What Is This ‘Fanlore’ Of Which You Speak?

Fanlore is a fan run wiki that allows TV and movie fans to tell their fandom history in their own voices. Often fandom activities are trivialized and dismissed and ignored because they are seen as unimportant. For example, on the main Wikipedia, an entry about a large Harry Potter convention in the UK was deleted because it was just was  “….just a school get together with Harry Potter fans.”

But I realized that in my many postings about Fanlore, I have not really gone into detail how wikis in general work. I also realized that some of the collaboration methods used by wikis are not obvious. Until recently I had only used Wikipedia (the main one) as an occasional resource – it was not until I started editing that I started to grasp Wiki collaboration methods. So hopefully, this post will be of use to some of you. 

Wikis are communal spaces and are open to anyone to read and edit. They are volunteer run and not directed (everyone works on the areas that interest them). That often trips up people because we expect there to be a central  organization directing volunteer efforts. It also means there will be gaps and inaccuracies because there may be many hands touching a page. Conversely, there may be too few hands touching a page.   More importantly, if  someone does not supply the correct information, it will not get added to the wiki.  All wikis face the same hurdles – getting accurate information and getting enough volunteers to add that information.   

Luckily there are ways to help make wikis more accurate. You can make edits in several ways:

1. Create a free account and make them yourself. This is often the fastest way to get the corrections made and the most accurate. If you do make the edits yourself, remember to familiarize yourself with the wiki’s editorial polices as they vary from wiki to wiki (Fanlore for example has a plural point of view policy which allows more perspectives to be added to an article than typically allowed in academic or research wikis).

2.       Leave a message on the “Talk” page (every page has its own discussion page). This also requires an account and can be overlooked because there are tens of thousands of pages.

3.       Send a message to the Gardeners mailing list. If you do this, please remember to include a link to the page that needs to be edited, along with what is wrong and what needs to be added to be corrected. General or vague corrections  are less likely to be implemented than specific  ones.  The gardeners list is also volunteer staffed and it is a general mailing list. This means no one is “assigned” to monitor it, your messages go the entire group of volunteers who may – or may not – be online. But depending on who is online and available, you may (a) have your edits made and get an confirming  email,  (b) have your edits made and receive  no confirming email, © have someone contact you for more info or (d)  your edits may not be made because no one  was reading the mailing list that day/week  or your message never reached the mailing list .  In which case you can always use any of the above methods or try again.   

As with all volunteer efforts, I find it helps to have patience and an understanding that people are doing the work for love and in their spare time.

So grab your keyboards and head over Fanlore to add what you love about fandom.