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?

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 16, 2001, the Snapeslash community benefited as a result of the opening of the first Harry Potter movie in theaters. This is mostly owed to fans finding Alan Rickman attractive. [58]
• On November 16, 2001, the first Harry Potter movie was released. [59]

• On November 16, 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon was premiered in Los Angeles, California in USA . [291]

• On November 16, 1999, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode The Initiative premiered on television in the United States. [274]

I got an e-mail two or three days from some one who found this blog and asked for affiliate links.  They touted their own page rank and how it would be to both our advantages to do this.  My reply was basically: Why are you asking me for links on the blog when you can get rel=follow blogs on the wiki, where the links can be on pages more targeted to their audience? The person replied back with something like: Fan History is a much better place! Here is more info on why we should affiliate link!

People?  Don’t send me those type of e-mails.  Don’t send others those sort e-mails.  Fan History Wiki is a wiki.  You want links?  All you have to do is follow our rules and our self promotion guidelines.  You don’t have to ask us if this is okay.  We encourage that because it makes the wiki more relevant and more useful.  If you want more incoming links, go ahead and add them to Fan History.

Are we going to add links to you on Fan History at your request?  Maybe… but generally only if you’re asking for a front page link because you have big, big fandom news that you think everyone landing on the main page needs to know about.  (Ficathons, charity events, law suits, contests, that sort of thing.)  If the link is good enough because your news is that good, we’ll be happy to blog about it.  Outside that, e-mails for reciprocal link are pretty much ignored.

The only other exception is if you want us to create a lot of articles (50+) about your site.  Then please feel free to e-mail us with as many details as possible, why you want those pages, what is required of us, how this will help Fan History be better at completing its mission.

Please, no e-mails requesting affiliate linking.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 12, 2001, the German language mailing list janeway_chakotay was created. [43]
• On November 12, 2002, animedrabble was founded.
• On November 12, 2002, the Ghostbusters LiveJournal community ghostbusters was created. [44]

• On November 12, 2007, the InsaneJournal asylum heroinaddicts was created. [290]
• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.

• On November 12, 2002, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Conversations with Dead People premiered on television in the United States. [271]

• On November 12, 2004 the Gil Grissom slash CSI LiveJournal community grisslash was created. [241]

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.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 8, 1996, the Tomb Raider video game was released in the United States. [26][27]
• On November 8, 2001, the mailing list Doggett_Torture was created. [28]

• On November 8, 2005, the episode Bugs originally aired on CW in the United States. [104]
• On November 8, 2007, the episode Red Sky at Morning originally aired on CW in the United States. [105]

• On November 8, 2001, the CSI episode Caged originally aired in the United States. [235]
• On November 8, 2007, the CSI episode Who & What (1) originally aired in the United States. [236]

This is a crosspost from Fan History Wiki. We are crossposting it to our blog as we’d like to expose it to a wider audience because we think the information contained in it might be useful for other wiki projects and for people to better understand how to do a good job at telling the history of fandom events that are happening in the moment..  Please feel free to comment here, or on the talk page for this article to help improve it.  Please also feel free to edit the on wiki version to make those improvements. 

Introduction

Help Fan History improve, be more comprehensive and cover breaking fandom news. Covering major fandom news in the moment, as they happen, is important because articles can be used as quick reference guides for people who are curious as to what exactly happened and this information can be difficult to follow without a good, overall guide. It also helps with the preservation of material that may later disappear (via deletions or expiration of links) and allows for current events to be put into a historical context.

We need your help to cover breaking fandom news. In covering breaking news, there are three things you should keep in mind:

1. Strive for being unbiased. Where bias is hard to avoid, present multiple perspectives. Ask for help from other editors to review and remove what might be biased language.
2. Strive to tell a cohesive narrative. In quickly evolving events, it is crucial to understand how and when things evolved.
3. Be organized. Compiling a link list is often the best way to begin.

