A Statement from Fan History (2008)

Meta
Title:	A Statement from Fan History
Creator:	Laura Hale
Date(s):	July 28, 2008
Medium:	online
Fandom:	multi
Topic:
External Links:	Wayback link; A Statement from Fan History » Fan History's Blog, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

A Statement from Fan History is a 2008 essay, an apology and explanation by Laura Hale, the then-owner of the controversial Fan History Wiki.

NOTE: there was, and hasn't ever been, any association between Fan History Wiki and Fanlore.

The Essay

The essay is quoted in full here with the author's caveat: "The apology is released as GNU so you can share it elsewhere if you want so long as the license and attribution remain intact."

Recently, Fan History, as well as myself, Laura Hale, have been under a great deal of criticism and scrutiny regarding our actions and policies with the wiki. I would like to address these issues here, as well as apologize for certain actions which I am aware were wrong. I would like to reach out to those who may be questioning why they should contribute or give support to Fan History in the future and explain:

what I know I did wrong

how I am working with our administrative team to correct these issues

address other misconceptions about how Fan History is operating.

Regarding the outings, and my apology First and above all else, I would like to apologize for the inclusion of information on the site about several individuals, information which linked their real names to their fandom identities. The intent of including this information was never malicious in nature, nor to cause ill will towards these individuals. I never intended to threaten anyone’s livelihood, out anyone who I believed was not already outed to the community, nor to reveal private information publicly. The specifics of the decisions made, why they were made after consultations and agreement with other wiki administrators at the time, is something which will not be discussed here because it could continue to provide information these individuals would prefer to remain private, and I respect their wishes.

At the time, I believed that by failing to include this information in the wiki, Fan History was engaging in historical revisionism by excluding information that was already common knowledge within fandom. For me, it was about being open, honest and correct in my history. This was, clearly, a mistake in judgment. I realize that there were obviously flaws in our decision making process regarding this matter. Knowing what I knew about how people perceived Fan History and my actions, I knowingly did things that were likely to cause upset in the community. While I may have thought my reasons were logical and were done for the good of the community at the time, I was wrong to do them.

For my part in this, I am deeply sorry, as are the other admins who were involved in the decision-making process. In this case, I took a stand where it was wrong to take a stand. I am deeply sorry for that and I take complete ownership of my mistake.

As a result of these incidents, myself and the Fan History administrators are currently working to redraft our policies regarding privacy and personal information. I would like to assure all potential users of the site that this is a matter I take very seriously, having learned from these mistakes in the past. A repeat of such mistakes will not happen again. As these policies are under revision, all pages related to the individuals in question and their organizations have been deleted, until it has been fully determined what is acceptable for inclusion and what is a breach of privacy.

Fan History financing I have been accused of only being interested in Fan History as a money-making scheme, and of using fandom solely to generate profit for myself, reaping millions off fandom and the work of others. It is true that Fan History is seeking venture capital for the long term health and growth of the wiki. The site has grown past the point where it can function solely on the money out of my pocket, which is how it has been run to this day.

Fan History has gotten to the point where in order to grow and be more useful, and to address known shortcomings with the site technically, it needs to hire staff. The staff members that Fan History wants to hire include a backend developer, as well as two to three programmers to help with our programming needs, building extensions and automated improvements of articles. Fan History is also looking to hire a marketing person to help the wiki generate income to make it more self-sustaining. Lastly, Fan History is looking to hire a few community support personnel, similar to those employed by Wikia. These individuals would monitor recent changes to ensure rules are not being violated, help develop the community, serve as guides to help people learn the rules and become better contributors. Fan History is also looking to improve its server situation so we can acquire one of our own.

These things all cost money, just as Fan History costs money to maintain. Fan History does not believe a donation based model will allow us to accomplish these goals. It would put us at the mercy of forces we could not control and, in our view, give the wiki an even greater perception of bias based on the individuals contributing monetarily to the project.

