’t have an LiveJournal community, either. We do have one on InsaneJournal that we use mostly for information sharing. The content, though, tends to be mirrored from our blog. Our recent changes are shown on our Twitter and identi.ca accounts. Our admins are also found on Twitter and they sometimes discuss organizational efforts with a wider community there. But neither our microblogging presence, nor our InsaneJournal presence are in any way really comparable to an off-wiki version of wikiHow’s New Article Boost.

We also have this blog on a subdomain of our wiki. You don’t have to be a member to read it. If you want to comment, you can, just by filling out the form with your name and website address. You can carry over your disqus presence when you comment. It’s our way of bringing our work to a greater fandom audience than the one found on LiveJournal.

We feel it is important that major news, discussions and policy matters are discussed on Fan History itself instead of on an off-site community such as LiveJournal. We try to keep those conversations on the wiki, announcing discussions and events on our main page, and then posting about them on the blog to make finding the conversation easier. Wikis need fewer barriers to help fans get involved.

Other wikis have different means of discussing their organizational and content objectives. wikiHow does their organizing with the wikiHow Herald . On it, they talk about projects they are working on. They highlight featured contributors. They encourage the general community through that and through wikiHow’s forums . A few other wikis on Wikia also have forums where they discuss policy issues, plan article and category improvements, and build a community for their wiki. AboutUs doesn’t really have forums, but they have a GetSatisfaction account where you can ask about policy issues, for article help, and find out how you can get involved in an off-wiki manner.

the chat has been empty every time I’ve gone in,

Fan History recently changed its chat server to chat.freenode.net in #fanhistory. Unfortunately, it seems that the chat at Fan History is nearly empty, too. But chat can really help with community development. AboutUs, Wikia, wikiHow and EncyclopediaDramatica use it extensively. ED has their own server where people occasionally break out of the main room to work on side projects. wikiHow folks use their chatroom on chat.freenode.net to coordinate patrolling Recent Changes, for writing parts of the Herald, and for discussing improving projects like wikiArt. AboutUs has staff members and community members in their chatroom, ready to help people out who have questions or who are looking for information on how to contribute. It just takes a few dedicated regulars to make it workable.

and the Issues page is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive “well you
may be correct but I feel that possibly your face is stupid.”

Fortunately for Fan History, we seem to have fewer of those issues. We have certainly had articles and sections of the site which have been subject to edit wars and bias concerns, but we have tried to work with the parties involved to create as unbiased a history as possible in these cases. And when a administrator feels personally too close to a subject, that administrator will ask that others with a more neutral stance get involved.

Among other things, this means that there’s no clear outline of what needs work;

Well, they are wikis. If you understand wikis, you can’t really outline what needs to be done as this constantly evolves as a wiki grows. You can begin to outline what needs to be done on talk pages, or on how to lists, etc. The trick is less outline, more “How do you communicate with contributors outside the core to understand what their goals and intentions are for contributing to the project? How do you foster them and work them into your existing wiki work?” If someone comes in and makes an edit, you welcome them and ask how you can help them. Or say something like “Hi! Thanks for your edit on Lord of the Rings. We’ve been wanting to see it improved for a while. If you’re planning on sticking around for a while, we’d love for you to help the category structure there. It could benefit from some one who knows the fandom really well making it more fandom specific. [How does your fandom organize ships and what are the standard ship names? We've not touched those articles because we're not sure.]“

there’s no reward system for putting up a good page,

This is hard. Most bigger wikis like Wikipedia and wikiHow do BarnStars. But when there are just a few regular contributors, doing that becomes difficult. Depending on who is doing the editing, BarnStars can end up looking like a lot of self-congratulatory work.

What Fan History tries to do is to thank really great contributors on our main page and on the blog. We’ve also considered doing an extended featured article on the main page as a reward for the editors who do a lot of work on their own People article. There are other ways of giving those who create good articles and make good edits the feedback that keeps them coming back and continuing.

especially since (as yet) no one is using it as a resource;