News sources

Sometimes you can stumble upon fandom news on your own. You may run across an event that needs covering on your Twitter feed, on your LiveJournal (or its clones) friends list, reading your favorite blogs or as a blow up happens on your favorite mailing list, message board, fansite or archive. If news is not obvious or you don’t know where to go to get, there are several places you can to find news to cover. Sites that are favorites of Fan History’s admins to check for news include:

• Dreamwidth Studios
  • lol meme
  • linkspam
• Fandom blogs
  • Henry Jenkins
  • Online Fandom
  • Convention Fans Today
• InsaneJournal
  • deutschesfandom
  • espanolfandom
  • meta_roundup
  • metametameta
• JournalFen
  • fandom_wank
  • fandom_lounge
  • the hms stfu
  • unfunnybusiness
  • wank report
• LiveJournal:
  • fandom_lawyers
  • fandomsecrets
  • fanthropology
  • metafandom
  • ohnotheydidnt
  • sf_drama
  • stop_plagiarism
• Tech blogs
  • Mashable
  • ReadWriteWeb
  • TechCrunch

This list currently over represents with LiveJournal media fandom because admins are a bit biased in that direction and this type of news is the kind that we get the most incoming visitors from. You can find other sources for fandom news. Please check Help:Be a Fan History Reporter/News sources by fandom for links to those sources. When documenting the history of an event, you don’t need to focus on fandoms and communities that fall under the purview of the communities covered just by those links.

Naming the situation

In many cases, small kerfluffles can be worked into an existing article. If the news is about a convention, the reporting can go on the page about that convention. This is how the situation was handled for TwiCon. Sometimes though, fandom news needs to go on its own article. The general rule of thumb is that if the link list in reporting a situation is more than ten links AND/OR the kerfluffle section would be longer than a third of the length of the article AND/OR the kerfluffle involves a large audience beyond the original intended one, a new article about the situation should be created.

Once you’ve determined that a new article is needed, how do you create a name for it? First, read a bit about the situation. In many cases, participants will have already coined a phrase to describe a situation. This was the case for SurveyFail and Race Fail 2009. If no one has coined a name for the situation you are reporting on, then you are free to name it yourself. The name should reflect what is going on. If there is a particularly influential post with a title that gives an idea of what is going on, you can borrow that. Otherwise if the situation is a fail one, it should include Fail in the title. If the situation is a kerfluffle/kerfuffle, it should include that in the title. If it is a wank, Wank should appear in the title. If it is none of those, chose some other short phrase to describe the situation. This was done for a situation involving Eli Roth that was named Eli Roth saga of doom. After you have chosen the descriptor, couple that before or after the main focus of the topic you are reporting on. Examples of names of topics cover that you can model naming after:

• Eli Roth saga of doom
• Fishboob Fail 09
• LambdaFail
• Race wank
• Trans Fail
• The War on Science Fiction
• Wiscon 33 Gender Kerfluffle

When thinking of a name, do not worry too much about it. It is easy to move an article or use redirects to point to that article if other names for a situation develop. It is a wiki and the article name being less than ideal is not going to matter. If you later have regrets about what you named an article, just comment on a talk page to ask for people’s opinions on what to rename it.

Links list

The heart of most of Fan History’s fandom news related articles is the link lists. These are easy to build and do not require extensive knowledge of a situation. Often, they are one of the first things that reporters write and they are a good place to start. If you do not have a good grasp of a situation, or the situation is developing quickly, we recommend that you start your reporting by compiling a link list. In some cases, this is all

Examples of articles with link lists that you can model your own article after include:

• Race Fail 2009
• SurveyFail

Link lists should be organized by date and author. The purpose of providing two versions of one list of urls is to make it easier for people to find content, and to prevent bias in how links are organized. Sorting by date also helps construct the narrative of the events for readers of the article and for other reporters trying to document the event. Sorting by author helps to identify key participants in events and makes it easy integrate those links in articles about members of fandom.

Links on the list you create should be formatted like this:

* [http://link Link title or blog post title)]: [[author]] on [[Month day]], [[year]]

This provides consisting formatting across other news stories and makes it easy to include parts of the list on other page while providing additional context.

Documenting an event

When documenting a situation, there are three goals: accurately portray what happened in a neutral fashion, provide a cohesive narrative and preserving the history of an event.

There are several tricks to writing in a neutral fashion. One way is to try to provide relevant quotes from all sides; do not just quote one side. Second, try to seek out links that represent multiple points of view. For example, in a situation like FanLib, you would want to provide quotes from FanLib, FanLib supporters and FanLib detractors. You would want to link to all of those with out placing a value judgement on the links.

Sometimes, it appears like people are overwhelmingly supporting one side and it makes it impossible to provide a neutral perspective. In these cases, the best way to handle things neutrally is to identify quotes from the minority that the majority has identified as the most problematic. Use these quotes so that people can see them in their original with out the commentary. Provide links back to that material. Include links to commentary about those quotes in the link section. Handling things in this fashion helps to accurately represent the minority view and highlights complaints of the majority.

