Fanlore

Our fannish wiki project, Fanlore, is both fun and useful! Allow us to demonstrate:

Ever gafiated because your fanpair couldn't understand that trickyfish would never pass the broccoli test? Ever have a BNF brit-pick your Pros curtainfic only to declare that you'd been totally fanon-Jossed by the hivemind? Ever suspected a profic of being a fusion from your gateway fandom with the serial numbers filed off by a flounced BOFQ? Ever had your AMTDI badfic kripked so that you had to fridge your Mary Sue, then during machete beta realized you're circling the id vortex? Ever had your C6D PWP hit someone's embarrassment squick, and regretfully offered them brain bleach? Ever been flamed for saying someone's BSO has too much manpain to be a GQMF based on fannish osmosis? Ever made Paul Gross arms because FIAWOL? Ever followed your BFF's fannish drift into WNGWJLEO tinhat territory, only to find yourself in a kerfluffle in which lurkers support you in email after Snacky's law goes into effect, then declared FIJAGH? Ever realized the little black dress in your vampire AU GSF is suffering from a bad case of zombie hand?

Well, luckily Fanlore is at the ready, and we can all avoid disaster!

Support the OTW, and enrich fandom's vocabulary of experiences.

Description: The Wiki Committee is in need of a terrific writer to help us straighten out the internal side of Fanlore -- basically, we need help reorganizing and rewriting policy pages and help files, and organizing them in a user-friendly manner. You do not need to be an expert in wiki markup, though some experience and comfort with basic wiki markup (linking, categorizing) is needed.

In these tumultuous times of fans having multiple journals, websites, networks and streaming sites (with slightly different versions of their handle on each!), and with Web 2.0 companies and various hosting sites folding, failing, or cutting back on their services, we'd like to remind fans that they can use Fanlore to keep track of the fans, fan sites, fan fiction, art, vids, and other fanworks they love.

Remember: Fanlore is searchable and easily updatable, so make it easy for people to find your journals, webpages, and fanworks. You can also create pages for other people or add links to their pages, so if you just re-discovered a story or a vid you thought you'd lost, put the link into Fanlore so others can find it too!

Remember, too, that GeoCities will be closing down on October 26, 2009! (So many sites, so little time, people!) If you, or someone you can get in touch with, has a site that will be lost, please contact Open Doors ASAP.

The Wiki committee of the OTW is pleased to announce the formation of a Fanlore community on Dreamwidth. We needed a place for people interested in the Fanlore wiki to congregate, talk about pages (cool ones, ones with issues and concerns, plus general "how do I..." type stuff), and just keep in touch with what is happening on the site. We've been looking at various options for a place to gather, and Dreamwidth's open ID option makes it attractive; you don't have to be a member, but can comment using a free open ID account. (Note: if you do want to be a member of Dreamwidth, some folks in the community have been donating invite codes.) The community is also syndicated on LJ, so you can also keep in touch with what's going on here.

Please spread the word about the community, and about Fanlore itself. While some areas of fandom (and some individual fandoms) are well covered in the wiki, others are badly under-represented. We will be doing outreach to some of these under-represented areas, trying to get help and expertise, but please help us spread the word. If you know people who have been nervous about Fanlore or afraid they were "doin' it rong" (offhand assurance: you really can't do it wrong), please tell them that there's a place they can go to ask questions, either technical or content-based. Membership is open; everyone is welcome!

The Wiki committee is pleased to announce the opening of a permanent chat room for the Fanlore community. You don't need to be a member of OTW to get into the room. It's open to everyone and can be accessed from the Main Page of Fanlore. Best of all, it's open 24 X 7, so it's always there for you to come in and chat about edits and articles with other fans at any time, day or night.

FYI -- There will be a log of the chats kept, but it will be purged on a periodic basis.

Other cool things we've done recently include the Fanlore Live panel at Escapade. We invited several fans who have been around a long time (think decades rather than a few years) to talk to us about how they got into fandom. We have our notes put up here. Check it out.

And be sure to watch this space for more information on participating in our Oral Histories.

--The Wiki Committee: Rache, Melina, Anatsuno, Betty, Meri

Don't panic! Livejournal isn't in any imminent danger, despite today's news (many of us here at OTW are archivists, and we know how long it takes for sites, even unattended ones, to degrade.) We'll all still be here tomorrow!

That being said, we do want to remind LJ-based fandom that:

* You can create a User: page for yourself on Fanlore. (All those "If LJ goes away" posts on LJ are kind of useless if LJ actually goes away!) You can put all your pseuds, journals, websites, and other contact info on your User: page, and the wiki is searchable and obviously updatable, so folks will always know where to find you. (See examples here, and there's an easy "create account" link in the left side toolbar of every page.) (Please note that the User: page is different from a regular wiki page. You control the content of your User: page: it's more like a LJ profile page, whereas regular wiki pages about individual fans are collaborative and editable; generally, others will make and edit these pages.)

* You can also document fannish information and resources on Fanlore. LJ hosts a number of irreplaceable fandom overviews, rec lists, newbie guides and the like, so take a minute to add some information to your fandoms' main pages, pairing pages, etc. Document fannish lists, communities, fanon, writers, artists, vidders, stories, kerfuffles, debates, and other fanworks. It's really easy. (Ask me how!)

* The Archive of Our Own has been steadily giving out beta accounts a few at a time; help us out, whether by giving us useful feedback on the workings of the beta-archive (there's a handy feedback form) or by volunteering to work at with us in some other way, and we will totally put you at the head of the line (er, as long as you're up for the creakiness of beta. Hey, we're working on it!) If not, we hope to be offering more general invites soon, after the next few rounds of code revisions. (We're at 953 on the public; 1012 is in the can; more coming soon!)

Remember, too, that if your fic is archived on LJ, and all the fancy backups alarm you, you can just go to your stories on LJ and save them as HTML pages on your hard drive -- then, in the worst case, even if LJ vanishes in the meantime, you'll be able to just copy and paste those files into the archive software once you do have an account.