This is a battle Fan History faces all the time: demonstrating our relevance. Something like wikiHow, AboutUs, Wikipedia, PoliceWiki even wikiFur and EncyclopediaDramatica have built-in audiences. Or the wikis have done a great job of demonstrating their relevance. wikiFur pretty much made themselves into THE furry portal through content selection and organization. They’ve worked with the community and created standards for writing articles about members. This has made it easier for the the wiki to serve their community peacefully. AboutUs has developed relationships with sites that provide domain information – to the point where you almost can’t get whois information without stumbling across them. PoliceWiki has done a lot of outreach to photographers and musicians to get permission to use their images and content on the site. Through the years, they have also worked to get those directly involved with the band to contribute material themselves as a way of presenting the most accurate resource for the fandom possible–and building good professional relationships. Getting a wiki recognized as a good resource takes concentrated effort, time and marketing. People need to know you’re there before anything else!

policy remains unclear in a number of important areas,

Making policy clear, and changing it when it becomes necessary is important in a collaborative effort such as a wiki. Fan History has been willing to do this, and has opened up policy changes for public discussion on talk pages, linking those pages to the main portal. It is vital to have clear policy on many issues in a wiki, such as privacy, deletion of articles, content relevancy guidelines, overall organization, and these things are best resolved then made clear to the public sooner rather than later.

such as cross-platform work with Fancyclopedia and the Fandom Wank wiki

In the past, we’ve cited the Fandom Wank wiki, but that in itself caused a lot of wank, so we’ve discontinued using it as a main source for information on new and existing articles. On a plus side, Fan History is “working” with FanLore by linking to their articles and citing them as a source in more articles. We have relationships with a few fandom specific wikis such as PoliceWiki and RangersWiki to “mirror” articles relevant to both sites, helping to build cross-community work and traffic to both wikis as a result. We also allow some mirroring of articles with AboutUs. We talk extensively to others in the wiki community, developing positive and beneficial relationships so where we know we can turn for help when needed. This includes having open communications with people who run AboutUs, EncyclopediaDramatica, wikiHow, wikiindex, Richmond Wiki, Wagn, wikiTravel, Kaplak Wiki, Wikimedia Foundation and Wikia. They’ve provided us with assistance on things such as advertising issues, content development, policy creation and letting us use extensions they’ve developed. A lot of this is about becoming a good wiki neighbor, finding areas where projects compliment each other but don’t compete. It fosters the whole idea of the wiki Ohana that is a favorite subject at RecentChangesCamp.

– and, to my deepest dismay, it is not currently a wiki for all of fandom.

This may be an unrealistic goal for any overall wiki on “fandom”–at least if fandom is being defined as covering all aspects and types of fandoms, from sports to television to music to video games. Fan History currently has over 4,000 fandoms represented on our 595,000 plus articles. We don’t even begin touch all of fandom. Truthfully, we don’t think that it’s possible to reach and represent every little corner, every tiny fandom. But we’re trying, oh, we’re trying, and trying to make it easier for people to add those fandoms that aren’t there yet. We’re doing a lot of aggressive outreach, building a lot of stub content and getting people invested. The outreach part is critical but frequently, for many good projects outreach doesn’t get done. It takes a huge amount of time away from content development, and from working on the core goals of the wiki. It can be loads of no fun and requires the kind of commitment that people invested in only a small subcomponent of the wiki might not want to do.

Fanlore is, as it stands, a chronicle of the fannish experience of an extremely small subset of media fans. Have you seen the current incarnation of the Who page? The Harry Potter page? Compare that to the Due South page or the Sentinel page. Though the fandom sizes of Doctor Who and Harry Potter remain enormous, no one is working on them.

Fan History faced much of the same criticism early on, and still does. Some of our fandom pages and categories are great, and have received a tremendous amount of work–often from one or two very dedicated people. But our own Doctor Who and Harry Potter articles could use some work, too. Still, they are a nice representation of what is possible. It is also why we have “Move; don’t remove” as our mantra because as you develop a history, you learn that things must be placed into context, especially when you have large amounts of data.

Some of our administrators and regular contributors spend time building up stub articles and categories in fandoms that we know are popular, to try to make it easier for new users to add their knowledge and experience. But it all takes time and effort and only so much can be done in each day.

And I think that is self-perpetuating. I’ve stubbed out a number
of pages in large fandoms, including the Who version I linked
you to above, but it is not rewarding to do some work on a
collaborative project and receive no … collaboration.

Fan History, wikiHow, RichmondWiki and AboutUs all have a structure that makes it easy for people to come in and figure out how to add content. We try to have a structure on Fan History where people can easily slot things in with out having to worry about writing and editing large tracks of prose. As a result, creating article stubs that can be filled in more fully later isn’t as big of a problem as it could be.