One of the ways to provide a cohesive narrative is to create a timeline of events. When you are first starting to write the article, you may want to use a standard Fan History style timeline with bullets stating that an event occurred on this site on this date with relevant citations. As you improve the timeline, take each of those bulleted points and expand on it by providing relevant quotes and screencaps. Provide additional context to those events, like what something happened in response to or why this event is worth including in the report. If you begin to feel overwhelmed, comment on the talk page to ask for assistance.

Preserving history is important as some links disappear, people will make posts private or delete comments. When you suspect that content may disappear, screencap the conversation and upload the screencap to Fan History. Put the image in the relevant category or create a new one for this event if there are multiple images. If you are unsure how to do this, leave a comment on the talk page for the image and ask an administrator for help in figuring this out.

In some cases, it is important that the text be more easily searchable. If that is case, you can create a page with the name of the post, put {{preserving history}} at the top and ask an administrator to lock this article as a historical document. This type of history preservation is useful for documents like Terms of Services when people may want to compare different versions.

One of the things that we ask at Fan History is that if you are reporting on a story that you do not drop in and comment to people that you linked to in order to inform them that you linked to them. In some cases, such as situations like Race Fail 2009, this could lead to derailing of important conversations. Some of the topics that you may cover are important and derailing would be unfortunate. You are free to post links elsewhere, pointing people to the article as a resource but we ask that reporters for a topic do not drop links. This is similar to the policy at fandom wank of asking users not to “troll” the wank.

Another thing that we ask is that as you report on event, remember to follow Fan History’s rules. Some important rules to remember:

• Do not reveal private information in an article. If during the course of reporting an event, some one does this and you think it is important to cover, explain what happened with out providing the private information. Link to the source that provides that information you are providing.
• Do not use profanity unless you’re quoting some one else and only then, if the profanity helps with documenting the evtn.
• Do cite sources as often as possible and assume good faith on the part of other reporters.
• Do not write in the first person. If you are involved in an event, you can get around this by labeling a section {{MPOV}} and giving your account of the events.

Most popular articles for October 2009. (Yes, two days early but I want it done because plans for the weekend.) Some patterns have changed from a year ago but mostly, what has always been popular continues to be popular.

1. Draco/Hermione
2. Sakura Lemon Fan-Fiction Archive
3. Shotacon
4. AdultFanFiction.Net
5. Yu-Gi-Oh Card Maker Wiki
6. Cassandra Claire
7. FanFiction.Net
8. FanDomination.Net
9. Naruto
10. Fan fiction archives

For the month, we had 36,101 pages that were viewed a total of 167,509 times.

We’ve received several visits to Fan History from people looking for information about Michael Jackson content that was archived on Geocities. We have a fair bit. It can be found in the following locations:

• Michael Jackson stories (info on 18 stories archived on Geocities)
• Michael Jackson fansites on Geocities (info on 7 sites. More to be added as we process our data.)
• Michael Jackson images (screencaps of several fansites hosted on Geocities. Some have not been made into articles yet.)

If you know of any Michael Jackson specific efforts to save info on Geocities, let us know!

Like most people, we’ve been pretty busy doing things in life that need to get done.  We worked really hard to get some Geocities preservation work done.  The site closes down tomorrow.  We’re not happy with what we got preserved, even as we are.  Doubled edged sword that.

We did a manual look through and found information on about 5,000 stories archived on Geocities.  We screencapped and created articles about over 500 sites.  We added definitions from around 50 pages on Geocities.  In the final days, we created an extension so that people could look at the page and fill out the form, updating wiki articles about the site.

And in the past five days, we really kicked it into over drive.  We extracted information about 9,000 fansites mentioned on DMOZ.  We screencapped about 5,000 of those pages which contain related meta data.  We screencapped another 500 or so pages based on Google search results.  We downloaded about 1,000 text files related to fandom.  We saved about 10,000 search results from Google that mentioned fandom related terms on pages hosted on Geocities.  Some of this information is just garbage.  Early SEO efforts used random keyword seeding on the bottom of pages and that still pulls up on search, especially 500 deep.  Some of the screencaps are undoubtedly 505 errors.  Others, especially ones based on Google searches, are probably not fandom related.  Lots and lots of potential garbage sorted in with potentially useful information.

