Fan History Wiki

Wiki
Name:	Fan History Wiki
Owner/Maintainer:	Laura Hale aka purplepopple, partly_bouncy, h2oequalswater
Dates:	May 2006 - last active edit was August 2, 2011 The wiki was online until September 2012, then down, and then back online in late summer (?) 2015 with limited searching and capacity Twitter (last tweet: September 2, 2012); the wiki appeared to be floundering, with the main page gibberish: Main Page, Archived version, accessed July 2017; As of early 2018 the site was completely inaccessible; the main page went to a page with the phrase: "Welcome to Saxony Not at all like Prussia!" In 2023, the site was occupied by who knows what. Don't go there. the site message between 2018-2023
Topic:	Fandom
URL:	http://fanhistory.com/
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Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

main page

The Fan History Wiki was a general fandom site was "dedicated to documenting the history of fandom." It set out to be "the largest fandom directory on the Internet." The site was active from roughly 2006 to 2011 and went offline in 2013.

The wiki was very much a "one-woman project." The wiki's founder, Laura Hale, was a controversial figure in fandom, and Fan History Wiki was similarly associated with a number of controversies, including inaccuracy of information, outing incidents, heavy-handed editing, data scraping, and attempts to run the wiki as a personal business which included seeking venture capital and offering paid articles.

From Fan History Wiki:

Fan History has big plans for the future and is slowly working to bring them to fruition. These include:

Making Fan History into the largest fandom directory on the Internet.

Publishing materials on the history of fandom for distribution at conventions and for use in academic settings.

Becoming more of news site for fandom activity, providing updates on what fandom is up to.

Two tag lines from 2007 were: "Fan History Wiki: A project to continue for many years" and "A Wiki that anyone can edit."

The site had a blog from March 2008 to March 2011; for more information, see Fan History Wiki Blog Posts by Laura Hale.

Background

Fan History Wiki was an outgrowth of Writers University and FanFiction.Net.

In January 2001, Laura Hale and Writers University left fanfiction.net on bad terms, with Hale posting a long farewell letter to various ff.net forums detailing her reasons for leaving, including repeated mentions of the fact that she felt she had been lied to and that some of the people she'd been involved with had proved untrustworthy.

She reopened Writers University at a new site where it resided until 2004.

In May 2005, Hale posted a timeline of fanfiction and wrote: "I'm currently working on putting together a history of fan fiction fanzine because I collect this information like mad."

Around the same time in 2005, Hale was apparently still looking for a venue for the information and statistics she'd collected; at that time, she contributed to "Academic Kids," a wiki for children under the age of 12. Some of her contributions included "Slash Fiction" and "Fan Fiction".

In May 2006, Fan History started with some basic history information that had originally been found on FanFiction.Net. Hale also copied from the discussions on the FCA-L mailing list via Writers University, as well as many of her own essays.

In 2008, Hale explained some of the wiki's history and origin in an interview she gave at Fanboy.com:

Writers University left FanFiction.Net and the a history section went with it to a few different urls. In May 2006, because I wanted to expand on and consolidate the knowledge of fandom history that had been sitting around my hard drive, and because Wikipedia deleted the Diane Marchant article, the content I had moved to FanHistory.Com. The decision was made to use a wiki format because I wanted to get more people involved in telling the history of fandom because for a few years, the only person writing history inside media fandom telling the history of media fandom was me. So it began as a one person show. It has since expanded beyond that.

Her assertion that the wiki had moved beyond being a "one person show" appears to be contradicted by her June 2008 attempt to get venture capital for the wiki; in her description of the wiki on at least one of those sites, she calls it a "solo venture".

Hale described the wiki in 2008, and again in 2009, and touched on a number of subjects including its origins and its "ownership.":

Fan History is an outgrowth of Writers University's history department. Writers University was founded back in 2000 on FanFiction.Net by Laura under the nom de plume 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 [sic]. During this period, Laura's research into the history of fan fiction and fandom continued. For a while, she hosted Fan History's original content on a shtuff.com wiki, but found the software too limited in terms of allowing others to get involved. Fan History's content on its multiple older locations 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 2008, Fan History became a limited liability corporation known as Fan History LLC. In October 2009, Fan History went back to an sole proprietorship.

Hale made it clear that she believed both herself and the wiki to be widely, almost universally, known in fandom:

Because seriously, you'd have to be pretty... well, isolated in fandom not to have run across Fan History Wiki and my other fan fiction history type work.

In early 2008, Hale stated that she'd always had bigger plans for the site: "Fan History was intended to be more than just a wiki."

Fan History spent much of 2008 and 2009 on reinventing its public image, removing the founder as the dominant figure from Fan History although Laura was still the owner of the wiki. Fan History presented itself as a site that was no longer a site that was just associated with Laura Hale, but its own brand with social network handles on AboutUs, Twitter, Facebook, and many other places.

In November 2009, Laura Hale approached the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit umbrella organization that includes Wikipedia and related sites in its projects, and tried unsuccessfully to have "Fan History Wiki" join them.

See the 2009 Failed Attempt to Become a Part of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Timeline

00s

2006

In April 2006, Hale referenced the wiki (which was at this point on a wiki site called "Schtuff", calling it "my personal fan fiction history wiki." Another mention by Hale: "I have http://fanhistory.schtuff.com/?action=index as my well... it was billed as a wiki and works that way well enough for me. ;-)"

On April 27, 2006, Hale described the wiki (at this point on the site "Schtuff"): "The wiki (which I've never found a good format to organize this information in as the amount of information to incorporate and ideal way to sort it is challenging) is found here. It isn't always very... friendly in terms of grammar, layout, etc. I tend to use it as an information dumping ground for the information I have and as a place to stuff essays I write related to the topic."

"When Writers University left FanFiction.Net, it moved to a free server, and then to its own domain. The information was then put together on a wiki on schtuff, before moving to its current location, in its current format, in May 2006." Hale commented on completing the content move on May 17, 2006.

The domain name for "Fan History Wiki" was registered by Nicole Pellegrini on May 19, 2006. There was also cross-pollination with Fanworks Finder.

On August 20, 2006, Laura Hale wrote that "The fan fiction history wiki. Originally, it was created after much deliberation, as a place to store information regarding the history of fan fiction that I had collected over the years." Hale also wrote that there were about 2,590 articles on the wiki.

2007

In June 2007, Hale began work as a consultant for for FanLib/Take180, specifically consulting on social network communities such as Twitter and Facebook.

On October 2, 2007, Hale was frustrated with one of the wiki's flagship pages, the "cluttered" slash page and personally feeling overwhelmed.

On October 6, 2007, Hale was approached by a Wikia employee with an offer to absorb Fan History, as well as offering up some commiseration about "the oddness of the OTW wank." as enticement.

On December 18, 2007, the wiki had 7,100 pages.

2008

During the years 2008-2010, Fan History practices provoked controversy over promotion and recruitment, data scraping, paid services, content accuracy, treatment of editors, deceptive practices, "outing" fan names, and treating the site as a startup business in search of venture capital (all topics covered in detail below).

On March 14, 2008, Hale wrote of her intensive promotional efforts.

Hale alluded to various conflicts the wiki was having in Documenting fandom history: Getting the bias out, on April 12, 2008. Shortly after, Laura created a tongue-in-cheek page for editors about dealing with stress.

On April 22, 2008 the number of total pages had jumped to 101,420 total pages; this leap was mainly due to bot scraping, a practice that had begun in March 2008.

In May 2008, Hale was at MediaWest*Con as a dealer with admittedly very little to do. By at least one account, Hale's promotion at MediaWest*Con of her wiki at was not well-received.

In July 2008, Fan History LLC (the company that operated Fan History Wiki and FanWorksFinder) was organized in the state of Illinois. "In November 2009, the site went back to being organized as a sole proprietorship."

On July 28, 2008, Hale made a post addressing many fan complaints about privacy, outing, profit and more. See A Statement from Fan History (2008). The site had been "locked down" three days earlier by Hale due to "repeated vandalism and ongoing privacy revisions." This was due to intense public discussions regarding Hale's behaviors and practices regarding outing, profit, wank, and more. See A Statement from Fan History (2008). While the original plan was to unlock the site "on or about August 14," the talk pages were made active on August 1, and the rest of the site "in the next seven days."

On August 2, 2008, the site issued some policy updates in response to fan complaints: Fan History policy updates.

On September 7, 2008, Hale discussed fan history and whether the wiki was the best place to document it. See Fan History Wiki: Content generation and finding the right format.

2009

Early 2009 (or late 2008), Hale began advertising for four interns: Social Media Internship, Python Programming Internship, Search Engine Optimization Internship, and Community Outreach Internship.

Mid-June 2009: "During mid-June, Fan History’s founder ran for LiveJournal’s User Advisory Board. She cited her experience with Fan History as a good reason to support her nomination. She didn’t get the 100 votes to make the ballot."

June 25, 2009: "On June 25, Fan History created a Facebook fan page. It was subsequently mostly forgotten after that."

The end of June 2007, Hale lost her job as a consultant for for FanLib/Take180, specifically consulting on social network communities such as Twitter and Facebook. This put put a crimp on Fan History Wiki's finances: "At the end of June, Fan History’s founder lost her job. This was stressful as this employment helped cover Fan History’s cost out of pocket."

On November 13, 2009, there were 12 administrators listed at Fan History, all volunteers. Fan History also had became one of the largest non-Wikipedia, non-modified MediaWiki install wikis on the internet.

On December 12, 2009, the site officially changed over their copyright to CC-BY-SA 3.0.

10s

2010

It was closed to open public editing November 23, 2010. At that time, the front page quoted these stats: "Fan History Wiki is run by 18 admins. This community withstands of 2715 users who have uploaded a total of 5294 files, made 1,706,174 edits, have created 905,978 good articles and created 1,001,182 total pages."

2011

Hale considers February 2011 to be the end of Fan History.

The site was up, then down, July 10 and 11, 2011.

After flooding the site with stubs about the sport "netball," the last new page was created by Laura Hale August 2, 2011 for the Netball in Tonga page.

2013

Despite Laura Hale's plans to have the wiki remain online as a static record of some fan history, Fan History Wiki went completely offline sometime in early 2013, possibly January. While some pages were available on the Wayback Machine, most were blocked by robots.

2014

The URL fanhistory.org used to redirect to the Fan History Wiki main page. In 2014, a fan unaffiliated with Fanlore bought the fanhistory.org URL and redirected it to Fanlore. However, the two wikis have never been affiliated; for more, see Fan History Wiki - Conflict With Fanlore.

2015

While FanHistory.com reappeared with the same URL, seemingly intact, some time before September 6, 2015. with limited searching and capacity the wiki appeared to be floundering, with the main page gibberish.

2018

As of early 2018 (and likely long before) the site is completely inaccessible; the main page now goes to a page with the phrase: "Welcome to Saxony Not at all like Prussia!" It is unknown if the site was hacked by a third-person or if Hale made this statement herself.

Descriptions

According to Fan History Wiki's entry on itself:

a November 2009 graph by Hale which places Hale and Fan History Wiki in wiki context

About: 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.

History: Fan History is an outgrowth of Writers University's history department. Writers University was founded back in 2000 on FanFiction.Net by Laura 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.

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 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 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.

The Future: Fan History has big plans for the future and is slowly working to bring them to fruition. These include:

• Making Fan History into the largest fandom directory on the internet.
• Publishing materials on the history of fandom for distribution at conventions and for use in academic settings.
• Becoming more of news site for fandom activity, providing updates on what fandom is up to.

Additional information: Additional information about Fan History can be found on Fan History's help pages, including our philosophy and the wiki rules. Fan History is in the process of looking for capital to help facilitate our growth. If you are interested in a copy of our business plan or our pitch, please contact Laura through LinkedIn or via e-mail at laura @ fanhistory.com. Seriously inquiries only please.

Also see What is a wiki? and Fan History is not Wikipedia.

Laura Hale made many targeted posts to fan groups which introduced and requested help for the Wiki. According to an August 2006 post on the Star Wars group rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc:

Fan Fiction History Wiki... Originally, it was created after much deliberation, as a place to store information regarding the history of fan fiction that I had collected over the years. And I'd like more contributions to it because I know a lot of areas are sparsely detailed and under represented. I also have problems knowing some areas because I do not know know a lot of fandoms and I do not necessarily know what roles people played. Some word choices are my own like the preference of the word saffic. Some things I treat as fact but would require two pages of meta to explain, like how FanFiction.Net helped kill a certain degree of age discrimination in the fan fiction community. (It isn't quite that simple but it is one of the bigger contributing reasons.) Some of the articles are also terribly short, one liners that could really use some fleshing out. As such, it needs a lot of work and article updating... but overall, I still think it is a useful starting point for people looking for information on the subject. Unlike the Fandom Wank Wiki and Wikipedia, I don't really have a threshold for how famous you have to be in order to merit your own page. Lesser known fen, where they visited, what awards they won, what fandoms they were involved with, that information helps build a broader picture as to the larger state of the fan fiction community as a whole and the state of smaller, individual fan fiction communities. It can also help track historical movements in the fan fiction community. The wiki currently has 2,600 articles are so.