The decision to seek capital was made in January 2008 after we discussed the possibility of selling Fan History to Wikia. The decision was not made lightly. It was discussed with the administrators at the time, including LennoxMacBeth, Sidewinder, Hector, ScrewTheDaisies and Jae. We also consulted other individuals in fandom such as Anarchiq and KayJayUU. We opened the discussion regarding the Wikia situation to everyone who visited the wiki. It was also discussed on LiveJournal, and on various people’s friends lists, where additional opinions were sought. Eventually it was determined that this would not be an ideal situation, so we turned to other methods of financing the site.

In March 2008, our steps towards financing Fan History were reflected on our about page and our funding page. We have never tried to hide this. We talked openly about it on the relevant wiki pages, our friends lists on LiveJournal and InsaneJournal, on twitter, and on various instant messenger programs. We discussed what the goals for the wiki were, how we would use the money to improve the wiki, etc. We have always tried to be as open and honest about this as possible, trying not to hide this fact as we were aware of how some corners of fandom would perceive this. It was why we decided that honesty and openness regarding the process was important; by being transparent, we believed people would be more understanding.

I realize that parts of fandom found the situation involving Fan History’s plans to become a business upsetting and counter to the norms established by the community. For that, I apologize. I’m not quite certain how else we could have gone about our goals of improving the wiki by acquiring funding elsewhere. I would be open to hearing suggestions that would be more in line with community standards, or how, after we secure funding, we could contribute back to the community in a way that would bring us more into harmony with some of those established beliefs.

In addition to these monetary issues, others have been brought up which I feel the need to address. In a Fan History blog entry, I offered some advice regarding disclosing financial information. My intent was to inform potential fansite maintainers that, for their own protection, some financial information should be withheld from users. I believed that users do not need to be told all of a site’s financial details if they are not being asked to contribute monies to a project. However, I oversimplified the situation and said that fansite maintainers should lie about their finances. This has led to the belief that I am untrustworthy and am lying about Fan History’s finances, despite having laid the site’s fiscal details open for public scrutiny. I regret giving that advice and apologize for it; it was ill-worded at best. Those who have questions about specific costs as disclosed in the funding page are welcome to ask about them.

Generating wank to drive traffic I have been accused of openly encouraging individuals to create wank to drive traffic to Fan History. This is untrue; it is a case of a joking comment made among friends in private and on FLocked posts being misconstrued and taken out of context. I would never knowingly plan to subject myself, people I consider to be my friends, Fan History administrators and contributors to the wiki to the onslaught of attacks, criticisms and strains on their relationships in fandom as has occurred recently. I would not knowingly seek a means of promoting the wiki in a way that I feel would hurt the credibility of the wiki, a credibility that I have spent that past year trying to improve.

Yes, I have encouraged members of the wiki team to openly discuss issues regarding the wiki in their journals, in other communities, and elsewhere that would help bring new people to share their fandom knowledge in the wiki. That is a productive action. I wanted people to be aware that Fan History was here and how it could be useful to them. Such goals cannot be accomplished through wank and creating controversy which only paints myself and Fan History in a negative light.

Our plans for the future In light of the current events, Fan History has decided to make several important changes both in our administrative team and our policies.

I will remove myself from daily involvement with the wiki. I will step in when decisions are needed regarding site policy, legal issues and financing. Rather than be involved with day to day wiki tasks, I will do more back-end support in terms of working on the business side of the site. Day to day operations of the wiki and organizational issues will be handled by system administrators, who will be given more freedom in how they operate on the wiki. I will also step back from fandom in general. I will not be an active participant in meta parts of the fannish community outside of Fan History’s blog. I will not be involved in handling deletion requests, and the deletion process will be handled by others on the administrative team through a simplified process of communication. This will ensure prompt handling of such requests, as well as minimizing chances that an article deleted would be re-created by someone else.

In the wake of recent departures from the administrative team, Fan History has moved Tikatu from fandom specific administrator to system administrator. DarkAngelFan06 and Random have also been brought on as system administrators to assist in dealing with administrative duties such as deletion requests. They have also been brought on to serve as additional checks regarding policy changes, to help with organizational ideas regarding the wiki, and to deal with user concerns via e-mail. Bestyb has volunteered to do all the marketing work for Fan History. This work will replace the work done by me and includes maintaining the promotion to do list, and editing articles to prepare them for promotion. This work is to be done from official Fan History related accounts.