The problem now is: What do we do with this data?  The screencaps, the google search results, the DMOZ information?  How do we sort through it, cull through it, put it on the wiki?  Do we just mass upload everything and sort the potential garbage out later?  Do we just slowly try to work out things now?

We’re looking for ideas on how to handle that.  We’re also looking for assistance in implementing any ideas.  Any help you can provide us with post Geocities closing is most welcome.

Our Geocities preservation project is moving right along. We have information on over 1,000 pages. We know there is a total of over 700,000 individual sites on Geocities. We still need your help… If you aren’t sure about creating pages from scratch, consider editing one of our existing pages and improving that. The following list is our most popular articles so far that could use some help:

In 2009, the New York Yankees averaged the second highest per game attendance of any team in Major League Baseball.  On LiveJournal, there was only one team with more communities dedicated to it, only one team with more total members of those communities, and only one team with more posts and total comments.  On bebo, the Yankees had more groups dedicated to them, more total members, more total profile views and more total loves than any other team.  The Florida Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates and Oakland Athletics have the lowest average per game attendance in Major League Baseball.  There are only one or two communities on LiveJournal, LinkedIn and bebo dedicated to these teams.

Social media is an increasingly popular tool to connect with others who share your same interest.   Sports fans, baseball fans, fans of Major League Baseball teams are participating on social media to do just that.  They are on popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.  Sports fans and Major League Baseball fans are also on less popular networks liked bebo, BlackPlanet, CafeMom, Dreamwidth, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, orkut.

The less popular networks are not examined as often ones with greater traffic and more media attention.  The discussion regarding social networks, and the sports and Major League Baseball communities located on these sites is even less.  These sites are worth analyzing to answer questions such as: Is there a relationship between the number of communities on social networks and a team’s at ballpark attendance?  Is there a relationship between the volume of activity on these networks and ballpark attendance?  Is there a correlation between size of a community in members and attendance? MLB Game Attendance and Social Network Group Engagement seeks to answer those questions and a few related ones.

The results show that baseball communities dedicated to Major League Baseball teams are large and well established on several social networks like bebo, LiveJournal, LinkedIn and orkut. There is a community presence on other networks including biip, BlackPlanet, Blurty, CafeMom, DeadJournal, Dreamwidth, Eons.com and InsaneJournal.  Community does not exist on BIGADDA, buzznet, cloob.com, DontStayIn, Inksome, JournalFen and VampireFreaks.com. 

Where communities exist on a network, so does a correlation between the size of that community by team using the average number of people attending games featuring that team and using the percentage average game attendance.  In general, the more people on average attending a team’s games, the larger and more active social network community around that team.  There is a predictive value where you can determine the size of a community or average attendance based on the other variables.

A copy of MLB Game Attendance and Alternative Social Network Group Engagement can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/baseball.pdf.

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.

This is a cross post from Fan History’s InsaneJournal asylum.

At Fan History, we’ve been busy trying to preserve the history of fandom on Geocities. This is extremely important and we’ve hard at work since the news came out in July. This task would best be accomplished by a group of people, where different fandom projects were being coordinated. To this end, Fan History has tried to reach out several times to the folks at the Organization for Transformative Works for assistance. We’ve sent them e-mails, tweeted looking for people to get in touch, made posts on our LiveJournals asking people to help us get in touch with them. Most recently, we commented on their LiveJournal community.

So far, all we’ve received in return is aching silence. Our replies are not returned. Time is quickly ticking down. It is likely that Fanlore and Fan History are overlapping in some areas and completely lacking in the same areas. This makes no sense to us at Fan History. We need to put aside our personal differences, work together for one big last push in the 10 days before Geocities closes. We need to coordinate to preserve this history of fandom, so that there will be a record of it, so that when people talk about fandom during the late 1990s and early 2000s, we have good secondary sources to cite as our primary sources are disappearing. It is important. We need to work together.

Yes, there has been bad blood between Fan History and some of the people at the the Organization for Transformative Works. It needs to be put aside for the greater good. That’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve taken away from Race Fail: Principles can and often should trump personal loyalties.

So if you know some one at the Organization for Transformative Works, please ask them to finally get in touch with us. We would love to work together for one last push to preserve the history of fandom on Geocities.