From the wiki's main page in 2007:

Fan History Wiki: A project to continue for many years

The maintainer of Fan History Wiki is committed to this project. This project is not a flash in the pan. The creator started researching the subject in 2000 and has been actively involved in documenting fan history ever since. The wiki, originally hosted on schtuff, was created in August 2005 and moved to its own domain and hosted using the mediawiki script in May 2005. The move was done to help bring more people into the process of documenting fan fiction and fandom history by using a more user friendly and scalable script. This is not a project that is going to go away. If for some reason the maintainer could no longer continue, it would be handed over to someone equally passionate about this subject. At this time, that person would be screwthedaisies, Heather, the maintainer of RockFic and FanWorksFinder.

A Wiki that anyone can edit

Anyone can edit this wiki: Male, female, transgendered, Americans, Brits, Indians, people from Zaire and every nationality in between, English speakers, French speakers, Russian speaking fen and people who speak languages other than those, homosexuals, bisexuals, heterosexuals, anime fan, BandFic writer, casual fan, feral fan, acafen, corporations working with fandom, media fan, sportfic reader, yaoi fangirl, narutards, rabid shippers, otaku, genfen, slash fen or hetshipper. (But NOT automated spam bots.) A user name is not required because some fixes might need to be made fast or a person might not feel comfortable logging in. When this is done, their edits are tracked to the IP address. It is important that anyone can edit because the fan fiction community represents a history that is not always linear and not always one sided. There are multiple parties and it is important to give those parties the ability to give voice to their own histories.

Philosophy

What Are Fan History's Goals: Fanhistory.com:Philosophy:

Fandom Definition and Approach

Fan History defines fandom as a collection of different cultures. These cultures are dependent on the communities created based on the source of the fannishness, the canon that a community has adopted. This philosophy underlines the whole of the wiki. This approach is categorically different than most of the research being done on fan fiction, which focuses on fandom as an extension of the source. Fan History rarely focuses on the product that was created by fans, but on fans themselves.

This approach to fandom is used on Fan History as the maintainer and creator of the Fan History comes from an educational, historical and interdisciplinary approach to fandom studies. The maintainer has Masters of Education in Instructional Technology. Her exposure to feminist and literary approaches to critique fandom are thus limited. Educational research tends to focus on different population groups. The characteristics of the population are defined. They are then sorted into subpopulations based on their differences. The subpopulations are then evaluated, compared back to the larger population and conclusions are drawn. Education puts an emphasis on highlighting differences and puts tremendous value into defining those differences. This is not the case in other disciplines.

One example where this is most clear is in defining fan fiction communities. A literary, sociological and communications approach would define fan fiction based on Star Trek and Good Charlotte as fundamentally the same because both types of fan fiction include stories derived from other sources. These groups would then be subdivided into Media fan fiction and Real Person Fan Fiction. The difference is based on the source of the material for which the fannish texts are derived. Fan History, because of the educational perspective, defines the communities differently, based on the culture around which the fans are creating their products, the demographic composition of each group and the histories of each population. The boundaries of Media fan fiction and Real Person Fic are viewed as artificially imposed and do not necessarily reflect real differences in the communities. Fan History would argue that while they are both writing fan fiction, Good Charlotte fans are not similar to Star Trek fans because of demographic and historical differences in their communities.

Documenting History

Fan History is about preserving, documenting and writing fandom history. To this end, Fan History:

• 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 [sic] belief is that fans are the most knowledgeable about their own history and can best put events in fandom into historical context.

Practices

Promotion and Recruitment

On December 29, 2007, Hale wrote about the "randomness" of the wiki and suggested some tasks for fans:

Fan History has grown during the past year. It now has over 7,500 pages and over 600 users. There have been over 43,000 edits and 1.6 million page views. This growth has so far been rather random. As plans are to continue to expand the wiki to make it a more useful tool for academics, fan historians and fandom in order to preserve our history, Fan History needs a way to channel that growth. To deal with that, a series of to do lists have been created to deal with certain parts of the wiki. Please help Fan History by completing tasks on these lists and by suggesting new tasks.

On August 5, 2008, Hale mentioned that she had permission to use a bot to created a directory of MediaMiner.Org users.

Hale and other wiki admins also actively promoted the wiki in various fannish spaces, and actively recruited for it as well. An early example of Hale's recruitment is this letter sent to various archive maintainers. Dated December, 2007, it encouraged not only activity for the wiki, but also for some related projects. From the introduction:

Happy holidays from Fan History Wiki, FanWorksFinder, FanWorks.Org, MediaMiner.Org and RockFic! We hope your holiday season is going well. We are contacting you because you, now or in the past, were a maintainer of a [fandom] community, a [fandom] group. As a maintainer, you're a community leader and have influence in your fandom. We wanted to let you know about our projects, solicit your help with them and ask you to help promote our archives in your own communities.

Many of Hale's requests for help usually followed the same general format, such as this May 2008 post to a Breakfast Club community on LJ:

Can anyone help edit the Breakfast Club article on Fan History? The article is pretty lacking in information and could use some one more familiar with the fandom to help fill in the details regarding what was happening and when in the fandom. Fan History is also trying to create a directory of Breakfast Club fans. So far, there are 86 articles. It would be nice to have those articles improved and to add new articles about members of the fandom. :) Any help in that section would be really very much appreciated. :)

Laura commented on her recruitment work in this March 2008 comment:

Been really working on promoting Fan History recently at various places, e-mailing sites and blogs and asking them to link, posting links on orkut, fanpop, bebo, LiveJournal, stumbleupon, digg, etc. And some of those links and people finding the site through search engines have led to people posting links to the site on their own. It feels like Fan History is getting closer to self generating traffic. Almost or somewhat. *crosses fingers* But increased traffic feels like YAY!

Some other March 2008 comments by Hale:

W00t! Rank on Quantcast went from 114,964 yesterday to 113,924 today. [1] Been following as we've been trying to improve the traffic and content for the project this month. Some of this has been going on behind the scenes. Lot of it is just plugging and plugging away. We're waiting until the article count exceeds 10,000 before contemplating the idea of spending money to do a press release and go after that more aggressively. We're also waiting to see how things go post MediaWest. Hopefully that should give Fan History a bump in interest. [Two days later]: I've got to stop watching the ranking data. According to Quantcast, Fan History's rank is rank 111,509 today. Increased rank and increased traffic are really important. More traffic means more people who might be interested in helping improve Fan History. That's the goal of plugging Fan History all over the place: To get more people involved, even if it is on a drop in basis for a few edits here and there, in order to share the history of fandom. This can be anything from adding the names of people in the fandom, to plugging their own fandom projects to adding a whole slew of dates to adding words used in a fandom. It is an important project and one that really needs more people involved just because of the huge scope of fandom. One person, one hundred people. It just isn't enough to get an accurate idea of what is going on. Making it even more challenging, fandom history is not sitting still. Things are always happening that are important to the history of fandom and they all need to be documented. Massive thanks to all the bloggers and sites out there who have linked to Fan History. :) I really appreciate it.

Fan contribution to Fan History Wiki was not vigorous despite these efforts.

From a 2009 press release written and submitted by Hale: "Since May 2006, the project has been working on documenting the history of fan communities.... At every step, the fandom community responded, helped improve many of our stubs and added new content."

This statement contradicts a volunteer's 2007 statement that fan contributions were sparse: "I've watched partly_bouncy begging and scrounging for people with knowledge to contribute..."

• 

  an icon created by Hale in August 2008

• 

  icon from Fan History site encouraging fannish participation: "Please help promote Fan History. Get more people involved in sharing and documenting the history of fandom. Plug the article about yourself, your community, your stories, your fanzines or your fandom based business. Please feel free to link to the following images in on profile pages and elsewhere."

• 

  an icon created by Hale, March 2008 -- "Haven't I wanked you before...? My name is...: Find out my history of involvement in fandom at http://www.fanhistory.com?index.php?____"

Flyers

Flyers created for the purpose of sending traffic to Fan History Wiki. These flyers were distributed at MediaWest*Con and perhaps other places.

• 

  2008

• 

  2008

• 

  2009, print zines

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  2009, fan history

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  2009, Twilight stats

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  2009, metafandom stats

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  2009, pro bandfic bibliography

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  2009, pro bandfic bibliography

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  2009, Rat Patrol fandom

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  2009, convention dealers and business

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  2009, subject race and fandom, RaceFail

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  2009, subject race and fandom, RaceFail

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  2009, subject race and fandom, RaceFail

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  2009, subject race and fandom, RaceFail

Notability

One of the wiki's features and selling points was that, unlike Wikipedia, there was no "notability requirement" to fulfill in order to be included.

Some statements regarding notability and what that entailed in a practical use sometime contradicted themselves. An example regarding several fans' blanking of pages and RaceFail: "I believe we allow people to argue that they aren't notable and if that is the case, the onus can then be on them to minimize their involvement in fandom and we can then reconsider."

Hale had specific ideas on how to become "notable" in fandom, which she explained in the Fanboy.com interview:

We live in a celebrity driven culture, so in your opinion what are the qualities that make a humble fanboy or fangurl notable?

Couple of qualities. First, you have to be willing to put yourself out there and shamelessly promote yourself. Second, provide people with what they want in terms of content. Third, be controversial. Fourth, keep doing that again and again. The fans who really get to be known across fandom are the ones that can do that. That’s the way to get notable and known.

The other way to get notable is to create a quality product that fandom will consume and use. The downside to this is that, unless you’re vocally making yourself the front person for that product, selling the product as an extension of yourself, you might not gain personal notability.

Hale was consistent in these beliefs. A month earlier, she had posted to the Fan History blog along similar lines:

Controversy can sell and help add legitimacy to your project. Fan History gets fairly decent sized traffic bumps when people have issues with articles, with privacy issues in fandom or with people who help maintain the wiki. Fandom Wank can be your traffic driving, search engine visibility, viral link creating friend. Lee Goldberg slamming on you can give you sympathy and legitimacy. Having slashers and het shippers duke it out on your site insures they stay and means they’ll probably link to their arguments elsewhere to complain about the behavior of those they don’t like. Controversy may also bring media attention and attention from the people affiliated with your fandom.

On July 18, 2008, Hale posted to her Twitter offering to send cookies to anyone who would generate unique hits on her wiki:

• "I will mail anyone who can generate 500 unique visits for http://www.fanhistory.com/ half a dozen home made chocolate chip cookies. :)" 2:54 PM Jul 18th from web
• "Clarification: Half a dozen cookies for each 500 unique visitors you get up to two dozen cookies. I loves cookies. :) And traffic." 2:56 PM Jul 18th from web

Hale later claimed that the offer of cookies was made in jest.

She posted the same offer to her Livejournal in an expanded version; at the bottom of the post she added ideas on how to generate hits for Fan History. These included a variety of places to post information and links, including the instruction to "generate wank" (screencap) -- a notion very much in keeping with her stated assumption that being "controversial" is a key way to gain recognition in fandom.

Many fans took these repeated assertions to mean that controversy (or wank) is a tool that she actively uses and encourages. Others felt that the quotes were taken out of context. Hale publicly denied this interpretation in July 2008:

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.

In October 2008, however, she posted another affirmation:

If you’re a fan, you might shut your mouth and avoid controversy at all costs. If you don’t, your enjoyment of fandom might decrease. If you’ve got a financial or business stake in fandom, you might not have that luxury. You might need to wade in to that controversy or find a way to use it to your benefit. It can increase your traffic and your visibility which can help your bottom line. (4) By alienating a certain group, you might gain acceptance by a larger group who will enjoy what you’re doing who might not otherwise have been exposed to you had they not heard about it from the people who disliked the business. From a risk/reward perspective, it makes sense. 4. Which isn’t to say that this is just the purview of people with business interests in fandom. Plenty of fans enjoy controversy and plenty of fans have a stake in creating controversy in order to further their own standing in the community.[...]

Data scraping

Bots were on the table as of 2007. Hale wrote:

The about change has changed a bit as the focus of the wiki is changing to be more about the whole of fandom history involving art, fic, vids and discussion, rather than focusing solely on the fan fiction component. At some point in the future, category pages will be changed on a much larger scale, and using a bot, to reflect that focus. For now though, that is a slow moving process. Thank you for your patience.

