Fan History Wiki, fandom's best resource

Fan History is a collaborative project like none other currently serving the fandom community. Its core function is as a wiki which allows members of fandom - men and women, young and old - to actively participate in documenting the history of their various fandoms, share current news which may impact their experiences, as well as creating an easily searchable web indice of related communities, projects, and activities. It gives members of fandom a chance to share current fandom news that may impact people’s experiences in fandom. Fan History users can also promote their own creative projects, and share opinions with fellow fans and alert them to scams and questionable practices encountered within fandom. By providing these resources, Fan History allows users to celebrate their activities, whichever corner of fandom they come from: anime, cartoons, comics, movies, politics, science fiction, sports, television, theater, and video games.

read more

Languages

Fan History is primarily in English. It has a few articles that are bilingual or that are in Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech and other languages.

History

Fan History is an outgrowth of Writers University's history department. Writers University was founded back in 2000 on FanFiction.Net by Laura Hale under the nome de pume Michela Ecks, moved off about six months later, spent several years at writersu.s5.com, on its own domain and otherwise in a state of flux. The site eventually folded, with some of content being moved to FanWorks.Org, a precursor to this wiki found on another site and in an unpublished fanzines. During this period, Laura's research into the history of fan fiction and fandom continued. Fan History on its old location was not inviting enough participation on the part of wider fandom, which was the reason for its move to mediawiki on its own domain in May 2006.

In July 2007, Fan History partnered with FanWorksFinder to promote the other and continue to try to make accessible far flung parts of fandom.

In March 2008, FanFictionNetBot was run in order to help Fan History meet the goal of becoming a fandom directory. When the bot was finished running, it added over half a million articles to Fan History.

In September 2008, Fan History began an effort to collect statistical data that would allow researchers to better understand the fan community. [1] This data included information about the growth of about 3,000 fandoms on sites like FanFiction.Net, FanWorks.Org, FicWad.com and fanfiktion.de. [2] Later in the year, this information was joined by statistical information regarding the growth of select LiveJournal communities and fandoms. [3]

In April 2009, Fan History expanded by adding stub articles related to fanzines, movies, musical groups and episodes of television. [4] In May 2009, the addition of these articles made Fan History the largest non-Wikimedia Foundation MediaWiki install. [5]

Objectives

Fan History defines fandom as as a community of fans whose activities involves some one else's intellectual property or real people. In broad terms, these communities are based off anime, actors/celebrities, books, cartoons, comics, movies, musicians, politicians, sports, and video games. It doesn't include fans of business or products you can touch because the communities aren't organized similarly or culturally related to most traditionally accepted fandom activity.

Fan History's original objectives in writing of fandom history were to increase interest and to provide a more comprehensive secondary source for academics writing on the topic to turn to. Since that time, the mission, while still including those goals, has changed to include:

• Provide members of fandom a resource to find links to communities in fandom, and explain parts of the culture in those communities to help them adapt to them.
• Provide members of fandom a tool to promote their work, their projects, charity efforts by fans.
• Provide members of fandom a platform to share stories about what happened in fandom so that incidents won't be forgotten.
• Provide a comprehensive directory for fandom that anyone can edit. This is necessary because of increased fragmentation in a web 2.0 world, and as members of fandom transition away from various services because of downtime, problems with policy, etc. It is also necessary because a lot of time in fandom trying to track down authors and artists who disappeared and in trying to locate fanworks that have disappeared.
• Provide academics operating in fandom starting points for additional research and to provide academics with comprehensive data sets.
• Provide companies that deal with fandom a source to locate fandom communities, understand how fandom functions, identify current issues in certain fandoms, give examples of how certain issues were dealt with, etc. By knowing that information, they can better interact with and cater to fandom's specific needs.

Philosophy

Fan History is a wiki that deals with fans and fandom. Fans are well known for being passionate about their activities. Unlike some historical projects, the subjects featured on Fan History are around to speak for themselves. It means that special considerations often have to be made that make Fan History different from projects like Wikipedia in our philosophical approach to our content.

The following sums up parts of our philosophy:

• Does not have a requirement for article notability.
  • The belief is that all the little details help to give a complete and more accurate picture of what is going on and what went on in fandom.
  • The belief is intentionally excluding information can be seen as assigning value statements to fandom. As a history wiki focused primarily on documenting history, we don't feel that is our place to do that. It is the place of others.
  • The belief is if minor information becomes too tedious, segments can be moved to other pages to tell histories of subfandom in larger fandom communities. Example: Premiere dates are found on many fandom pages. They include international dates for release. If this information becomes too much, it can be moved to another page: Angel movie premiere date for Germany and other German X-Men fandom info can be moved from the X-Men page to a page called Angel fandom in Germany.
  • The belief is that little examples of activity can later be written into a more prose type article which can contextualize those events, to make them appear less random. Those little details might be emblematic of bigger trends that won't be visible until you have a whole lot of them.
  • The belief is that little details can be moved off an article, if they aren't important. Information should also be moved, rather than removed. This belief is reinforced in our rules.
• Does not have a have a list of people, fandoms and topics that cannot be mentioned.
  • The belief is that such a list would make it difficult to accurately present a history of fandom.
  • The belief is that cross checking such a list would create an unreasonable burden on wiki administrators and other contributors by requiring that they cross check such a list every time an edit was made.
  • The belief is that would run counter to the wiki spirit.
• Reserves the right to not delete articles about people and events.
  • The belief is that doing this may involve forms of historical revisionism and that some events need to be told, outweighing the need for requests to delete.
• Is about telling fandom history from the point of view of fans, by using a perspective that defines fandom internally, rather than externally.
  • The belief is that the method for critiquing ourselves is the most appropriate way to share this history.
  • The belief is that external methods for critiquing fandom may involve theoretical models that do not work in practice or that may be rejected by large parts of fandom.
  • The the belief is that fans are the most knowledgeable about their own history and can best put events in fandom into historical context.

Size

Fan History is a wiki and, as of June 2009, has over 765,000 articles. Much of our content falls into certain areas based on fan culture group. Below is an estimated size of the number of communities represented in those groups:

• Actors - 275 fandoms
• Anime - 550 fandoms
• Books - 450 fandoms
• Cartoons - 200 fandoms
• Comics - 100 fandoms
• Movies - 13,000 fandoms
• Music - 17,605 fandoms
• Politics - 5 fandoms
• Radio - 35 fandoms
• Sports - 125 fandoms
• Table top gaming - 5 fandoms
• Television - 2,750 fandoms
• Theater - 30 fandoms
• Video games - 250 fandoms
• unsorted fandoms - 500 fandoms [6]

Total fandom estimate: 35,155

Traffic

As of July 7, 2008, the Fan History was ranked 74,426 on Quantcast. During July, it was averaging, according to StatCounter, between 1,500 and 2,000 unique visitors day and between 1,000 and 1,500 according to Quantcast. The average visitor looked at 4.26 pages during that period. [7]

As of February 27, 2009, Fan History was ranked 56,338 on Quantcast and the site is averaging around 1,750 visitors a day.

As of May 14, 2009, Fan History was ranked 45,185 on Quantcast and the site was averaging around 1,770 visitors a day.

As of June 13, 2009, Google Analytics data indicated Fan History was averaging 2,113 visitors a day.

Fan History Domains

Fan History owns a number of domains that point to the site. They include:

Related Domains

External Links

• Fan History's main page
• About Fan History
• Alexa: FanHistory.com
• WHOIS for FanHistory.com
• Quantcast
• Wikindex
• Twitter