At this time, Fan History administrators are re-evaluating our privacy issues to address the problem of real names. Our first inclination, as a result of the ongoing situation, is to create a policy where real names are automatically deleted upon request and unwanted connections between real names and fan names will be removed. The issue is still a difficult one as different parts of fandom have different social norms and expectations regarding the degree of separation between real and fannish names. There are also issues where citations necessary to validate information in an article, such as the creation of a particular website or domain, might lead to a publicly-viewable whois page which includes a person’s real name. Fan History administrators are soliciting feedback from the community in the comments of this entry for advice on how to deal with these kinds of situations. We will examine that feedback, and then craft our policy with that feedback in mind. We are already working to redraft Help:Privacy and other related articles to address this—both in explaining our sensitivity to privacy in fandom, as well as alerting members of fandom to ways in which their privacy may also be compromised without their knowledge and what they can do about it.

Deletion policy Fan History has modified our deletion policy. If you want an article deleted, you will need to take two steps. First, comment on the talk page of the article you want deleted, such as an article about yourself. Second, send an e-mail to delete @ fanhistory . com , providing some evidence to verify that the article is actually about you. The request will then be handled by the administrative team. Fan History administrators are still working on rewriting the article rules to reflect the changes in policy and procedure in dealing with deletion requests.

This policy exists because if someone blanks an article, or edits an article to say something that goes against the rules of the wiki - such as saying the individual is not affiliated with the wiki - Fan History must assume bad faith. In those situations, we cannot verify that the edit was not done maliciously. Also, by blanking or otherwise defacing an article, an individual does not remove the history of that article. It is still there for anyone who wants to see the original version. Blanking articles does not make them disappear, and because we must protect the site against vandalism and blanking, those who do so will be banned from editing for two weeks.

In conclusion I realize that there are other concerns you may have which have not been addressed here. I value genuine feedback and dialog, as do the other site administrators, who are here to address your concerns. We have chosen to do so on Fan History’s blog instead of via the numerous conversations elsewhere about the site because we believe it is important that a record of such conversations be maintained on the Fan History itself.

Again, please accept my heartfelt apologies for actions in the past which have caused so much consternation and upset within fandom. I know many individuals may not feel as though I or Fan History deserve another chance to serve the community, or they may doubt my sincerity in this statement. I can assure you that nothing is more important to me than creating and maintaining a site which is for fandom as a whole and not my personal gain. This site exists today because of the hard work contributed by many individuals as well as myself, and that is why I am working hard to respond to criticisms and make it better.

I thank you for your time and willingness to read these words.

Sincerely, Laura

The text of this message is released under the following license: Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States, attributing the authorship of the work to Laura, Fan History’s founder.

Fan Comments

Fan Comments at the Post

The intent of including this information was never malicious in nature, nor to cause ill will towards these individuals. I never intended to threaten anyone’s livelihood, out anyone who I believed was not already outed to the community, nor to reveal private information publicly.

Bull. When you’re repeatedly told to take something down and continue to refuse to, that’s malicious. Anyone who looks at the revision history of the page in question will see your bad form; furthermore, your post on fanthropology, outing said fan yet again was not simply a mistake, a bad judgment call, or an innocent action. There’s a reason your reputation is shot, Laura, and this from someone who didn’t know you from Jack when I got involved with you: You’re spiteful. You’re vindictive. You have no empathy for anyone, but expect everyone to forgive you.

I won’t even comment on your notion above about revisionist history—yours and my communications prove quite well that you engage in it constantly.

The site has grown past the point where it can function solely on the money out of my pocket, which is how it has been run to this day.

You still haven’t accounted where YOUR money is coming from. If your claims are true, you haven’t gained any profit on Fanhistory’s ads. You have no job currently. You’re writing off things on your taxes that you frankly have no right to—I’m only hoping the IRS wises up to you. Despite all this, somehow you manage to travel, pay for FH and otherwise remain comfortable financially. Either you’re being financed by someone else, or you’re playing a whole lot shadier than you’d lead people to believe.