Fanfiction.net & Livejournal Bots

In 2008, Hale wrote: "Fan History loves original research and data dumping."

To generate pages, in March 2008, Hale implemented a bot that scraped fanfiction.net profiles for basic (often badly outdated, incomplete, or incorrect) information, creating a new page for each profile. By April 23, 2008 the bot had boosted the wiki's page count from roughly 6,500 pages to 93,808. By late October 2008, the bot had boosted the page count to 484,784—or more than 475,000 scraped articles.

While some fans thought this bot was a good—or at least neutral—idea, others disagreed, believing that it would result in information overload that would make the wiki largely useless to anyone actually trying to use it to learn about fandom. In April 2008, a fan wrote:

Pages could exist (for example) for Dex, DexF, DexFarkin, and Dex (Fanfiction.net user) - because he's shown up on various websites as all of those - plus anything that might've ever come up under his real name. It takes a human eye to know those are all the same dude AND that he's the guy who runs Dexcon. A bot can't do that - and a bot that is making 1,000 entries a day cannot be kept up with by a very -very- small number of humans.

In May 2008, the bot was creating problems for at least two editors. One said:

I thought you said I wouldn't have to see that damndable bot until Tuesday! You're supposed to be at the camp! Go do that and leave my page cleaning bot free!

Another May 2008 conversation:

I created a page for Lillehafrue under Thunderbirds Fans (with her permission), with the intention of helping her transfer her ffnetbot materials when she had time. Now the ffnetbot article is gone. Is there some sort of protocol for mentioning this somewhere (other than my talk) so a bot article that will be worked on doesn't get deleted? Thanks. --Tikatu 16:53, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Erf. That deletion was probably me. I might have deleted the bot duplicate. --Laura 16:56, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Found it. Restored it. This was just one of those errors on my part where I deleted pages I thought were the same because I've screwed up the bot several time and created about 2,000 repeat articles as a result. *sighs* So yeah. --Laura 16:58, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Another fan had this comment in July 2008:

I had become acquainted back on FCA-L with the fact that Hale is an incompetent historian, and there were things about her wiki that I had assumed were more of the same -- she can't distinguish information which is historically useful from information which isn't, for example, so she includes every possible fact -- and in the same way, she created a bot to make a stub on her wiki for anyone who's ever posted to fanfiction.net, even if they'd posted a single story and moved out of fandom entirely.

On April 7, 2009, Hale announced:

About a year ago, Fan History paid for some one to create FanFictionNetBot. The bot created about 490,000 articles when we finished running it. While it was primarily active in March 2008, we occasionally ran it to create articles about FanFiction.Net who had joined after we had created the bot. We last ran it on December 26, 2008 and the last article it created was the one about Ending Howard, a name that now seems fitting. We’re never going to run the bot again on FanFiction.Net. No new articles will be created. The articles were never intended to be updated. The bot is officially dead. Why? At the time that we created the bot, we were in compliance with FanFiction.Net’s robots.txt policy and their Terms of Service. We only created it and ran it in the first place because we weren’t violating those. FanFiction.Net has since changed their policy to explicitly prohibit this type of activity. Fan History tries to be a good fandom neighbor and violating a site’s Terms of Service would fall into that category.

Read more about the FanFictionNetBot and the discussion page at "Fan History Wiki."

In October 2008, without taking any time to allow the wiki editors to sort and clarify the massive inflow of unverified raw information from fanfiction.net, Hale moved on to create a second scraper bot, this time to capture data from individual fans' Livejournal profiles. Hale used several large communities as her starting point; the only way for members of those communities to avoid being scraped was to set their journals to be left out of search-engine indexes.

Other Bots

The wiki had not abandonned bots as a means of information gathering after scraping Fanfiction.net and Livejournal

Fan History Wiki also employed other bots to add stubs. From a May 18, 2009 post to its blog:

We’ve been hard at work on Fan History trying to improve content, create more stub content to make it easier for contributors to participate, to increase the number of people participating on the wiki, to become more comprehensive and to better serve the fan community. To this end, we’ve done three things in the past month or so:

• Added 17,000 articles about music fandoms;
• Added 1,600 articles about fanzines;
• Added 13,000 articles about movies.

These additions have largely been about providing a framework for the documenting of history that we’ve done so far. Pretty soon, hopefully in the next week or two, we’re planning to add between 50,000 and 75,000 articles. We’re going to be focusing on fan responses to episodes and using EpisodeBot as our base template. If you know of a search engine or an entertainment site that could use some link love, please get them in touch with me...

On September 9, 2008, Hale posted of her excitement regarding a "fan fiction stat bot":

I'm in a really happy, excited mood! Fan History has accomplished one of our goals: To have data regarding fandom size and growth. We view this as an important step forward in telling the history of fandom, understanding fandom and being able to explain what the hell is going on by having some hard data to back it up.

How are we doing this and what exactly are we doing? The how is Fan Fiction Stat Bot. Fan Fiction Stat Bot has a list of fandoms, of spelling variants of those fandoms, and of urls for fandom directories on a handful of fan fiction archives. The bot accesses those directory pages, looks for the fandom name (or variant), finds how many stories are on the archive in that category, stores that information, does a simple math computation to determine how many stories were added or removed from the fandom and then puts that information into a table. Once every fandom is done, it calculates how which fandoms had the most stories added to them. It then adds this information the the appropriate articles. What we get is a daily list of fandoms that have the most stories added to them and a record of activity in different fandoms.

Did I mention I'm happy and excited? I am! The bot has only been running two days but we've got some data worth speculating about. I've seen some discussions regarding how big the Twilight fandom is and questions of if it will be bigger than the Harry Potter fandom. Our list of fandom movers and shakers has Harry Potter but there as the fandom with the second most additions for September 13. It was third for September 12. Twilight was third on September 13 and second on September 12. There isn't enough data to draw a conclusion yet but we can see that the two fandoms are both comparable in amount of activity in the fan fiction community at the moment. Harry Potter does seem to have an edge in terms of amount of activity because the fandom has people uploading stories to multiple archives. Twilight lacks similar activity, with all the activity taking place on just FanFiction.Net. We really need more time and more data to draw a better conclusion, to get a better idea of what is happening, to better be able to compare these two fandoms... but we have a tool to help us to be able to do it. And that strikes me as awesome.

Fan Reaction Regarding the Bots

Well, looking at what she did when she had a bot crawl ff.net: she'll create a page for every LJ name that's in fandom (I assume she'll crawl based on interests), and that page can list the LJ creation date as "this person has been in fandom at least since...", and then will probably add all fandoms listed as "this person is in at least these fandoms: ..."

And there'll likely be a notice that tells people to come and edit their pages, to merge them with any existing pages, and in the end, she'll have a list of LJ users, potentially with their email addresses from those that have them enabled on their profile, and a list of fandoms that person is interested in, and she can try to sell that - since her goal with the fandomwiki, as stated by herself, is to make money and to sell it as a database full of potential customers.

She's hoping that will also drive a lot of new people to her site who will check if a page for them was created, so that she can rack up the numbers of unique visitors, to make the site potentially more appealing to buyers.

[addressed to Hale specifically]:

I know I'm going to regret getting into this discussion, but you did ask for feedback.

In Marketing (which I teach BTW), there are two main strategies: Opt-in and Opt-out.

With Opt-in, you invite potential customers and they volunteer to participate. [ie: Yes! Sign me up for the newsletter/book club/monthly emails, whatever].

In Opt-Out, the customers are drafted/commandeered/forced to participate, sometimes without even their knowledge and consent and they must deliberately ask to be let out of an agreement that they didn't make (or thought they didn't make) in the first place.

Book clubs that make you send in a coupon to stop the monthly delivery of a book were based on opt-out strategies. Today, there are lots of websites that bury their opt-out statements so the consumer might not notice. Some adware also works as opt-out.

However, modern marketers generally prefer opt-in because it's transparent and allows the consumer choice. Opt-out is sneaky and frankly, it pisses people off. Opt-in is friendly and strikes up a dialogue, a relationship that the consumer requests and voluntarily --- sometimes enthusiastically --- enters.

Your strategies have mostly been opt-out strategies which is why you're getting flack. Any marketer would.

One can certainly treat fandom like a business, but remember that with cons or even buying from Mysti, the consumers *choose* to do so or not. *They* make the move. Mysti doesn't thrust a zine into their hands. Cons don't inform them that, oh guess what, they're attending unless they send back a card that says they're not. Do you see the difference?

For the opt-in strategy to work, you must convince the consumers that *it's in their interest* to engage. [BTW: Google has already done this, which is why most people don't object to showing up on Google ---*it's in their interest.* However, Google is having its own problems with digitalizing books but that's another discussion]

If you're having trouble getting folks to volunteer to join Fan History, then the problem lies in your own PR efforts. You haven't convinced them that it's worth opting-in.

The answer is *not* to then hit them with an opt-out strategy. That way only gets the marketer into trouble.

In the end, you have to convince your prospective target why it's not only in your interest that they opt-in, but why it's in *theirs*. If you can't convince them, leave them alone. Bots are not the answer.

I don't like it either. It's invasive, and as usual, shows no regard for fandom whatsoever.

Paid Services

In January 2009, Hale instituted a new practice/service on the wiki: paid articles. This appeared to be part of Hale's business plan. According to the blog post announcing it:

These services include article writing about and for individual members of fandom, convention dealers and fandoms. The cost of an article ranges from $25 for a basic article about a member of fandom to $1,500 to write the history of a fandom and create all the relevant subarticles.... Beyond helping Fan History by buying a paid article, what do you get? If you’re a member of fandom, you’ll get increased exposure for yourself and your work in fandom. You may want this service because Fan History administrators and staff are the best at what we do on the site; we can best help you have a great presence on Fan History and you get that to your advantage.

According to the site's FAQ, individuals could pay to have an article written about themselves or someone else; many people can band together to pay for a fandom article. All paid-for articles will be open to future editing by wiki users. The FAQ goes on to give more background and detail:

Are you trying to profit off fandom? Are you going to get the rest of fandom in trouble trying to profit off fandom?

Fan History is trying to make enough money to fund projects we wish to do work on, including doing a better job at documenting the history, documenting trends in entertainment, providing statistical data about fandom to the public, improving our fandom directory, etc. This means that we need to be able to pay developers, pay for our hosting, and compensate people for their time. To meet some of these goals, it also means being able to increase our visibility. To do this, we need to be able to reserve space at conventions, pay to publish some materials and buy advertising. It would be awesome to make a big profit but that isn't our end goal.

Our actions are not going to cause trouble for anyone in trouble in terms of bringing the powers that be down on fandom. Fan History's admins are very aware of the history of fandom, the relationship between fans and creators, the history of trying to make money inside of fandom, how other businesses operating in this type of space behave and have talked to a number of professionals in social media, in fandom and in entertainment related business before launching this service. If we thought there was a reasonable risk in causing problems for the whole of fandom by doing this, we would not be doing it.

Aren’t you charging too much for these services?

The price points that Fan History chose were done after contacting several people who do contract work for creating content on-line, and looking at similar services which offer paid article placement. Fan History tried to make our price point as low as we could and below those the price points of others. We did this because we understand that this type of service is not the norm in fandom, where people aren’t expected to pay for a service like this. We also did it because we believe that those who are doing paid work for Fan History should be fairly compensated. ...

Doesn’t charging for articles mean that Fan History is complicit in engaging in historical revisionism?

No, it does not mean that. Fan History does not allow paid articles to be locked and people who hire us to write them are aware of that specifically to prevent possible historical revisionism. If a person does something that should be documented, then it can still be integrated in to that article by other contributors. The only thing that people need to remember is that new edits to inform people of things a person a paid article is about still need to comply with Fan History's privacy rules and bias guidelines. If people feel that historical revisionism is going on despite efforts to prevent them, there are a couple of steps that they can take: They can comment on the talk page. They can edit the article themselves. They can e-mail a Fan History admin, bringing the article to our attention so we can attempt to take appropriate action such as putting a neutral point of view disclaimer on top of the article. ...

Who will write my paid article and will they be paid?

Fan History has a few people who have volunteered to write paid articles. These individuals generally are professional authors. They have been published but don't earn enough from their writing to quit their day jobs. Some are are involved professionally with web related services. All Fan History's paid article writers are members of fandom and have been for a few years. These individuals are paid a to write the article about you as a means of quality control and to insure the timeliness of the article being completed.

Why are you charging to monitor articles?

Fan History has limited staff. Because of that, we have to place a priority on certain activities. By charging to monitor, we’ll prioritize in your direction in order to help us compensate our staff whom have to take time away from other activities to work on the site. We’re also charging for this service so that we can continue to expand.

Why is Fan History offering these services?