As for collaboration, it’s definitely something that smaller wikis have problems with, but when it happens, it can be fantastic to see. We loved watching this happen with articles such as the Rescue Rangers article, the Shota article, the Draco/Hermione article, the Race Fail article and others. And if one or two people are creating content, they end up learning a lot about fandoms outside their own, which is always a plus. Because in the case of Fan History? A lot of what we are about is sharing knowledge with others.

I am not castigating the other editors for this — that would be somewhat absurd — but I do wonder why I have not seen Fanlore more widely linked to other communities, outside of the one that the founders of the OTW are members of.

This is not hard to figure out. People will link to an article organically if they see a need to or think contributing will benefit themselves. Fan History’s Draco/Hermione gets a lot of views because it has become a resource for finding old and influential fics. People also link to articles about themselves because they’re excited to see themselves mentioned in a wiki. It is another way that they can promote themselves and their work. One of the published authors on our wiki has seen twenty visits a month on the article about herself, which is an incentive to keep it updated and to contribute to our community. Other people contribute in order to control how outsiders view them. That can be seen on Fan History most clearly with the case of AdultFanFiction.Net and Rescue Rangers. Still others contribute to Fan History in order to promote conventions they are involved with, to try to up the standing of those authors and artists they love, or just for the LULZ. That latter one, we think, ends up indicating a certain amount of success if they think that Fan History is worth trying to get LULZ from.

We’ve also developed a large amount of links by linking them ourselves. AboutUs?  bebo? Chickipedia? Delicious? Facebook? FanPop? identi.ca? InsaneJournal? Last.fm? LinkedIn? LiveJournal? MySpace? Orkut? Plurk? Twitter?  Wikia? wikiidex? All of these are linked at Fan History. We also developed content that people would want to link to. Articles about the ordinary fan and fleshed out content on topics or relevant content that can’t be found elsewhere. And it is why our desire to get a few interns (are you interested in interning with us? Contact Laura!) is less for the wiki itself than the community outreach because we know doing that will lead to edits.

Fanlore should have extensive entries on “slan” and “Victoria Bitter,”
not just Laura and Bodie from The Professionals.

Interesting that FanLore’s most edited article, the last time one of our admins bothered to check, was about Fan History and/or its owner. Here are our top ten most edited articles that didn’t have bot contributions:

1. Harry Potter

2. Draco/Hermione

3. Bandfic

4. Beauty and the Beast

5. Supernatural

6. Digimon

7. CSI

8. Rescue Rangers

9. Doctor Who

10. X-Files

We’ve been working to make certain our most edited articles are not our personal loves or the people we dislike. Why? It’s not conducive to building a community. We’ve learned this the hard way, admittedly, so it is not surprising to see that another wiki may be encountering the same issues. That said, being seen as a personal “grudge” site with too narrow a focus is not good for building positive public relations. It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to rebuild trust after working the bias out of your more problematic articles.

I know the only answer to this is “edit it yourself,” but I feel that a stronger sense of community among Fanlore editors would make new editors more comfortable and allow a broader range of articles to arise.”

That’s a problem every wiki faces. But you have to learn from both your own mistakes and the mistakes of others. Learn what makes other wikis successful and adapt them for your own purpose.

We wish FanLore nothing but the best of luck in their endeavor. It is a long a bumpy road but one that be filled with tremendous personal satisfaction in creating a great tool for the greater fan community.

When looking at large scale preservation projects, a lesson I have learned from the Geocities situation, is that one person cannot do it all.  Two people cannot do it all.   Three people cannot do it all.  Four people cannot do it all, even if they are dedicated, well meaning, have certain skills and are willing to put the time into saving and preserving the history of an online community.  I’m ecstatic about what we accomplished but I’m also disappointed.  I feel like we could have done more, if there was more than a core team of a few of us at Fan History. 