I would not knowingly seek a means of promoting the wiki in a way that I feel would hurt the credibility of the wiki, a credibility that I have spent that past year trying to improve.

That’s blatantly untrue. Remember our discussion about the Rescue Rangers page? You wanted to quote Encyclopedia Dramatica to drive up wank. I discouraged it strongly, even after you made the edits (anyone can go look at the page history on this incident and see I’m telling the truth); eventually you capitulated, but you made it clear to me on repeated occasions that any attention is good attention, and that credibility falls secondary to hit counts.

It’s a damn shame that it took this long for you to take the advice of me and several others who gave you our time, effort and hard work—to step back and let your admins do the work. I, frankly, don’t believe for a moment that Sidewinder, or the very charming Random, will be able to act any better than you did—they’ve already proven to play puppet to you. I likewise don’t think you’ll be able to keep your hands out of it. I only feel bad that poor Tikatu got caught in the crossfire—she’s a class act and the whole lot of you people should look to her as a role model.

Laura: It’s too late. You have exhausted fandom’s good will with your bad (and sometimes outright spiteful) decisions. If you really believe in fandom, in fan history, in a fan directory, it’s time to let someone else run one, someone who hasn’t turned around and hurt people, someone who hasn’t managed to drive off everyone else. Because of you, Fanhistory will never outgrow its bad rep. I should know: I tried to help it do so.

Too little, too late.

Sorry, Laura, but too many of us have screen caps of you advocating lying about money and encouraging people to generate wank to drive up traffic. NOT in a joking fashion, NOT in private, but in public posts which are deadly serious. You’re nasty and petty, you’re a pathological liar, and you’re not getting away with it.

I have been accused of openly encouraging individuals to create wank to drive traffic to Fan History. This is untrue; it is a case of a joking comment made among friends in private and on FLocked posts being misconstrued and taken out of context.

See, that’s the thing, I thought it was a joke when I posted that wank, and what is conveniently cut out of the screen cap is the convo with LennoxMacbeth in which she(?) is to receive cookies. There was probably about 10 comments in that post regarding the cookies. You were serious. You sent out bribes.

I would never knowingly plan to subject myself blahblahblah…

Shall I post the chatlog?

I will remove myself from daily involvement with the wiki.

You’ve said this before. You’ve tried this before. It never lasts long.

I will not be an active participant in meta parts of the fannish community outside of Fan History’s blog.

Maybe because you’re banned from Fanthropology last I heard.

See, the thing is, I can’t really ask for my stuff to be taken down, even if I get a little uneasy. Know why?

Because it’s been collected off ff.n by a bot.

Being open about fandom is one thing (and this is why I cheer the OTW folks on). I did not choose to be archived, and thanks to the way I was, do not have the choice to have myself removed unless you reprogram the bot completely—and for one person, that’s kind of pointless, isn’t it!

The saving grace here is that I found out about your data mining practices before I made any moves to connect my account with the rest of my online presence. Forewarned being forearmed, I’ll simply have to go on in relative anonymity, knowing that anyone who did want to dig around for me still could, but I certainly haven’t made it easier.

Your apologies may be heartfelt, but the real proof lies in the actions you will take to rectify your mistakes. I hope those actions are forthcoming, for your sake and the sake of everyone who’s been hurt by this.

Due to the fact that most of your pages contain bogus information that anyone can edit, I don’t think you are doing a service to fandom in general.

I don’t believe that your wiki can do anything that other wikis don’t already do.

You are bad for fandom, Laura. Your ethics and morals are bad for fandom and all of fandom is aware of it.

Just a question..is it absolutely necessary to have a “kerfuffles” section on every bit of fandom? I agree that fandom history should be thorough, but I don’t think it’s necessary to document all the infighting.

You’re sorry? Geez, *sincerity*, once you can fake that, you’ve got it made, right?

I actually like your site. Despite the fact that it was collected by a bot, since my personal information wasn’t given out (my real name, my real address, and so on), I don’t really care about the info. In fact, I think I might add more info to my page, when I get a chance. And I love reading about the famous scandals and sockpuppet fiascos, so please, keep this going. It’s really great.