Fanlore: One Week Left For Stub September

emilianadarling:

Fandom Public Service Announcement:

In addition to running Archive of Our Own and the Transformative Works and Cultures academic journal, the Organization for Transformative Works also runs Fanlore, a fandom-oriented wiki dedicated to hosting information aboutfan activities, fannish vocabulary, and the histories of fan communities.

On July 5 2014, Fanlore passed its most recent goal of reaching 30,000 articles — which is awesome! But as with any wiki that relies on user interest for the creation and maintenance of pages, there are still some pretty noticeable gaps. Some of the most prominent authors and pairings in popular fandoms have almost nothing on their pages — or, in many cases, have no pages at all. (As of September 21 2014 the Steve/Bucky page barely has anything on it, and Thorin Oakenshield — one of the main characters in The Hobbit books and movies — doesn’t even have a character page.)

The Fanlore Challenge:

To help fill these gaps, I propose a simple three-step solution.

1. Create an account with Fanlore.
2. Think of 5 things that you consider important to YOUR fandom experience and that you think other people should know about. (Your favourite pairings, characters, fanfic authors, fanartists, remarkable fanworks — whatever makes you think “this person/thing deserves to be recognized.”)
3. Go contribute to the Fanlore pages for those 5 things.

That’s all it takes! Saying “X Author is a significant author in Y fandom” with a link to their AO3 page or adding the links to a few Notable Works for a particular pairing is more than enough to qualify. Know of an awesome rec list for that pairing? Add a link. Remember a meme that sprung up about a certain character? Throw that in too. It doesn’t have to be much.

And if you have the time and energy to really flesh out those 5 pages? Even better.

Providing a balanced and well-rounded fandom wiki is pretty much impossible for one person to do. But if everyone who sees this post makes just 5 constructive edits, we can all work towards making Fanlore into an even better resource and repository for all of us to use.

Happy editing!

Some tumblr comments:

"This is our history. Don’t let it fade away." 

"This is an amazing opportunity to build our own history, folks - get to work!"

"There was no page for In the Flesh, so I made one! It’s…very bare-bones, clearly, but it was fun, I’m going to do more and you should too. Preserve fandom history, kids!"

 "*bursts through the window, knocking over potted plant*  YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE AN EXPERT, BNF, BEEN-HERE-SINCE-THE-BEGINNING FAN TO CONTRIBUTE TO FANLORE. ADD THE STUFF THAT WAS/IS IMPORTANT TO YOU! 

ALSO! LANGUAGE USAGE, JARGON, MEMES, IN-JOKES, TROPES! CHARITY DRIVES AND BOOK PROJECTS!  INFLUENTIAL FIC AND ART! CELEBRITY TWITTER SHENANIGANS! META CONVERSATIONS! ALL THE THINGS!  \o/"

 "And please, please, please add stories!  Most of these just have generic links to feeds from FF.net or A03 which just makes me miss recs."

 "Fanlore is very cool and you should help with it!" 

"There is a part of me that wants to fill the hockey RPF page in about events before 2012, but I don’t know how to do that..."

"I love Fanlore so much.  I did a lot of tribbing at first and I totally am going to get back into the habit.  There is SO MUCH missing about newer fandoms it makes me cry! And it’s really easy to use—I’m so not technical but even I can open the cheat sheet (there’s a cheat sheet for markup language) in a tab and work with that!"

 "Fandom history is important. It’s not “just” fandom; it’s part of the long strange story of humanity, and that makes it significant to all of us. Dear reader, you’re part of history too. “History” isn’t just dates of battles and names of kings — it’s ordinary people screwing around with their friends, coming up with injokes, and sharing sad headcanons, too. Do you know something about your fandom’s history? Go and tell people about it — write an article or edit one, whatever, man, share your story. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of a huge fandom or a tiny one. Share the wealth."

 "Mabelyn I found someplace for you to lose your mind"

 "This is awesome and important. I didn’t even know about it!"

"DO IT (Thorian and Stucky are now doing better, but could do with some more examples still). And there’s plenty of other stuff to do. During ‘Stub September’ I added loads of stuff to Sapphire & Steel (please do add more stuff to this!), Red Dwarf (this was my miesterwerk really, and people added loads of stuff to it for me), and RemixtheDrabble (I don’t know how to work Tumblr and put links in, but you can just search for them. I also added stuff to the Machiavelli Factor page.  Fanlore is great. It’s particularly brilliant if you join a new fandom and don’t know anything about it, particularly particularly if your fandom is old as the hills, like Blake’s 7, and has a lot of zines or drama.  The Doctor Who pages are shockingly bad in most cases (except the zine stuff).  And as Tescos are wont to say, Every little bit helps."

"When I do a big overhaul of the barren Steve/Bucky page tomorrow..."

"Ahhh, I just finished editing my very first Fanlore article and I feel so accomplished?? Like I know it’s not much but I’m CONTRIBUTING TO FANDOM CULTURE AND HISTORY and CREDITING PEOPLE WHO DESERVE IT and it just makes me so happy!!!"

"Okay Pac Rim fandom - especially Newmann lovers - hie thee over there and represent. What to add? How about the things in our fic like Newt and/or Hermann being trans, ace, or non-binary. One or both of them as kaiju hybrids. All of Newt’s different bands. Then there are our meetups and cons - Shatterdome Atlanta, Dragon Con, the nascent Shatterdome Seattle. The importance of Newt and Hermann as disabled characters; geeks and nerds who aren’t othered because they are geeks and nerds....."

"musketeers fandom, we should do this!"

"So if you’re looking for instant gratification and an immediate sense of accomplishment… … I suggest creating Fanlore pages for articles without anything on them. It’s also a super calming and simple activity if you’re experiencing anxiety about something!"

"So I saw all the people advertising the new-ish fanlore site, went to see if there were any stubs or articles that I could help expand… and promptly got sucked into a wormhole of my first fandom. Oh Chalet School, what is it about you that I just keep on coming back to? I haven’t been on that board for at least 18 months but it’s so much fun to read."

"OMG FUCKING YAY! Just finished this- http://fanlore.org/wiki/NaziZombiesRiDe I stink at HTML so it’s not fancy but at least RiDe has it’s own page on Fanlore now. Please go and add more fanfic links because all I had left was my own...." "

I'’m still really proud [after how many months?] that autisticsherlockinelementary is part of the Elementary fanlore page it makes me all squishy inside I just want to hug whomever added it as a resource ok"

"Agreed, this is important—I JUST tonight submitted a proposal abstract for an academic paper on RPF? And I was looking at the RPS page about two hours ago for some source material and THERE IS NO MENTION OF COCKLES. Not a single word—there’s J2 but that’s it for SPN. So, uh, yeah. We need to get our butts out there and start tribbing!—which has the added benefit of sounding, uh, actually completely dirty."

"I have made myself contribute to the HTTYD section of the Fanlore website. Literally all I’m doing is creating the pages for HTTYD/HTTYD2 characters, but there’s so many oh my gods. Like, every page I end up needing to create like 5 more pages. Someone help please. At least add to the pages I’ve created."

"Time to make the Poirot fandom LIVE ONCE MORE."

"I love Fanlore so much, and seeing that it currently has over 100 active users makes me so happy. Not only is it extremely useful (despite the admittedly huge gaps), it also feels to me like its existence alone proves that fandom is valuable and deserves to be preserved. Go and add things! There´s no notability requirement, and the gardeners are very helpful if you have questions." "

This is so awesome!!! Building a map of our minds and hearts!"