In doing a preservation project, one person trying to save things means that things will be missed.  The process can be greatly aided by institutional help in determining the size and scope of what needs to be saved, and in developing a list of resources that need to be saved.  The following of institutional structures that would have been useful for us to have had relationships with:

• Yahoo/Geocities.  ArchiveTeam tried to reach out to them and were rebuffed.
• Open Directory Project.  We didn’t really need them because they helpfully provide a list of all the sites listed on DMOZ.  We were able to utilize this.  For that, we are happy.
• WebRing.  Lots of Geocities sites hosted there.  Couldn’t scrape them easily to try to easily pull a url list.  Didn’t respond to our contact requests.  Couldn’t find anyone associated with them on Twitter to help us get that.  We probably should have called and called and nagged. :/
• ArchiveTeam.  We used one of the lists they provided to get urls to scrape but most of what they provided publicly wasn’t that useful for our needs.  I did a comment on their blog.   We should have reached out more to them.  They had the technical knowledge to do things, had the computers, had the dedication to do this.  We have the structure to provide a historical framework for some of what they were doing.
• The Internet Archive. They archive old copies of pages across the Internet.  
• Organization for Transformative Works.   They are dedicated to preserving fandom history.  Repeatedly reached out to them on Twitter, on LiveJournal, via e-mail and elsewhere.  Never responded.  EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING. They have manpower and a shared purpose that would have been helpful.

We should have gotten institutional support.  They could have provided us with three things: 1] A (structured) list of fandom related urls, 2] Technical assistance, 3] Community support and manpower.  Some of that we got because these institutions provide some of this as part of their own efforts and mission.

After institutional support, we needed technical assistance.  We were lucky in that we got some assistance from Lewis Collard and illyism.   We just didn’t think to ask some people until too late, about two weeks before Geocities closed.  Asking two individuals for all our technical assistance and implementation of technical solutions isn’t fair, won’t result in a timely solution.  It doesn’t allow enough time for integration with institutional support.  Lewis scraped about 5,000 pages and screencapped them.  He downloaded about 2,000 files.  In doing all this, he blew through his monthly bandwidth allotment. Illyism developed a Firefox plugin.   There are several resources we could have, probably should have tapped in our own community, the wiki community and the fandom community.  They include:

• #mediawiki, #wiki, #yourwiki, #recentchangescamp, #wikia, #pywikipediabot, #wikihow on irc.freenode.net.  These chat rooms have awesome people in them.  They do a lot of open source projects. 
• Organization for Transformative Works.  They are training female programmers for their projects. 
• ArchiveTeam and Internet Archive.  They already have technical people. 
• Idealist.Org.  Listing requests for volunteers might have gotten some assistance.
• Wikimedia related mailing lists.
• Tech and programming people we met at RecentChangesCamp.
• Relevant LinkedIn communities.
• weget developer community.
• identi.ca.  They have a lot of developers on the site who use it instead of Twitter.  It is smaller and more intimate.  It has a lot of open source advocates who like doing things for the greater good.

There are probably a few more places where we could have asked for help.  We could have used help creating a list or urls, screencapping sites, creating tools to automatically input the attained data into a usable format, and tools to make it easier for non-tech people to contribute.

The last component in the we cannot do it by ourselves and succeed is community support.  In our case, that community involves fandom.  We needed the community to help edit relevant articles to do deeper documentation on stub articles created by our core team and created with assistance from our tech team.  Sometimes in fandom, it is easy to get locked into a box of thinking of your corner as representative of everyone.  The more people we had, the smaller that box would have been.  We should have been more aggressive with our outreach to that community and to internet news and mainstream news sites that would have covered our project and helped us get greater exposure with our core audience.  Places we should have been more aggressive include:

• wikiFur, Transformers Wiki, Futurama Wiki, Battlestar Galactica Wiki, Wikia, other fandom related wikis.  The content we created on Fan History that preserved the history of those fandoms could have been shared with them so everyone could have won.  If we had reached out.
• Twitter.  We should have been tweeting damned near every fan person who mentioned Geocities on Twitter to beg for assistance.
• Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!Groups, Ning.  We didn’t reach out there at all.  Large fan communities exist on them and are ones that probably used Geocities.
• Fanac Fan History Project and other science fiction historical projects.  They stood/stand to lose a lot of their own history too.  This includes convention reports, early histories of scifi fandom on Geocities, pictures, etc.
• Fansites.  Lots of domain level fansites will plug meaningful projects.  They could have helped us get the word out, helped us to recruit people with this project.

We mostly tried to mobile through LiveJournal, through blogging outreach, on IRC, through contacts on the wiki community (Thank you ProjectOregon and AboutUs!) and our own personal network of acquaintances.  This wasn’t as successful as a method as it could have been.

Repeating: One person (or a small team) cannot do it all.  For this type of project to be successful, you need three things: Institutional support, technical support and community support.  If we hear that other sites are at risk in the future, we now know what needs to be done and better understand the consequences of failing.  We’ve learned an important lesson.