Fan History wants to continue to expand and to improve. We want to change our look, improve our content, continue to add analytic information, reward contributors, cover our hosting costs, be able to be represented at convention, pay our staff and more. In order to do that, we need to have a funding source as these goals require money.

Why do I need to pay for this service? Can’t I do the same thing on my own?

You don’t need this service, and yes, you could do what we’re doing on your own. Anyone can edit Fan History so long as they follow the rules. You may want this service if you aren’t familiar with wikis and but want the benefit of having a well-written article that promotes your presence in fandom. You may want this service if you’re not certain about how to go about optimizing your article and on-line presence to have the most desirable search results appear first on Google. You may want this service if you don’t want to have to worry about checking Fan History regularly to see if you’ve been mentioned in an unfavorable way. You may want this service because Fan History administrators and staff are the best at what we do on the site; we can best help you have a great presence on Fan History.

To pay for an article, fans had to complete the following steps:

Send an e-mail to [email protected] with the type of article you are inquiring about in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail, include details about the article such as the person it is about, if that person is you, the fandom or the convention dealer.

An e-mail will be sent back to you within 5 days with a quote regarding the cost of the article and a contract you are agree to honor after you have sent your payment. Respond by sending the amount to [email protected] using PayPal.

Once your payment has been sent, the person writing the article will be in touch with you with in 2 days.

Linking Policy

In September 2009, Hale outlined the wiki's official policy regarding its linking to posts and journals during controversial discussions in a blog post titled: "Fan History, kerfluffle documenting, linking and informing":

During a major kerfluffle that anyone is covering, there are generally three approaches:

• Provide links and commentary in a summary of the events. Do not participate in the kerfluffle. Document it. Do not go to people’s blogs and comment to say that Fan History has linked to them. (Don’t troll the wank.) This is the philosophy that fandom wank has adopted.
• Participate in kerfluffle as you normally would. Do not announce that you are linking to posts on the posts you are linking to, unless you are responding to something where linking to the post is necessary.
• Inform every person that you linked to in your write up that you linked to them. This is the philosophy of linkspam.

There are benefits and drawbacks to each philosophy. Fan History’s policy for its admin staff is to follow the first one: Do not go to people’s blogs and comment to say that Fan History has linked to them. We have chosen this policy for our admin staff for a variety of reasons.

First, we see Fan History’s mission to include documenting the history of fandom as fairly as we can, in as unbiased manner as we can while accurately describing events that took place. We believe that if we actively inserted ourselves into the conversation by commenting to link a person to our post and announcing that we linked to them that we would not be able to work towards Fan History’s mission. It would make us participants in the conversation, and that would hurt our ability to be unbiased, fair and factually accurate. We would be forced to participate and defend our commenting to inform.

This leads to the second reason: The need to defend if people were upset by our linking could also possibly serve to derail important conversations. We want to document the history. We don’t want to derail conversation in fandom that people think are important. This includes conversations on issues such as gender, race, privilege and more. These are important conversations to have. By changing the focus, making it more about Fan History and that we linked to the person, we may be sending a message that we think we are more worthy of being discussed than the topic in the post.

The third reason and final reason we don’t link is that Fan History is that people can easily find if they are linked on Fan History. We’re rather search engine friendly and people can find us if they search for us. In many recent kerfluffles, our articles have been well linked so people can find us in the stream of links around a kerfluffle that we are covering. If people really want to know if they are linked, it is pretty easy to do so.

Before ending this post, I just want to make it clear: This policy is for Fan History’s admin staff only in terms of how we contribute to kerfluffle articles. It is not our intention for links on these posts to be used as starting places for people’s trolling. We also do not hold our contributors to the same policy. If they want to add links to an article and inform people that they linked to them, that is their pejorative.

Fan History Wiki as a Business

Communication with Users: Do I Need to Discuss Policy Decisions?

Should you discuss policy decisions with your users?

Fan fiction archives, mailing lists, LiveJournal communities, wikis, forums have rules. (Or don’t. But most do.) At some point, some one is going to object to those rules existing or run afoul of them. You’ll ban some one for plagiarism. Some one will question why your m/m slash community doesn’t allow f/f slash. People will get upset because you needed to throttle bandwidth and turned off the feature that they cannot live with out. People will demand, absolutely DEMAND an explanation from you in some of these cases.

This situation is difficult. My advice is make a short statement and do not engage outside that. If you must engage, do so privately. By actively and publicly engaging your users over say why you banned a particular author for plagiarism, you’re inviting them into dialog. That dialog is probably one that you cannot control. If the dialog is going on on your community or site and you shut it down after you’ve participated, people are going to come after you with all sorts of lovely accusations of stopping freedom of speech, breaking your own rules and being a hypocrit. It is a situation you cannot win because you probably won’t be able to scream as loud as those complaining as their numbers are probably larger than yours. Just wait it out, be willing to risk losing participants and friends. Don’t capiluate [sic] unless you have to because by capitulating, you’re giving people permission to pull that similar stunts. Eventually, those situations will pass.

Before you get there, make sure your ass is covered. About page, Terms of Service pages, contact information, rules pages, help pages on how to use your project, a history of your project, all of those are communication tools. If you want, include an article about why your policies are the way they are… but have it up before you launch. If you don’t accept chan because you are in Australia and that’s child porn, then communicate that with your users so they know who to blame. (The Australian government, not you the fan fiction archivist.) Make sure they are linked in your header, footer or sidebar so people don’t have an excuse for not seeing them. That can head off some of the worst that may come at you.

Communication with Users: Do I Need to Share Financial Information?

Should you tell users all about the financial situation in regards to your project?

This is a common communication problem for fan projects because they take money to run. Fans can sometimes have entitlement issues which can make those who run projects queasy about because those fans can wank a money situation hard core. Couple that with your own need for money to help fund your site, well… huge problems can develop.

Before communicating with your users or others involved with your project, determine your comfort level and your potential monetary needs. If you’re not willing to be in the spotlight, then consider not talking about money. Deal with everything behind the scenes;try to keep the project scalable so you don’t need to create waves with users by begging for donations or adding advertisements. By making changes and being public about those changes and the monetary reasons behind it, you’re likely to become fandom unpopular and end up on fandom wank. If discussing money in fandom is something you’re not comfortable with, don’t discuss it period and don’t create situations where you might need to. If you need money to run the site, then be honest about it from the get go. Be as specific as you’re comfortable with and provide as much information to users as you think they need in order for you to meet your finacial [sic] obligations for the project.

Communication with Users: Do I Need to Talk to Participants?

Should I communicate with people participating with my project?

This is a question I’ve seen from a few tech oriented people in fandom. They do not see the inherent need to communicate with the users on the sites they run. Or they think that they can get away with just communicating with their administrative help people. I’ve also seen members of fandom lament over the lack of contact they’ve had with administrators at the sites they use. This happens with big sites like FanFiction.Net and smaller groups like mailing lists or LiveJournal communities.

The decision to communicate with people involved with your project comes down to a couple of things. Do you need to continue to promote your project? If yes, then you need to communicate with participants until such a time that marketing begins to take care of itself. If no, then you might be able to get away with it. Do you plan to use the project as an example of your coding skills and is that your primary motivation for building the project? If yes, then you can probably get away with out communicating with participants for your project because the project isn’t about the participants and the community but about the underlying value being the coding. Is your project central to your identity in fandom? If yes, then you probably want to help keep and maintain that identity by protecting your project by communicating with your project’s participants. Can you get some one else to communicate for you? If yes, then the pressure is off you and you can use that other person to handle any problems. Can you afford to lose people because you’re not answering questions? If yes, then you probably don’t need to communicate that often with people.

Profit

As fans uncovered more information about Hale and the wiki, it became clear that the wiki was not a fannish project, but a for-profit venture intended to market fannish information to businesses.

From the wiki (date unknown) on a page titled "Fanhistory.com:Replies to common objections":

"Fan History is not run by a non-profit. It is incorporated as an LLC. This runs counter to the idea of not profiting of fandom."

Fan History is incorporated as an LLC to insure its stability and continuity. The project seeks only to make enough money to cover the costs of running Fan History.

A project can be run by individuals, as an LLC while still maintaining the ideals that an non-profit organization strives for. This is the case for Fan History.

In early January 2008, Hale explained the wiki's money plan to fans:

some June 2008 expenses/income: for other renditions of these expenses, see January 2008; March 2008; May 2008

Fan History costs and income: Fan History costs $90 a year to host with the current host. This is paid for out of pocket by User:Laura. The domain costs $9.95 a year with the current registrar. (It was switched to Enom after problems with RegisterFly.) In December 2007, FanHistory.Net and FanHistory.Info were also purchased to point at FanHistory.Com. The domains were paid for 2 years when they were bought. These purchases were paid out of pocket by the maintainer. In January 2008, FanHistory.Org and FanHistory.US were purchased. The domains were paid for 2 years when they were bought. Fan-History.Com, Fan-History.Net, Fan-History.Org and Fan-History.Info were also purachased [sic]. The domains were paid for 1 year when they were bought.

Fan History has googleads on the site. These are unobtrusive and can generally be blocked with any decent adblocker. The ads have been on Fan History since August 2006. The total earned since that period is $44.11 as of January 2008. Google does not send a check until ad revenue exceeds $100 and if it does not add up to over $100 in a year, Google takes previous years earnings away. So far, Fan History has earned nothing as a result of the ads on the site.

Fan History is going to be represented at MediaWest in 2008. The registration was $42.00 for early registration in December 2007 and $47.00 to get a dealer's table in January 2008. Related planned expenses for the site in coming months include printing costs for various hand outs for the convention.

[snipped]

Does Fan History take donations? Short answer: Yes, if you want to send us money through paypal, please e-mail Laura at laura at fanhistory.com for the details. Long answer: At this time, the cost of running Fan History are manageable. Any donations would be used to support future projects, namely our plans for continuing to promote Fan History, Fan History Press and MediaWest. Instead of monetary donations, we would prefer contributions to various entries, plugs on various places on the Internet, help with writing things like press releases, informational material for convention and distribution our materials at conventions.

If you are interested in advertising opportunities with Fan History, please contact Laura at laura at fanhistory.com. FanHistory averages around 20,000 unique visitors and 92,000 page views a month. We'll work with you to determine the best solution for you.

Why do we accept advertising? The purpose of acceptance advertising is to help fund future projects for Fan History. These include projects related to Fan History Press, providing educational materials for conventions and more.

As early as May 2008, a statement appeared on a Fan History Wiki page created to provide information on expenses and for advertisers:

Fan History acquisition: Are you a media company possibly interested in acquiring Fan History? If you are, please contact Laura via e-mail at laura at fanhistory.com or via LinkedIn. We're looking to massively expand in the next year and would be interested in hearing serious offers that could help make that happen.

In July 2008, in the midst of a controversy over an outing on the wiki, fans discovered that the wiki was absolutely not a fannish project, but a business venture, for which Hale was seeking venture capital.

Hale addressed the issue of profit and the wiki in July 2008, as well as her previous statements about financial transparency:

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.

[...]

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 July 2008, the planned asking price of Fan History Wiki was apparently between $200,000-500,000.

It was also at this time, Hale claimed the site's monthly revenue was $1000.

In January 2010, however, Hale's description of the wiki's financial health was different:

This is one of those hard things to do: Asking for help. And we’d like your help in assisting us with defraying our hosting costs. Fan History Wiki costs about $130 a month to run. In addition, we spend about $100 a year on domains, and $45 every quarter for additional statistical data. So it costs us about $155 a month if those costs were spread equally each month.

Fan History has never been particularly self funding. The most we’ve ever earned off our advertising in a given month is about $15.00. Job loss / no income makes it hard to cover Fan History’s costs on my own but I make it happen because I really, really believe in what we’re doing. Fan History has the largest collection of information about fanzines, has the largest directory of members of the fan community on the Internet, gets over 50,000 visitors a month, has over 30 active contributors in any two week period, provides statistical data to the fan community that no one else is doing, has original research that can’t be found elsewhere, worked hard to preserve the history of fandom on Geocities, represents small fandoms, has stub articles on over 50,000 fan communities. We’ve tried to be good neighbors in the wiki community on wikis such as AboutUs, wikiHow, wikia, Futurama Wiki, Rescue Rangers Wiki and more. Our admin staff tries hard to balance conflicting fandom beliefs to be fair to everyone. We love what we do and we think we do it well. It is why I pay the money to cover hosting, domains and stats.

It is just getting to the point where this is hard to maintain. And we could really use some help from others who believe in our mission. If you could help support us by sending us even $5.00 on PayPal, or if you could bid on our ProjectWonderful ads? We would really, really appreciate it. It would go a long way towards helping us with our mission. The donation button can be found on the sidebar of both the blog and the wiki. Thanks for supporting us.