Fan History has used some automation to help create articles about fansites and fan fiction archives.  (This is outside the fabulous job that Sidewinder has done by manually adding this information.)  All of these articles have (Geocities) in the title so that we can readily identify these articles.  With the end of Geocities fast approaching, we could really use some help with what are our most popular articles of this type to date.  Screencaps would be awesome.  Adding information to the timeline, who maintained them, where the sites are moving to (or if they aren’t) is really important to get.  Because of the interest in these sites, improving these would be nice to have as a priority.

The_Ultimate_Tekken_Fanfiction_Archive_(Geocities) is our most popular article with (Geocities) in the title.

The following also have views:
5 views

• The_De_La_Vega_Library:_Zorro_Fan_Fiction_Archive_(Geocities)
• CSI_Miami_Fan_Fiction_(Geocities)

4 views

• The_Sam_and_Jack_Fan_Fiction_Challenge_Archive_(Geocities)
• Kath_&_Kerr’s_JAG_Fanfic_(Geocities)
• Legolas_Fanfiction_Archives_(Geocities)

3 views

• The_Jon_Bon_Jovi_Slash_Fanfiction_Archive_(Geocities)
• Wraithfodder’s_Lair:_Stargate_Atlantis_Fan_Fiction_(Geocities)
• Huan_Zhu_Ge_Ge_Fan_Fiction_(Geocities)
• Simon_and_Simon_Fan_Fiction_Archive_(Geocities)
• Starlight_Anime_Fanfiction_Archive_(Geocities)
• The_Stefan_and_Laura_Fan_Fiction_Archive_(Geocities)
• What_is_Yaoi_(Geocities)

Any help improving these articles would be very much appreciated.  We need to save our history before it is gone forever.  Things like screencaps are important for understanding trends.  (Passions sites tended to be purple.  Just writing the history of a site?  You don’t get that detail.)  Please help!

Fan History Wiki once again has ads. Thanks to the folks at Transformers Wiki for providing us with the skin. We are extremely grateful. Fan History is using ProjectWonderful. The skin was specifically designed for them. They have a lot of fandom related companies who buy advertisements.

Why are we back with ads? Fan History Wiki generally operates as a no-profit business. That is, our primary goal is to cover our costs, to basically behave and do good things like a non-profit organization while organized as a sole ownership LLC. We didn’t do this in order to make money, but rather to cover our costs. For Fan History’s history, the site has almost exclusively been paid for out of pocket by me, the founder of Fan History. Changes in my circumstances have made it in my monetary best interests to see if some of the considerable cost of hosting cannot be recouped to make my life a little bit less stressful. This solution is preferable to the alternatives. If I get to the point where the monetary picture changes substantially, we will go back to being advertisement free.

In the mean time, I’m going to squee over our new skin and think about what image changes need to be made.

Are you passionate about fandom? Do you love to see how celebrities are interacting with fans?  Do you check our how professional authors treat their fans?  Do you ever read blogs by professional athletes and musicians to see what they think about their die hard fans?  Do you want a unique experience with a no-profit start up corporation where you can do something with your obsessions?

Company Background:  Fan History LLC is a developing entertainment company focused on our core products of an wiki and a fan fiction, fan art and fan vidding link site.  Fan History was founded two and a half years ago and incorporated 6 months ago by Laura Hale.  In that period, Fan History has grown from a wiki with a few hundred pages and 200 visitors a month to a become a wiki with over 800,000 pages and getting over 55,000 unique visitors a month.  We offer fans and entertainment related companies information that cannot be found elsewhere including a history of fan communities, the Internet’s largest directory of fans grouped by community, metrics data regarding the growth of fandom community and more.    To learn more about our company and our sites, visit http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistory.com:About .

Role Description and Responsibilities: Fan History LLC is currently seeking candidates interested in a part-time fandom Journalist/Report position.  This is an unpaid volunteer position that can be made into an unpaid internship position.  It is virtual so much of the work will be done remotely where you will interact with Fan History LLC’s team via e-mail, instant messenger, phone, and face-to-face depending on location.

The primary responsibility of the Fandom Journalist will be to document major in fandom news stories.  As such, the Journalist will be responsible for assignments and projects that include:

• Monitoring major fandom related news sources including:

• Techcrunch

• Mashable

• ReadWriteWeb

• Metafilter

• Henry Jenkin’s blog

• Linkspam on Dreamwidth

• Fandom wank on JournalFen

• Unfunnybusiness on JournalFen

• Sf_drama on LiveJournal

• Ohnotheydidnt on LiveJournal

• Metafandom on LiveJournal

• Creating and updating articles about breaking fandom related news stories.