In the meantime, we’ve still got a lot of data that needs to be processed into the wiki into a usable format.  We could use some technical and community assistance in accomplishing that.  How do we get 3 gigs of screencaps uploaded?  What is the best way to upload 1,000 text files to a wiki?  Is there a way to scan those text files to make sure that they are what we think they are?  As a community member, can you help us improve articles we did create?  Can you help by improving descriptions on the screencaps we do have uploaded? We still need help.

Now, I’m going [maybe] to take a bit of a wiki break, data mining break, data processing break because I’ve pretty much been doing that straight through for the past week.

We recently created a collection of articles about fandom related wikis on Wikia. The list isn’t complete as Wikia has over 24,000 wikis listed on their own internal list. Six to eight hours of data crunching left us exhausted and so we have about 8,000 or so wikis we haven’t looked at, couldn’t figure out how to handle the problem of ten wikis from the same fandom and language having the same name. That said, we can still give you an idea of some of the most popular fandoms to create wikis about. They are:

1. Star Wars – 161+ wikis
2. Pokemon – 135+ wikis
3. Music wikis (not fandom specific) – 102+ wikis
4. Movie wikis (not fandom specific) – 100+ wikis
5. Runsescape – 91+ wikis
6. Naruto – 88+ wikis
7. Warcraft – 84+ wikis
8. Nintendo (non fandom specific) – 75+ wikis
9. Anime (non fandom specific) – 70+ wikis
10. Halo – 66+ wikis
11. Club Penguin – 62+ wikis
12. Yu-Gi-Oh – 59+ wikis
13. Dragon Ball – 48+ wikis
14. Fan fiction (non fandom specific) – 46+ wikis
15. LEGO (non fandom specific) – 45+ wikis
16. Comics (non fandom specific) – 44+ wikis

During the past few days, we’ve been working on trying to visualize our organizational patterns on Fan History in order to understand our own patterns, how we conceptualize fandom, to check for organizational consistency, create tools to help users understand our organizational patterns, to identify areas where we lack stub content. This is our second post in this series. This one is about Harry Potter.

Click on the image to view it full size.

There are things about the top level category that drive me nuts. Namely, the category seems to have way too many categories for specific sites: LiveJournal, GreatestJournal, EZBoard, InvisionFree, JournalFen, Yahoo!Groups. I’m not certain how this can be fixed with out a major category restructure. The major hesitation about doing that is it would disturb our existing patterns, would make the tree a lot deeper and harder to navigate.

Once I start looking at the structure regarding communities in depth, it appears that we have started to move that content into its own separate structure. It just was never fully implemented. Or quite possibly, it was implemented and then people went in and changed it not realizing that we had attempted a restructure. This is a wiki and anything is possible.

Our character and pairing structure was taken apart at one point, with articles removed from them. There is the whole question of if we should restore that and put the articles back into the subcategories and restore that. Some like Draco/Hermione have a lot of content that could go in them including stories around the ship, etc. Having that structure existing just makes it easier to navigate and conceptualize in my opinion. If you specifically find that Snape/Harry LiveJournal community, than it helps to have that sorted if we don’t have an article list of Snape/Harry LiveJournal communities.  

The Harry Potter fandom also seems to be structured around pairings, characters and houses.  The community doesn’t necessarily have the emphasis on a coherent community identity.  Thus, it seems logical to me to structure the fandom more around these articles and rebuild them that way as a history of the fandom would be much more accurate if told from that perspective.

There is also the issue of how to organize fan fiction. We have fan fiction archives, fan fiction, stories, slash, saffic… and all of these deal with fan fiction. Should those sub categories be moved into Category:Harry Potter fan fiction? And looking at that category now, it really looks like everything in it should be moved to Category:Harry Potter stories. Oye.  If we combined communities and organized that way, it feels like it would be logical to combine this one too.  Things just seem really scattered like this; would it make it easier for article contributors to link various parts of the history they tell if the category structure made those connections more obvious?

If you have any feedback on this tree, any questions about how it developed, we would love your feedback. Do the organic patterns we’ve developed make sense? Is this construction too artificial? Is it not logical? Does it make sense in relation to the fandom this structure represents? And if you’re really motivated, we’ve really like that feedback on the relevant talk pages for those categories.