Three days later, Hale thanked two fans:

... my eyes about bugged out of my head and I had to reread the e-mail about five times to check the decimal place: He donated $500.00 towards Fan History. That should keep Fan History going for about three months, give or take a few weeks. And that’s a huge amount of less stress on me and it makes it easier for us to complete our mission as we don’t have to worry for the next two or three months about how to pay for the site.

And wow. Just wow. I… yeah. I can’t begin to explain how grateful I am. Seriously. Wow. And thanks. And thanks again.

I’d also like to thank Nile for her $5.00 and to anyone else who can help support us.

• 

  Hale's Google Ad planner, 2009

• 

  Laura Hale ran some numbers, and determined that "predicted valuation" of Fan History Wiki in May 2010 was $9,170,000.

Hale appears to have wanted to be open about her intention to sell the wiki, mainly by mentioning it on her wiki, particularly on the About page. When she tried to drum up interest in helping on the wiki, though, Hale stressed only the wiki's value to fandom, rather than its monetary potential or its value to outside businesses, and did not draw attention to the fact that the wiki was meant to be a business rather than a fannish labor of love.

But such mentions were easy to miss unless they were deliberately sought out, and the fact that Hale thought of the wiki not primarily as a fannish resource but as a "pretty comprehensive marketing tool" including contact lists that she could sell off had escaped many people. What some fans understood instead was that she was looking for ways to raise money to operate the site—for instance, to cover bandwidth and hosting fees—so that it could continue to be a fannish resource.

Some fans were fine with Hale's raising money for expenses, but drew the line at actually profiting once they discovered the truth:

A fan wrote on July 24, 2008:

Not long ago, she had been looking into either moving her wiki, or selling it. Regardless, she wants to make money off it. The reason I didn't stop her, hell, even help her (I suggested the Project Wonderful ads to her.) was because I thought she only wanted to cover the cost of the site. Bandwidth, domain names. That sort of thing. I do know that the ads she runs don't come close at ALL to covering her site, let alone giving her a profit.[...] Between Metafandom, and Fandom Wank, I've read various links to various posts that she made, in her own words, from her own fingers, that her goal is to line her pockets. That is not cool to me.

While Hale was relatively open about wanting to sell the wiki and/or its information, she also made it clear that she believed in using deceptive practices to build up her "business". In Hale's own words in November 2008:

...I'm sitting on a really nice, pretty comprehensive market research tool. That doesn't even begin to get into various other things I have compiled, like lists of LiveJournal communities that you can advertise your in fandom material on, contact lists, private demographic studies I've done, polling data, etc. The potential there for using that from a marketing perspective at fandom is nice. (It is why Fan History does NOT have a GNLU license and why our privacy policy is rather vague.)

In December 2008, Hale wrote :

... if you’re asked, tell your users that all the extra money is going into a savings account for the site to help cover costs in the long run. Say this even if it isn’t true. Fan sites run by fans take a lot of flack for making money compared to fansites run by corporations and that way, you cover your ass.

Other fans had no problem with Hale intending to profit off the wiki, selling it for as much as she could (or, more recently, asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside investment). A fan posted on July 23, 2008:

FanHistory is a business. Laura is an entrepreneur. Laura has been doing everything she can to get more page views and activity on FanHistory.[...] :I don't care that Laura is trying to make money with FanHistory. In fact, I wish I'd thought of it first and had the start-up capital for it.

Another fan wrote on July 22, 2008:

Some of the objections to [site name redacted] don't bother me. I don't care if a bot picks up fan profiles from FFN. I don't care if a site turns a profit. I don't care if it's a bid for fame. If it has my goodwill, I will happily link to it, plug it, contribute to it, and promote it.

In July 28, 2008, Hale posted to explain why she felt she needed so much money:

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.

Some fans took issue with the idea of having to hire that much paid staff to run a fandom project, particularly a wiki, since wikis are generally mainly volunteer efforts. One fan wrote:

Most wikis are in general, community run, something like wikipedia, which is HUGE, might need more infrastructure, and the fannish one that OTW is planning might eventually need a set staff (probably unpaid, but we're fandom, that's what we do) because again, nature of the beast. But the idea of hiring staff is just-- odd to me, and the idea that the wiki has been around for that long and still lacks so much information in various places is just-- telling. I don't think there's more than one complete-ish fandom page in it.

In mid-to late 2008 or early 2009, Hale advertised for four interns In each of the ads, the wiki was referred to as "a company," "a startup," "an entrepreneurial work environment," and in the "what's in it for you" section, applicants were told:

The selected candidate will be afforded the opportunity to immerse themselves in a developmental, exciting, and entrepreneurial work environment. Our business is about sharing information, teaching others about what is happening in the fan community and how this information can be applied to help them meet their goals. That premise carries through our activities both internally and externally – we place just as much an emphasis on our growing our audience share, growing the amount of information that we have available as we do on developing our staff’s skill sets and knowledge base.

The Intern will be afforded extraordinary opportunities for mentoring via interaction with our team. Our team has been involved in entertainment and fan communities for over ten years and has worked with entertainment companies to help them meet their goals. The Intern will be personally mentored by Fan History’s Founder and will gain access to our professional network for future job networking opportunities.

Hale was also a "consultant" for FanLib/Take180 between June 2007 and June 2009. This appears to have been a paid position; Hale mentioned losing this job at the end of June 2009, something that put a crimp on Fan History Wiki's finances: "At the end of June, Fan History’s founder lost her job. This was stressful as this employment helped cover Fan History’s cost out of pocket."

In 2012, a fan mentioned Hale's intentions to sell Fan History Wiki and some assistance he provided in this venture.

Overall, the knowledge that the wiki was a business venture put the outing into an even uglier light for many people, who believed it had been done deliberately to generate controversy/wank, and thus page hits, to make the wiki more attractive to potential investors.

If It Had 10,000 Dollars

On August 5, 2008, Hale encouraged fans to vote for "Fan History Wiki" in a contest.

The prize was $10,000. On the application form, Hale answered the question of "What will you do if you win $10,000 for this idea?" and said:

If Fan History won the $10,000, we would spend the money on developing content development. The development would largely be focused on the creation of several bots, which would complete several tasks that Fan History has been given permission to do. This includes creating a directory of MediaMiner.Org users. The money would also be spent on providing some compensation to administrators so they have more time to improve the wiki, making it better. One task that they would would love to compensate them for is monitoring for privacy issues, as this issue is a core concern to some of our contributors and those involved in the fan community.

Fan History Wiki and Wikia

One of the first people to make a post on Hale's Fan History talk page was an employee from Wikia. Wikia was also one of Fan History Wiki's earliest "partners." From a early post on privacy: "Fan History Wiki uses Google Adsense to place ads on pages, and tracks users using Google Analytics, Quantcast, and statcounter.com. Cookies are used as part of the mediawiki script in order to allow users to remain logged in. At this time, Google Analytic data is occasionally shared with outside parties whom Fan History is considering partnering with. To date, this information has only been partially shared with Wikia and that happened only once."

Hale was deep in the decision to join Wikia in late 2007, early 2008 when she posted the pros and cons to joining that corporation, and her eventual decision:

Resolution: After much discussion here, via e-mail, on AIM and Y!M, having Wikia's staff answer our questions and having been nothing but polite and helpful in making this decision, Fan History decided to stay at its current location. The major pluses were increased traffic and tech support. Fan History would have been one of 14,000 wikis and the level of individual attention we would have gotten appeared limited. It did not appear much like Fan History would get a change to network with other sites, outside Wikipedia. It would largely have required turn over of the domain for less than fair market value or less support if we kept the domain. As Fan History has other projects it wants to explore in the future, the move looked like it would have seriously impacted our ability to do that. We would to thank Wikia for their time. --Laura 08:34, 26 January 2008 (CST)

Hale reiterated Fan History Wiki's business status on September 20, 2009 when she posted about her decision to not become part of Wikia:

Fan History is a business. We are incorporated as a single entity LLC. We have a business plan. We have an intern and are currently looking for more. We have been seeking funding to grow the wiki, improve our back end, integrate and improve FanworksFinder, create related products. We have hired developers to do work for us. We attend professional networking events. We try to keep our actions on the wiki professional and businesslike, rather than purely fannish and hobby like. If Wikia were to acquire Fan History, it would be great for their business. Fan History Wiki would take Wikia from about 3.2 million pages to 4 million pages. Fan History has the potential to create an organizational structure for Wikia’s entertainment and sports wikis. Fan History is set up to easily promote Wikia’s other content inside of our own. We have a large amount of content that could have its SEO optimized quickly, with the right team, that would significantly improve its current traffic. Fan History has a number of articles in content areas that advertisers would be happy to have ads placed on.

For much more discussion, see Wikia Moving Discussion, ^{Archived version}, Fan History Wiki talk page, January 2008

Controversy

Until mid-2008, controversy/wank around the Fan History wiki tended to be about the inaccuracies or strict editor controls; several issues were controversial enough to make Fandom Wank.

from Laura's twitter, July 23, 2008 -- "Anyone good with PR who might be able to help me with an ongoing situation? If so, would love to get in touch ASAP."

By July 2008, things had reached an intensity which made Hale temporarily shut the wiki down and to offer an explanation. See A Statement from Fan History (2008).

Content Inaccuracy

Pre-Fan History Wiki

The inaccuracy of Hale's research had been questioned at least two year's before "Fan History Wiki's" founding. One example: in March 2006, Hale defended a lengthy post she put on FCA-L:

[Hale]: These are no more official than any other history. They are the history I am presenting based on my own research. To me, there is no excuse for people like yourself, sitting willfully by, throwing stones at others while not taking matters into your own hands and writing your own history. [snipped] These are no more official than any other history. They are the history I am presenting based on my own research. To me, there is no excuse for people like yourself, sitting willfully by, throwing stones at others while not taking matters into your own hands and writing your own history. It is sad that more members of the community are not busily engaged in writing the history of fan fiction and fan communities. This lack of understanding of history distorts the reality of fan fiction.

[S]: On the contrary, as a member of fandom, I have a perfect right to complain when someone comes along and does a poor, inaccurate, incomplete job of writing about fandom and tries to pass it off as "truth."

And there is absolutely no reason for anyone who protests about a piece of "historical" writing then go off and it on their own. You are the one who set herself up as an historian of fandom. I didn't choose you. [snipped]

It is a monumental task to try and grasp the whole of fandom and put it into writing. It's more than I care to take on, because I know the amount of work it would take--more than what you are putting into it, and that's the problem. There's so much out there you've only begun to scratch the surface, but unfortunately, you present your work as if it were the complete story. If, say, you were to tell the history of one fan, or one zine, or one list, I would be much more amenable to your research.

I'm appalled that any non-fiction writer, much less historian, would accept distortion over truth. No one should tolerate that level of acceptability. Half-truth is never better than whole truth, and in fact helps perpetuate the rumors, lies and stupidity you claim to hate. A distorted, partially incorrect history reveals nothing, illuminates nothing, perpetuates untruths, and is absolutely unacceptable.

I'll tell you what distorted history is--easy. It doesn't take anywhere near the commitment, work, research and time that finding the truth of your subject takes.

Telling other people to do your work for you is not an excuse for disseminating incorrect, inaccurate information. It's not up to others to do what you cannot or will not. In the meantime, I, like others will continue to nitpik, point out your inaccuracies, complain about your flimsy research, and otherwise make sure fans who read your writing know that it has no reliability or validity.

Remember, YOU chose to do this. No one forced you, no one elected you, no one died and made you Grand Fan Historian. If you really had an interest in fandom and its history, you would take as many years and miles and people as it takes to paint the truth. But because you seem to think a half-assed job is acceptable, I wonder why you bother at all--it can't be because you care, because everything you write says you don't.

[R]: Neither [S] nor myself need to be engaged in charting fannish history in the same capacity as yourself in order to see the flaws in your methodology. Also, for someone with complaints about the inaccuracies currently being perpetuated in the field, you certainly seem to have no qualms about contributing to them.

Perhaps you prefer incomplete and inaccurate accounts passed off as actual histories to no proclaimed histories. I do not. If they are presented anyway, I certainly expect the compiler to be open to corrections and suggestions as to other methods of research, as well as questions regarding her credentials and intent. As it is, presenting these posts and timelines as more than partial, personal histories is misleading.

From the beginning, the wiki contained so much inaccurate information that at least one person eventually commented:

[April 17, 2007)]: Though I'm now wondering if some of the mistakes are deliberate attempts to forcibly encourage people to engage simply to fix things; some of the misinformation is so egregiously wrong that I really can't believe it occurred accidentally.