Candidate Qualifications:
Fan History LLC is seeking some one knowledgeable about popular culture or fandom with the following qualifications:

• Experience editing wikis,

• Organized,

• Uses social media,

• Detail oriented,

• Ability to distance self from topic reporting so reporting is unbiased,

• At least intermediate writing skills, and

• Willingness to learn about different fan communities.

This position reports directly to the Founder.  This is an immediate opportunity and we are seeking candidates that can work a minimum of 5-15 hours each week.  The weekly schedule is extremely flexible and can be developed around a candidate’s availability.  This position requires a minimum of an 8-10 week commitment. 

If you are interested, please contact Fan History’s founder at laura@fanhistory.com .

On January 15, 2009, CSI had one of its highest rated episodes all season.  On that day, people published 26 new pieces of fan fiction, the most stories posted on the same day as an episode had aired. On September 25, 2008, CSI had it third lowest ratings day all season and people posted zero new stories on that date.

Fan fiction is a really popular outlet for fan expression of interest in television shows.  The stories are creative, explore plot lines in the show and, according to many fans, help market a series in a positive way.  Fans often argue that their activities mirror larger interest in a show, and that producers should pay more attention to them and cater to their fannish interests as the example provided seems to demonstrate.  Fan Fiction’s Predictive Value for Nielsen Ratings tests this fan theory and answers the question: Does the volume of fan fiction published in the period around when an episode airs correlate to Nielsen Ratings?

To answer this question, fan fiction daily posting stats were gathered for the one week period around television shows where fan fiction communities existed and Nielsen Ratings were available for that show.  The fan fiction data was compiled from six archives: FanFiction.Net, fanfiktion.de, FanWorks.Org, FicWad, SkyHawke, and Freedom of Speech Fan Fiction.  The Nielsen Ratings data included over 720 episodes representing thirty-nine shows.  Once this data was compiled, it was analyzed using Pearson’s Correlation and linear regression. 

The results confirmed what many fans already suspected: Levels of fan activity, specifically in terms of the production of fan fiction, mirrors interest specific episodes of television.  Fan fiction can be used to predict Nielsen Ratings.  The predictive value is strengthened in several cases when it is broken down by network, genre or specific television show. The best networks for predicting Nielsen Ratings are CBS, The CW, Disney, Fox and USA. Comedy, crime comedy, crime drama, medical comedy and sports drama are the best genres for predicting Nielsen Ratings.  The strongest correlations for  television shows for predicting Nielsen Ratings are Burn Notice, CSI, Eli Stone, Friday Night Lights, Gossip Girl, Grey’s Anatomy, Hannah Montana, Heroes, iCarly, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Life, Prison Break, Psych, and Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

This information is potentially valuable to parties with a vested interest in a television show’s performance.  By analyzing content patterns around periods with high volumes of fan fiction and high Nielsen Ratings, comparing that to periods of low posting volume and lower Nielsen Ratings, producers can make changes to maintain high interest amongst fans.  Non-American television networks and advertisers can better predict how their shows will perform.  This method of analysis can help organizations save money as it is cheaper to monitor and track than other analytic tools.

A copy of Fan Fiction’s Predictive Value for Nielsen Ratings can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FanFicNielsen.pdf . The appendix can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FanFicNielsenAppendix.pdf .

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.

Fan History covers a lot of topics. One of our most popular article types, in terms of volume of traffic, involve kerfluffle articles. Unlike other articles on Fan History, these articles tend to have two or three contributors. They are updated frequently as a major kerfluffle goes down. Most of the contributors to these articles tend to be Fan History admins or friends of Fan History admins. Given the last statement, I felt it was important that we outline our notification of linking policy and why we chose our particular policy.

During a major kerfluffle that anyone is covering, there are generally three approaches:

We’ve had a couple of deletion requests recently on Fan History where we have had to turn people down because they are notable. These requests were connected to people involved with Race Fail 2009. Because of this, we went through and pro-actively put labels on a number of articles to announce that the article was about some one notable and was not eligible for deletion. There are probably 50 articles that are effected by this decision. During the coming weeks, we are likely to review major kerfluffles in fandom and add notable, not eligible for deletion notices to other articles. We’re hoping that this will help alleviate future problems and make people more aware of what we consider notable. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Well, at least one of its representatives is

I’m leaving today for Dragon*Con, where I’ll be all weekend working the Spacial Anomaly Gallery table in the Dealer’s Hall (location F13, if all goes according to plan.) You can also check out some of my artwork in the Art Show and Print Shop.

