If you haven’t been watching Fan History’s recent changes page, you might not have noticed it but we’ve steadily been working on clearing out our wanted categories. In the past 10 days or so, we’ve taken that from over 4,500 categories being wanted to what amounts to zero. Along the way, we’ve probably created a bit of a monster in that we’ve found several capitalization issues, several issues with articles appearing or not appearing in categories, etc. Those problems will get resolved over time and will be much easier to address now because we know those categories actually exist and have articles in them. All this category creation has given us reason to reflect on our category organization methods. We’ve subsequently updated our category help page.

Getting to the main point, all this category structure means we have a much better idea of how many fan communities are represented on Fan History. We don’t have a firm count because there is some crossover for things like Star Trek which is both a television show, movie and cartoon. These are estimates based on fandom categories.