While this level of widespread inaccuracy frustrated many fans into staying away from the wiki, others believed that enough participation could solve the problem, and were instead frustrated by the people who refused to help:

[January 2, 2008]: A side-note to that: I've seen a LOT of complaints about the existing Fan History Wiki. If you don't like that a page is empty or missing, FIX IT. I updated the Sakura Lemon Fan Fiction Archive page last night because it was largely empty. If any of you hadn't noticed, that archive no longer exists. I went through the trouble of using the Way Back Machine to find the archive again and run the stats I quoted myself. I wrote up the MediaMiner.org page. I'm working on trying to find info for other pages, including my own author page. I SUCK AT REMEMBERING NAMES AND DATES. If I don't have a time-stamped webpage to look at, I can't remember the exact date something happened or who said what. If I am capable of editing pages, anyone else is.

Hale herself commented on the stubbiness of the wiki and the almost insurmountable task of the project:

[September 7, 2008]: On Fan History, we have a a fair amount of content but most of it is really stub like. Even those articles which are more fleshed out, like the CSI, Doctor Who, Star Trek, The Police, X-Files and Supernatural, really only begin to give a cursory overview of a fandom's history. They are one step above including the the very basics for a fandom's history. [snipped]

...there are times I wish that Fan History was less of a wiki and more like a peer reviewed journal. This desire tends to feel selfish in ways that I don't particularly like when I think about them. With out a wiki, I could spend a lot less time worrying about the finances of Fan History, less time working on getting people involved with the project, less time networking, less time learning about SEO, and less time working thinking about the limitations of wikis and MediaWiki. I could spend more time being involved in fandom, more time reading fan fiction. I could do a better job writing the histories of specific fandom as I could be concerned about one fandom at a time as opposed to 2,500 plus different fandoms. I could happily obsess over say the Doctor Who fandom, develop a comprehensive list of fanzines, find out the BNFs on all the various message boards, mailing list and social networking communities. I could learn more about conventions that mattered in the Doctor Who fandom, find out how national communities interacted in the Doctor Who fandom. I could write fifteen pages on that and then feel like I never need to write about that topic again. I did that with BandFic and I'd love to do it again.

If I did that, the history of fandom wouldn't best be served. Such a project wouldn't have much the potential scope that Fan History has. For all the drawbacks of the wiki format, it still best serves that history. It just comes back to how do you get content.

From the wiki (date unknown) on a page titled "Fanhistory.com:Replies to common objections":

"Fan History can never be high quality. Spelling and grammatical errors. "Fan History has numerous spelling errors. It strains the credibility of the wiki." Fan History is a wiki. Anyone can help correct spelling and grammatical errors. It is also a small price to pay to risk spelling errors in order to allow the wider community to contribute to the documenting the history of fandom. We must remember that not everyone in the fan community speaks English as their native language.

Self-Promotion

Hale used other sites to promote herself, the websites she was involved in, and later "Fan History Wiki." One example is from 2005:

*waves dramatically* *pokes ego* *whispers "Stop that."*

I post to fanthro. Sometimes, I feel it is my personal goal to high jack fanthropology for my own fannish purposes."

Personal Bias, Alternative Viewpoints, Micromanaging

On January 8, 2008, Hale commented:

Hey. Had a conversation last night with some one that pointed out that one of the external criticisms was that it is very easy to view Fan History as a personal monograph that too heavily reflects my own personal bias. For me, this seems like a perfectly valid criticism and has some elements of truthfulness. It isn't helped by my own frequent use of the term my when describing Fan History and with other administrators seemingly going to me for the final word on the changes that they want to do. This issue was then discussed with another person regarding the validity. The following suggestions were made and looking for feedback on them so I can figure out how to behave and to help improve the quality of the histories on Fan History by making it more accessible to others:

On wiki issues 1. Get rid of timelines and other lists. They aren't history. Use paragraph structure as that is a history, as opposed to be being a list of facts. 2. Stop using the templates linked on Help:Contents. Remove all the blank sections. Allow contributions to develop more organically. 3. Remove references to me as the final go to person for decisions made on Fan History on the main page, all about pages and help pages. 4. Remove the philosophy of wiki page. Remove statements regarding bias. Make the about page much flatter and factual, with out any statement regarding purpose, audience, who can edit. Should not need to be stated.

Contributor issues 5. For me to stop personally editing much, stepping back from the wiki for a month or two, allowing the current administrators and others to become more active with out the fear of me sitting on the sidelines, waiting to impose my philosophical mindset on the history being presented. 6. Paying for advertisements on external sites in order to get contributors outside the narrow audience that Fan History currently is receiving. 7. Using an account not tied into my personal accounts to promote wiki inside of fandom that administrators have shared access to. Have other administrators use them and actively promote the wiki as where I've already been doing but removing the personal tie ins that I tend to have. Assign administrators specifically to promote the wiki as part of their role of admins. 8. Approaching people affiliated with other philosophical mindsets for the wiki and offering to pay them to become active contributors on the wiki and do lots of edits in order to give clear voice to alternative perspectives in fandom.

One of the wiki's administrators responded that same day:

3. Taking a step back, yeah, might be a good idea for a while beyond dealing with technical details that arise. Uncertain how I feel on removing the philosophy as again, I think it helps point toward the approach being taken and how it may be different from, say, the wiki being created by OTW or any other organization (because otherwise a casual visitor might wonder "Why is this wiki different/needed vs. any other one?) I can certainly help with promotions and the like. Encouraging other perspectives...could get tricky/messy/wanky beyond a certain point. I mean, as long as alternative perspectives are given fair time and it's not an issue of someone coming in and rewriting a piece that already exists to change the viewpoint...that's where it could get funky (and perhaps why having multiple wikis with different goals/approaches/philosophies is not necessarily a BAD thing...)

Hale's response:

re: Backing off: I'm seriously contemplating going on vacation again. ... Just not until mid to late February. (And the wiki did fine while I was away and less obsessively involved.) I'd just gotten a lot of comments and suggestions for help pages needed, explanations needed, etc. which was why I was I was creating a lot of that recently. The help page, in the past month, has been expanded and reorganized a lot. I think it could pretty much stand as it is at this point and remove the draft statements, lock them up so that only sysops can edit them, etc. Lot of the other issues regarding modding, you, User:Jae and others are handling quite well. The stuff regarding organization isn't something I really need to comment on because the wiki structure and purpose has become really well... We can see where it is going and what works in a way that wasn't necessarily as apparent before. It has grown. The mods that we have, including you, can handle almost all of that and do it well. (It is just a perception issue that I'm doing it all. I'm doing most of the spamming and writing of help pages these days. And doing some content filler to help plug pages. I'm mostly just making lists and stubs otherwise.) And yeah, having another wiki is not necessarily a bad thing. Different perspectives, different user bases, different goals. Fan History is clearly like x and is moving more towards Y. Another wiki could be more like A and move towards B. Neither is necessarily wrong. (Though this could launch a whole debate on relativism that I'm not certain I want to engage in mentally with myself here. Some of the OTW stuff comes down to that vaguely personal view of they are claiming to speak for all of fandom. I'm in fandom. They should be reaching out to people in fandom who they are claiming to represent. They didn't. Ego tweaked.

On January 9, 2008, Hale again acknowledged that Fan History Wiki was really the project of one person, and how this was seen as a fault:

Would [joining Wikia] add credibility and allow Fan History to do the projects that we had down the pike in discussion? The major reason that I even proposed this and considered it in the first place was because of external criticism, re: Organization of Transformative Works supporter criticism, that said that Fan History was too much tied up in one fan, too tied up in me, Laura Hale AKA partly_bouncy. Fan History was too much an expression of my personal views of fandom history, with everything on the wiki being a reflection of me, me, me. And some of that is true. And yes, Fan History is tied in to me. There are ways that this could be addressed when plugging the site, like getting accounts just to plug Fan History on various services that are not tied to my name and me. (As I'm actively doing most of the plugging.)

On April 24, 2008, Hale acknowledged that the wiki's organization was confusing for many people:

The problem is that Fan History has grown rather organically with out any real planning in place for it. When it started, I really had no clue what was necessary, or even a thought about it as it hadn't been done... so what has grown has been organically. I'd prefer what I was doing just because it makes more sense to me and makes content finding easier and more logical. And I'd like to stick to it.

Hale's Treatment of Editors

In addition to the inaccuracies, Hale acquired a reputation for not allowing edits she didn't like, and for banning people who tried to change things on the wiki. In a conversation about this, Spirit Dog explained her experience to Hector Rashbaum:

Spirit Dog: The big issue that got to me with fanhistorydotcom for a long time was how it felt like no one could edit it unless it was to list a bunch of vaguely but not really related LJ groups or fanlib links. ... The most important thing for a wiki is for it to be a wiki, a collaborative effort, and after my one experience trying to edit an article on fanhistorydotcom all it felt like to me was a personal project.

Hector: This is such a pervasive perception about FH that even as a supporter I stopped bothering to argue it with people. I know I advised Laura at least once that if she wants to get rid of the ban-happy reputation she needed to lighten way the fuck up when it came to banning; I don't know that I ever said the same about content control, but I thought about it.

Spirit Dog: About the editing thing.. for me its not as much a perception as what actually happened. LH asked me to edit the Warcraft page [...] I started editing, adding information [...] but in the middle of me doing that Laura decides that the page is her personal project for the day. So she startes to rapidly edit in a lot of LJ pages locking out the edits I had worked for hours and hours on but could not submit, and when I asked her about it, she ranted at me about how mean people are and that she had been accused of it being a one woman show. Since I had just lost a lot of work, that I didn't particularly want to do in the first place, I told her if she treated them how she treated me, they were exactly right. She blocked me on IM for a few months for that.

frito_kal, in X-Men fandom, also recounted being (temporarily) banned for making edits meant to clarify a page:

I specifically got banned because I took a list of 12 seperate release dates for the X-Men movie and it's accompanying 12 IDENTICAL URL's to IMDB and turned it into 2 sentences.

Oh, and I removed some shipper stuff and put it on the ship page.

Other wiki admins tried to work with users despite Hale's banhammer tactics:

Please come back to Fanhistory. Even if you have major issues with how Laura has it structured right now (I'm not happy with the setup myself), *I* could use all the help I can get in maybe getting that thing more in shape, less wanky and more nicely organized. [...] Come back. You're not banned anymore, and I need the help. Because I really, really think that this wiki's a GOOD idea, no matter how much past wank the originator has attached to her. And maybe if we all chew on it enough, we can find a category method that doesn't hurt my brain.

But some fans were also having problems with Hale's unwillingness to listen to other people's suggestions or advice, making the wiki unappealing to new editors:

I think the work required to get everyone back interested in it would be staggering - about 10-15 people saw what happened - not just to me, but watching Dex get rebuffed in his suggestions and a few others get told "you do it my way or else." and ran for the hills.

An exchange between Laura and an editor on Laura's talk page:

Hello. Thanks for your comment. We'll get to that eventually. We're hard at work on other things. You're more than welcome to help contribute if you want to. If not, no big deal. We valued your contributions and involvement. The only reason you were removed from the administration staff was that your vision of the wiki did not mesh with our vision, to the point where you were unwilling to help enforce the rules, and explain them to users who might have questions regarding the wiki's philosophy. That was not something that was done lightly. It was done after we talked about it with four other administrators as we did and do value the contributions you made. But we'll get to those other changes. At the moment, we're hard at work trying to improve the back end to help insure Fan History's future. --Laura 14:16, 17 June 2008 (CDT)

Actually, you never told me to enforce anything. Just to look at it and ask what she was doing. Which I did, and asked her, and got a reply. And then, you didn't like my judgment call and banned her. And then I went WTFBBQ?! And then, you blocked me, and I e-mailed you. Then, you didn't reply to me, instead sharing the e-mail with however many other people. And then, I was de-admin'd, without warning, without any discussions, without any negotiations. Oddly, no where in there did you tell me to enforce anything -- you merely told me to go and look at what Jaina was doing. The talk history where she said she was deleting inaccurate material should still be available. See... it was one thing to bust rear on this when it became my pride to do so; when I was in a position that I took seriously enough to spend hours working on this. But why should I bust rear for someone else's pride, since my own doesn't matter? Really: There shall be no revisionist history on this issue. The facts are as stated above. I'm just deeply sorry for the sake of a good ideal that it ended up as such. But hey, whenever you find someone else willing to spend hours looking for proper fandoms for Misc. categories, and fixing split ones over hundreds of thousands of pages in the long term... well, you likely won't. But good luck in the search! )

This editor left the wiki herself after running afoul of Hale's banhammer policies by trying to defend a new editor:

See, I was sure that being a good administrator/editor meant making judgment calls. The whole thing that sparked this off was FH owner Laura asking me to look at a link. What was happening, was a new editor named Jaina was chopping up the Bleach article. I asked her what she was doing in big bold letters, just to make sure I got a quick response. Jaina did, indeed, respond quickly -- she told me that she was deleting inaccurate information, along with taking out links to individual stories that were cluttering the fandom page. I saw this as being reasonable; I told her to go ahead.