I’ll try to post some updates throughout the weekend, though my perspective will be fairly limited during the day to a vendor’s point-of-view. Please feel free to stop by my table during the weekend if you are there, I’d love to say hi, sell you some goodies – and of course, talk about FanHistory!

I felt so much guilt for missing July… and this month I’m really busy too. This is shorter than I would like as I’d like to have covered more areas… but I’m sitting on a nice pile of research I want to get analyzed for Monday.

Most Popular Articles: August 2009

1. Draco/Hermione
2. Cassandra Clare
3. FanDomination.Net
4. Cassandra Claire’s Plagiarism
5. Sakura Lemon_Fan-Fiction Archive
6. Naruto
7. Digimon
8. FanFiction.Net
9. Shotacon
10. Harry Potter fan fiction

Most Popular Fandom Articles: August 2009

1. Naruto
2. Digimon
3. Twilight
4. Mortal Instruments
5. The Fast and the Furious
6. Dragon Ball Z
7. Prince of Tennis
8. Harry Potter
9. Supernatural
10. Merlin

Most Popular Keywords Landing on Fan History: August 2009

1. fandomination
2. restricted section
3. naruto wiki
4. freedom of speech fan fiction
5. draco hermione
6. shotacon
7. michael jackson fan fiction
8. cassandra claire
9. draco and hermione
10. michael jackson fanfiction

Most Popular Internal Keywords Searches: August 2009

1. racefail
2. Shadow Crystal Sage
3. aja
4. lunaescence
5. obama day
6. sonic the hedgehog
7. a team
8. harry draco
9. obama day movie
10. sasuke

Most Popular Fan History Referrers: August 2009

1. community.livejournal.com
2. animenewsnetwork.com
3. mademan.com
4. fanfiction.net
5. tvtropes.com
6. metafilter.com
7. fanpop.com
8. answers.yahoo.com
9. twitter.com
10. sidewinder.livejournal.com

The countdown to Geocities closing is rapidly approaching.  Fan History’s admins are just a bit queasy about this as the closer the get, the more we realize that we don’t have valuable information.  As of yet, there has been no large coordinated effort to data mine Geocities information to preserve fannish history.  Fan History has gotten some information, including about 5,000 articles about stories that were hosted on Geocities.

What we really want to push now includes terminology, fansites and fanzine information.  I’d really like the fanzine information.  Please.  Also, please help.  Much of the information hidden away on Geocities is from the late 1990s, an era that had a much closer connection to fanzines than we have now.  If you can, please help in the following ways:

• Screencap and upload pages that mention fanzines.  (We can always data mine that information later, so long as we know it is there.)
• Create an Excel file, csv file, tsv file, Word table where each row has information about a fanzine where the information was found on Geocities.  E-mail that to us and we’ll automate the creation of pages about those fanzines.
• Update fandom specific lists like Star Trek fanzines with names of fanzines.
• Update or create articles about specific fanzines.
• Comment on talk pages with information about fanzines where the history is found on Geocities.
• Promote Fan History’s efforts so that more people can get involved with this project.

Thank you for your help.  We really appreciate it.

… has taken a break this month because I am on vacation in Australia.   It will be back when my Internet connection is a bit more reliable and I have time.  (Or rather, What’s Hot for August should be posted on September 1.)  There is no July post.  Sorry about that.

We’ve had some great success recently adding a large number of fan-fiction story articles, both as part of our Geocities preservation project and through indexing stories at large archives such as the due South Fiction Archive and inuyasha-fanfiction.com.

We at FanHistory see how useful this project can be, and will continue to work on creating more story articles from other large, fandom-specific archives. By creating these articles, we can help readers who may be searching for fiction in certain fandoms or by particular authors. Readers can also leave review comments and add more information on a story. Authors may find this resource helpful should they be faced with a plagiarism case, and need to prove when they first posted a story — or if they simply have lost track of where their stories were posted through the years. Those studying fandom trends, growth, and migration, should now be able to easily see when large fandom archives saw the most posting activity, and what pairings or characters were most popular there, and when.

For those who might question these efforts, it is important to note several things.