Laura banned her. Apparently, Jaina neglected to move this inaccurate information before taking it out of the main article. I told Laura to go move it herself, if she wanted to keep it that badly. She blocked me off AIM. Okay, well, that's fine. I'm not the most tactful beast in the world, especially when I see someone fucking up. Laura was fucking up; she admitted it herself.

Now, this is where I have to swallow some crow. I stood up for Laura, even to some people I respected greatly... namely, some former Subrealizens that I had nothing but respect for. I told them that she was learning from her mistakes, that she wouldn't be so ban-happy. I told them to come back and help. They tried to warn me that I was gonna get burned, but I didn't listen. I was proud of the work I was doing.

She burned me. Some bullshit about 'not following our philosophy' when the fact is, she wasn't following her own. Right on the main page, where it says 'anyone can edit' -- then she goes ban-happy on those who do. She cited the 'no notability' thing as being the reason for removing my admin status. Even though she had asked me to look at that link (not what to do with it) and had asked me to deal with it (without telling me how), and even though she keeps confusing 'no-notability' with 'everything is a gem'.

In one retaliation on June 25, 2008, the wiki got pwned by a former editor:

"Mild revolution. There are the rest of my caps. It was mostly done for fun, not for major meaningful statements....I had my access stripped, so I was more... creative consultant than that. It is a shame, but it got a good laugh at least, out of a depressing situation. And feel free, link away."

Outing

The Fan History wiki policy was that they occasionally connected someone's real and fannish name, if they felt that the link was obvious enough already, and in July 2008 Hale admitted doing this. Many fans feel that this is outing, akin to deliberately disclosing someone's sexual identity. This resulted in a much wider controversy, with many fans incensed at such behavior while others supported Hale and the wiki, on the basis that no one could expect true privacy on the internet. When people tried to remove the personal information from the Fan History wiki, Hale overruled them and returned it. Hale herself discussed the inclusion and deletion of real names on the wiki in March 2009. The Laura Hale page has more complete details.

Outing for Profit

The timing of the fanthropology post (an essay called "How to maintain fandom privacy" to the Fanthropology LJ; it has since been deleted) and the very public outing of a fan began to be questioned—why the need to generate so much wank and so many hits, right at that point?

One fan posted:

I'm just wondering at the timing right now, to be honest. Why the concerted effort all of a sudden? I think that's the question people should be asking themselves, and asking themselves what happens when she needs to roll over someone else for her little cause here.

In July 2008, in the midst of the wankstorm, Hale incorporated the wiki as a limited liability corporation (LLC). Her Twitter posts during July provide a timeline, starting with the day after she outed the fan in the fanthropology post:

• "Anyone good with PR who might be able to help me with an ongoing situation? If so, would love to get in touch ASAP. 12:22 PM Jul 23rd"
• "Ordered 'Art of the Start' and it has arrived! Talked to @Jenbachand on the phone for an hour. It was a good convo. 10:23 AM Jul 25th"
• "I think I should have a registered agent which means I can push through LLC incorporation documents. Score! 1:54 PM Jul 25th"
• "fuck fuck fuck. :( things went from bad to worse, 3:21 PM Jul 25th"
• "This morning started out bad. I can't see it getting much better. 7:25 AM Jul 26th"
• "Advice for dealing with clusterfucks in PR when dealing with a startup? 7:26 AM Jul 26th"
• "Spent an hour discussing how to handle PR situation, policy changes, etc. Has been productive. Should help contain situation. Maybe. 6:22 AM Jul 27th"
• "LLC forms completed and payment submitted. That is another one of those great big massive steps. 9:29 AM Jul 27th"
• "Fan History and my apology regarding recent actions 4:40 AM Jul 28th"

At roughly the same time, she began listing her wiki on start-up sites, asking for venture capital -- $200,000 to $500,000. See Fan History Elevator Pitch.

The possible connection between Hale's choice to out a fan and her desire to make her wiki look attractive to potential investors drew more ire from some fans:

This is about Laura deliberately starting wank in order to drive up hits to her website-- deliberately making a meta post on fanthropology, waiting until it got linked on metafandom, then editing it to include a fan's real name against that fan's express wishes. Why? To make money.

Another fan posted:

My fundamental problem with Laura Hale is not that she is making money from fandom through googleanalytics or whatever is on the site now or trying to sell the wiki to the highest bidder on content and information that does not belong to her, that was not created by her except for the parts she... fabricated. My problem with Laura Hale is that she is making money from fandom by lying, by causing distress and real life repercussions, she is making money by gleefully soliciting and generating wank, by making our fandom a fundamentally unsafer and unhappier space. She causes misery, not *just* because she can, but because it puts money in her pockets. All of this is because it's good for *marketing*, it's her viral strategy.

In short, fannish privacy being a powerful cultural factor, Hale quickly became the subject of public anger, outrage, and scorn as her entrepreneurial intentions became clear.

A fan posted:

But every once in a while--and it is generally a very long while--someone takes an action that goes Too Far, even for the most unflappable fans. The unforgiveable act usually involves one of three things: (1) Privacy; (2) Credit; or (3) Profit. If a fan violates another fan's privacy (posting private email without permission, hacking email, posting real name or contact information, contacting an employer, contacting an ISP to get them in trouble for copyright violations), steals another's credit (plagiarism or clip-theft or failing to credit an icon), or tries to profit directly off fan activity (selling fic on Amazon, asking for money so she can stay home and write) -- these are the things that violate the terms of the fannish social contract. We give credit; we work for free; we respect pseudonymity. Laura Hale, in publicly linking fannish pseuds of multiple fans with their legal identities, did so (it seems clear) in order to drum up hits for her wiki. She wants to sell the data in the wiki, which is full of information supplied by other fans about their fanwork and fannish histories. Except the fans who edited the wiki won't be paid for their work, if she does sell it--she's coasting on their work and the work of the fans whose information populates the wiki. In doing so she's violated the rules about privacy, the rules about profit, and even the rules about credit (it's her wiki, not fandom's).

Driving Traffic to the Wiki: Illegal Clickbait

On July 16, 2008, without permission, Hale posted a very recent article to the wiki as a lure for more traffic. She then advertised it on Fanthropology, with a link to Francesca Coppa.

If you haven't seen it, Reason magazine did an interview with Francesca Coppa that appears in the August/September 2008 edition. I haven't found a copy on-line so I uploaded the article and an on-line version can be found here. It is really detailed, goes into a bit of history of vidding, mentions MediaWest, talks about how vids are arguments, cliches in vidding, etc. It is worth reading.

Deliberate Wank

On April 20, 2008, Hale blogged about deliberate wank as a way to sell her product:

Controversy can sell and help add legitimacy to your project. Fan History gets fairly decent sized traffic bumps when people have issues with articles, with privacy issues in fandom or with people who help maintain the wiki. Fandom Wank can be your traffic driving, search engine visibility, viral link creating friend. Lee Goldberg slamming on you can give you sympathy and legitimacy. Having slashers and het shippers duke it out on your site insures they stay and means they’ll probably link to their arguments elsewhere to complain about the behavior of those they don’t like. Controversy may also bring media attention and attention from the people affiliated with your fandom.

From July 20, 2008, Hale's comments:

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.

On December 22, 2008, Hale explained how wank didn't generate the attention she necessarily wanted:

Another way to generate traffic is by wanking. Make fandom_wank or sf_drama and you can probably see another 1,000 to 3,000 visitors. If you’re linked through metafandom for being controversial, you can expect between 500 and 2,000 visitors depending on how many posts you’re linked on, how controversial you are and what day of the week it is. But like digg and Stumbleupon, these are cheap visits. Most of the visitors you get through wanking are wank navel gazers. They come in, view one page, spend between 10 seconds to 1 minute on your site, then go. They generally don’t repeat. In fact, because of the tie-ins to wank, they are less likely to be repeat visitors than if you had been linked through Digg. This is because your reputation ends up getting smacked around and you become known as a wanker. And once the wank winds down, your traffic levels off to prewank levels. The high in increased visitors doesn’t hold. You’ll get a massive drop off. So using wank to generate traffic, unless you’re specifically running a wank-type site like fandom_wank or EncyclopediaDramatica, isn’t a good idea. It doesn’t help build value by increasing the visits to your site, increasing time spend on the site, or increasing the number of page views per visit. (It is why Fan History mods don’t intentionally go around wanking; it doesn’t help our more important and valuable metrics. Quality over quantity of visits. And when we have wanked, our traffic tends to fall off a cliff about two days after the wank dies down. We’ve known this for over a year now when we first got the numbers to demonstrate it.)

• 

  collected by Hale -- "Traffic for Fan History according to StatCounter for period between December 22 and December 28, 2008."

• 

  May 11, 2009 – June 22, 2009, Hale was paying attention, and labeled this search and graphic: "Fandom wank effect on traffic russet noon"—See Russet Noon

• 

  "Chart showing how many visits from search engines Fan History received in the period between June 2007 and April 2008. Category:Cassandra Claire"—Laura's label on her graph

Some fan comments:

tiferet: And [Fan History Wiki] is incredibly biased and bans anyone you and FW don't like. We need one that is interested in more than grudges. I still remember when you posted on one of the big SPN news comms asking for submissions for your wiki--you asked for grudges, wank and beefs, not anything else.

Management Style

One of the criticisms of the wiki was Hale's over-involvement and tight control of of even the most trivial issues and edits. In January, Hale asked a fellow editor and admin member if she should take a different tactic:

Contributor issues 5. For me to stop personally editing much, stepping back from the wiki for a month or two, allowing the current administrators and others to become more active with out the fear of me sitting on the sidelines, waiting to impose my philosophical mindset on the history being presented. 6. Paying for advertisements on external sites in order to get contributors outside the narrow audience that Fan History currently is receiving. 7. Using an account not tied into my personal accounts to promote wiki inside of fandom that administrators have shared access to. Have other administrators use them and actively promote the wiki as where I've already been doing but removing the personal tie ins that I tend to have. Assign administrators specifically to promote the wiki as part of their role of admins. 8. Approaching people affiliated with other philosophical mindsets for the wiki and offering to pay them to become active contributors on the wiki and do lots of edits in order to give clear voice to alternative perspectives in fandom.

The fan she addressed answered:

Taking a step back, yeah, might be a good idea for a while beyond dealing with technical details that arise. Uncertain how I feel on removing the philosophy as again, I think it helps point toward the approach being taken and how it may be different from, say, the wiki being created by OTW or any other organization (because otherwise a casual visitor might wonder "Why is this wiki different/needed vs. any other one?) I can certainly help with promotions and the like. Encouraging other perspectives...could get tricky/messy/wanky beyond a certain point. I mean, as long as alternative perspectives are given fair time and it's not an issue of someone coming in and rewriting a piece that already exists to change the viewpoint...that's where it could get funky (and perhaps why having multiple wikis with different goals/approaches/philosophies is not necessarily a BAD thing...)

Deceptive Practices: Editing Wiki Talk Pages

I had a page up on FH. It was scraped from ff.net and wildly out of date, but I'd corrected it. (I support fan wikis in theory, just not how this one is run.)

After Laura Hale refused to delete Astolat's real name from the wiki, I was annoyed and blanked my page with the edit summary, "Icarus does not want to participate in FH."

The page was undeleted and I was banned as an editor. A revealing (and rather frustrated) note was left on the Talk Page connected to my entry, along the lines of "just having a page on the wiki doesn't imply you support it."

Later the note was deleted and replaced with a more lawyerly, "blanking the page constitutes vandalism."

I checked the edit history of the Talk Page -- the original note had been removed entirely from the Talk Page history. Oh, man.

This is a big Wiki no-no. Wikipedia swears up and down that the strength of their system is that all edits are preserved. That's what makes the Wiki open and democratic.

The removal of an item from the history can only be done at the modly level. It was an abuse of moderator power -- over a very minor matter to boot.