1. All information being added on stories is publicly available and easily found through Google, or through links off high-ranking Google search returns for fan fiction, fan fiction archives, and specific fandoms. We are not adding links or information about stories under any kind of membership or privacy lock.
2. If an archive has site-wide warnings, disclaimers, and age restrictions, we are including those warnings on every story article page.
3. Please note that we are *not* archiving the stories themselves. FanHistory is not a fan-fiction archive. FanHistory is only providing links to stories in descriptive articles. This is no different than any other link list provided by another website or search engine, nor any different from the previously-added individual story articles already on FanHistory.
4. Authors may request articles about their stories to be deleted at any time. Please see our article deletion page for details.

We would love to work directly with fan-fiction archivists. Such a collaboration could help build traffic to your archive by featuring it prominently in the FanHistory category for your fandom(s). If you are interested in the opportunity, send us a copy of your current story database, so we can add your site’s information to FanHistory, or please contact one of our Administrators for more information!

A few days ago, we blogged about whether or not to continue adding more story articles to the wiki based on recent experiences building a database of stories in Inuyasha fandom. We have gone ahead with continuing this process, today adding over 5,000 articles on Due South stories from the Due South fiction archive. We felt this was a good fandom to continue with, as FanHistory has received some criticism in the past for not having more content related to Due South and its fandom. We hope this will help track trends and posting frequency in the fandom through the years. Also, as one of our admins pointed out in the earlier discussion, our indexing of archives such as dsa could help in the future in cases of plagiarism in fandom.

As always, FanHistory is not indexing any information which is not already easily retrieved on the internet through simple search and link methods. We are not actually archiving these stories, only providing links as to where to find them and summary details. We will also be willing and ready to delete story articles on request and will be refining our policies on this matter as we continue to look into indexing more fan fiction on the internet.

If you’re on Facebook, we’d really appreciate it if you could become a fan of Fan History.   Thanks for your continued support.

Recently, we added a number of articles about specific stories on Fan History.  Many of these stories were hosted on Geocities.  We wanted a record that these stories existed because they are likely to disappear.  It gave an idea as to what was happening in smaller fandoms not hosted on FanFiction.Net, in real person fic communities and elsewhere.  Many of the fandoms on Geocities more closely paralelled what was happening on Yahoo!Groups than FanFiction.Net or LiveJournal.  It was important to get that out there.

But we’ve opened Pandora’s Box.  We’ve got all these story pages that we didn’t have before.  After we did that, we added a bunch of stories about Inuyasha.   We had the database.  It was an interesting experiment to try to add those articles.  We were showing some love towards another archive.  (We love to do that.  If you’re in fandom and are looking for a way to promote yourself on Fan History, let us know.)  The articles represented another perspective outside of FanFiction.Net and LiveJournal.  It seemed all good.

It would be really easy to add articles about a lot of other stories on other archives.  We could e-mail fan fiction archivists and ask them if they would be interested in having articles about the stories they have hosted on Fan History.  We could ask individual authors if they could put together an excel file that lists all their stories.  If we wanted to work towards our goal of getting to a million articles, this would be one way to get there a lot faster.

Except, you know, over thinking happens.  Do those pages have value?  (Maybe.)  Are most stories able to help people get an idea of possible trends in fandom?  (You’d need to look at 10 to 100 articles to really know.  Maybe.  Hard to tell.)  Would this be useful for smaller fandoms where it isn’t as centralized and readers may not be as aware of other places to find stories?  (Yes.  Definitely.)  Would this be useful to larger fandoms in the same way?  (Not really, no.) Wouldn’t this duplicate what we already have started with FanworksFinder?  (Kind of.  But FanworksFinder doesn’t work.  And what about stories that no longer exist?  Where is the dating?)    Could it almost become like Yahoo!Answers or fic finding mailing lists where people can easily hunt for stories?  (Yes.  If done right.  Likely not though until Fan History’s audience reached a critical mass.)  Wouldn’t it remove some of the neutrality issues of the wiki if we did this and allowed reviews of stories on the wiki?  (Yes.  Hugely scary issue.)  Would we piss off a lot of people in fandom by linking and discussing their stories with out permission?  (Probably.  Maybe. Somewhat.  Bound to happen.  Scary to think about.)  Would people find this useful in terms of promoting their own work?  (Yes.  If person articles are any indication, lots of people would find them useful.)

There are just so many good arguments both ways.  We’d love feedback from the community regarding this issue as we go forward.