Conflict With the OTW

And thinking more, do the potential reactions of Organization for Transformative Works matter? They have around 1,100 members on their community. They are watched by less than 2,000 people. They have no product. They've repeatedly demonstrated that they are out of sync with most of fandom. Do their opinions even matter? Should their views even be considered in making this decision? Is their long term acceptance of Fan History important for the well being of Fan History and in telling fandom history? Wikia's user base is huge and Fan History has reached the point it has with out their support AND at times standing directly in conflict with them. Is it even relevant to consider that in making this decision as it relates to Fan History's future? --Laura 17:48, 9 January 2008 (CST)

No, no, no, no and no. OTW is just another archive. If and when it gets off the ground it's going to be just as popular as any other archive out there - which isn't saying much. Herding cats is still herding cats, whether you claim to be under a label of "non-commercial" interests or not. Which animal shelter runs more effectively and houses more cats - the one that's independent and does all their work from the ground up, or the ones that have money backing them? It matters no more what OTW thinks of Fan History than it matters what MediaMiner.org or FanLib or any other archive thinks of Fan History. They are independent sites that, even if they are around for years, don't have any more impact than any other site. The only reason FanFiction.net is where they are at today (and has fandom buzz the way it does) is because they're an unpatrolled madhouse with enough money backing them to keep the site open and running. --Lady Macbeth 18:01, 9 January 2008 (CST)

I don't think that the potential reactions of Organization for Transformative Works matter and shouldn't figure into plans for Fanhistory.com, especially given they've made it clear that they won't be working with Fanhistory.com. --ScrewTheDaisies 17:53, 9 January 2008 (CST)

I absolutely agree with H - as you've said, Laura, your ideological approach to fandom history differs so much from that of those involved with OTW seeing eye-to-eye is most likely impossible - with that in mind, putting too much weight on their opinions would probably lead only to a deadlock. -- HectorRashbaum 18:00, 9 January 2008 (CST)

I agree with the other comments above - I don't see it as a reason not to move [to Wikia]. It may, of course, provide more fuel to the fires burning already by critics of FH but it in and of itself is not an issue I see in major conflict -- unless the day comes that commercial interests mandate or try to censor any of the content provided. I still say that as long as a simple, clear, and easy way to get *out* of an agreement with wikia, without losing any of the information already uploaded to the wiki, is in place, then I'm on board with the move no matter what the reaction of a small fragment of fandom as a whole might be.--Sidewinder 18:21, 9 January 2008 (CST)

Conflict With Fanlore

In 2007, when the OTW announced the intention of establishing Fanlore as a place for collecting fannish lore and history, Laura Hale was openly critical, something that was likely due to her unhappiness at the "competition" for energies, hearts, and minds of fans and fan history, displeasure regarding diminished personal stature, and Fanlore perhaps impeding Hale's plans to financially profit from her own wiki. From a mid-2008 statement by Hale, one in which she speculated her wiki was worth between $$200k - $500k:

Competitive Advantage:

Fan History currently has no real direction competition: No one else is competing for the same audience, with the goal of creating a similar product across the broad base that Fan History has targeted. Most of Fan History’s competitors are intending to create a community around a narrow audience, do not offer analysis for their information, focus on intellectual property for which copyright and trademark may be a concern, a not very usable for some one looking for a resource specifically aimed at a fandom audience or do not provide a service where the information can be explained as to how it matters to companies operating in that environment.

2007 Comments from An Introduction to the Organization for Transformative Works (post)

From the comments to the September 2007 announcement by the OTW, titled An Introduction to the Organization for Transformative Works (post).

Hale (partly bouncy) has since deleted all of hers. They are archived below.

[partly bouncy]: Hey, heads up, a fan fiction history wiki already exists.

hector rashbaum:

...a fan history wiki

What's wrong with the existing one?

bethbethbeth: ...we don't think of it as a question of right and wrong, but rather that we're thinking in terms of bringing another voice into the preservation of fannish history, sort of like the way the OTWarchive, when it goes live, won't be the only archive in existence, but will be joining hundreds of other fanfic archives. ...[the OTW wiki] is still a way down the road, but when the plans for the other OTW projects are more than a "someday..." thing, we'll pass that information on to fandom. For now, it's the archive that's the project getting the most attention.

hector rashbaum: Which still doesn't answer my (admittedly, poorly phrased) question: Why a wiki when there is an excellent fan history wiki already in existence, when the very nature of a wiki removes the need for "bringing in another voice", your initial reason?

partly_bouncy: Can you address that please? FanHistory.Com, Fan History Wiki, is the largest resource of information related to fan fiction history on the Internet. It has over 6,400 pages. It has problems and needs work but nothing that a few contributors, contributors like yourself, couldn't help fix. So why didn't you contribute? Why didn't you lend your voice to it? And why, if you want a new face for fan fiction and having done your homework, didn't you reach out to me and ask for my assistance on this?... Find out why, when the project was planned, when my wiki was linked to, why I wasn't personally invited by the people behind the project. Because seriously, you'd have to be pretty... well, isolated in fandom not to have run across Fan History Wiki and my other fan fiction history type work. In the mean time, while you get your proposal together, could you please give a shout out to Fan History Wiki...

miriad: Wow, that's pretty arrogant. I've been involved in fandom for twelve years, on LJ for almost 8 and I've NEVER heard of your wiki until today.

Out of curiosity, why did you think that they needed to talk to you before they started their own? Do you own the rights to a fandom wiki? Or did you just want your name attached to the big new thing?

Your argument that because your wiki was linked to that you should be asked to participate holds no weight whatsoever. People link to sites all the time, including wikipedia pages but that does not create some sort of contract or requirement on the part of the linker to make the linkee involved in their posting/e-mail/web site.

Maybe instead of complaining, you could have just volunteered your time. Just a thought.

absolutedestiny: I'm not a representative for OTW. I've not been involved in the planning at all. I know as much about the plans as you do.

However, I have my own thoughts on this.

1) OTW has a wider scope than merely fan fiction. fanhistory.com specifies fic.

2) While a wiki can be edited by anyone, a wiki hosted by an individual does not belong to everyone. Without the individual who hosts it, the information, however open and collaborative may vanish and be useless. OTW, by opening ownership to the community, helps with this issue.

partly_bouncy: OTW has a wider scope than merely fan fiction. fanhistory.com specifies fic.

So... OTW is talking about doing a fan history wiki, to compete with Fan History Wiki which has over 6,400 pages already that touch at least 1,500 fandoms, touch on the activities of over 1,500 people in fandom dating back to the 1930s. Fan History Wiki looks at people, fandoms, archives, legal issues and more. It covers parts of vidding, fan art and general fannish activity history.

Can I ask how the proposed fan history wiki that OTW is doing is going to be wider than that?

OTW, by opening ownership to the community, helps with this issue.

By not editing the wiki and by not offering to assist with the wiki, you're not helping to open it up to the community and not helping the community learn more about its won history. I've done more out reach with the wiki than OTW has done with their project. I've been committed to maintaining the wiki and helping the community since day one. I can't say the same for OTW.

absolutedestiny:

[...]

The fact is that FanHistory.com is not community information in the truest sense of the term because ownership ultimately falls outside those who created the information. Sure, anyone can contribute but what then? If I did contribute to FanHistory.com what guarantee would I have that the information wouldn't be taken offline for no reason, locked by some biased moderator with no explanation or simply just removed by the isp never to be seen again? There is no privacy policy on the site. There is no copyright information detailing common ownership. Am I even allowed to quote the about page like I just did? For all I know FanHistory.com could be collecting information with the purpose of taking it all offline, compiling a book and making money all thanks to the hard work of the poor saps who were "helping the community".

I'm sure that's not the case (I'd hope!) but if there's one thing to distinguish OTW and FanHistory.com (other than scope and many many other things) it is transparency. OTW has been transparent about its development from the very start with the entire organisation (from membership to mission statement) being developed collaboratively, organically, by the community rather than by one individual. It's an organisation established because of the inability to trust externally owned hosting, born out of user/owner clashes with corporations and individuals alike. FanHistory.com, whether run by a fan or no, is no different in this regard. The users that contribute to the information have no control over the final use, access and distribution of that information (as it currently stands).

partly bouncy: OTW has been transparent about its development from the very start with the entire organisation

AHA HA HA HA! No. Seriously. You can't be serious. Where is the transparency? OTW is a train wreck, waiting to happen. They've made decisions with out consulting the community, appointed themselves the voice of fandom and were silent for months and months while decisions were apparently made with out the community knowing. When pressed for updates, no one could answer.

by the community rather than by one individual.

Got an article wrong there. "by a community" is correct. OTW's outreach has been horrible, awful, craptastic. I saw no representation on MySpace, Quizilla, FaceBook, AdultFanFiction.Net, JournalFen, FanDomination.Net, MediaMiner.Org, FanFiction.Net, HarryPotterFanFiction.Net, FicWad, DeviantArt administrators or users. I saw almost no outreach to mailing lists. (I think I saw three posts.) So you would be wrong on both counts.

Are we really going to get into a pissing contest about who has given more or whose dad is bigger than whose? The page count is completely not the point.

Hey, I'm not the one talking about being for the community and by THE community. If I can do the outreach on a wide scale, why can't OTW? It isn't about a pissing contest but OTW's effectiveness at their stated goal. Which, because of their/your lack of outreach, you're/they're probably going to fail. I outlined eight problems I had with fanarchive way back in June. At least two of your committee members were offered the chance to read it. They were perfectly valid concerns. Have they been addressed yet? Nope and I can't see them doing it. FanArchive, an archive for a community.

"I've done more out reach with the wiki than OTW has done with their project. I've been committed to maintaining the wiki and helping the community since day one. I can't say the same for OTW."

Are we really going to get into a pissing contest about who has given more or whose dad is bigger than whose? The page count is completely not the point. }}

partly bouncy: we don't think of it as a question of right and wrong, but rather that we're thinking in terms of bringing another voice into the preservation of fannish history I call bullshit. I've been after people for years to help me document this stuff. Years. Where were you then? Why didn't you reach out to me when this whole thing was being discussed in the planning stages? Why didn't you reach out to Steven Savage? Why didn't you reach out to MediaMiner.Org, RockFic, FanWorks.Org, FanDomination.Net, AdultFanFiction.Net, FicWad, SkyHawke, HarryPotterFanFiction.Net, SugarQuill and other large archives? Why didn't you respond when Heather, the founder of FanWorksFinder reached out to you? Where was your knowledge base and research being done that your group decided that years of fandom experience from people who have been there, done that wasn't worth consulting or inviting to participate in the process? Added to that, pretty much anyone can edit FanHistory.Com. Why didn't you edit the wiki to offer another voice? Why didn't you encourage others to edit the wiki to lend their voices to that?

norah: I'm far less likely to contribute to anything that has this kind of negative "but we did it already" railing coming from its organizers/contributors. You looked at OTW and said "this is a train wreck" and then wanted them to invite you specially to join them? As far as I know, anyone was free to join this effort, as anyone is free to edit your Wiki. I'm not sure why this is causing you such consternation. People sold books on the web before Amazon, and had blogs before Blogger, and had fan archives before FF.net, and sold burgers before McDonald's, and spoke out for justice before Amnesty International. Just because people did it before doesn't mean there's not room for someone else to do it, and doesn't mean there's not room for people to continue doing it afterward. If that were the case, then Wikipedia would be the only wiki out there, period. If the issue is that the people starting this one didn't take all your advice or agree with all your points, then all the more reason to do your own thing and let them do theirs, no?

2008 Comments at Fan History Wiki

In 2008, Laura wrote on an administrator's talk page:

And yeah, having another wiki is not necessarily a bad thing. Different perspectives, different user bases, different goals. Fan History is clearly like x and is moving more towards Y. Another wiki could be more like A and move towards B. Neither is necessarily wrong. (Though this could launch a whole debate on relativism that I'm not certain I want to engage in mentally with myself here. Some of the OTW stuff comes down to that vaguely personal view of they are claiming to speak for all of fandom. I'm in fandom. They should be reaching out to people in fandom who they are claiming to represent. They didn't. Ego tweaked. -- Laura 11:22, 8 January 2008 (CST)

A fan replied:

From an archivist and history standpoint, I see having multiple sources as a benefit. Part of the reason I archive my fanworks on many sites today, and part of the reason I'm glad I did it in the past, is because after The Ultimate Mozenrath Site went down, I was absolutely certain I'd lost all of my old work; I'd had a computer crash, and hadn't backed up my fics. Thankfully, the Library of Agrabah had gone out and mined almost all of the sites that had Aladdin fan fiction on them, and a copy of my work was saved that way. I have always touted multiple sources, even if they think they're competing with each other, since then. Also, competition breeds improvement - it forces you to keep raising the bar and thinking toward innovation. -- Lady Macbeth 11:43, 8 January 2008 (CST)

Positive Attention

some April 2009 stats, a snapshot

Fan History wiki saw positive attention too. In 2009 this included links in other online publications, fueled in part by its Geocities preservation initiative, and Laura's white paper [2][3] on the use of fan fiction as a possible indicator of Nielsen ratings. Mentions were also made about Fan History wiki's success in attracting traffic by getting mentioned on Fandom Wank and taking advantage of hot news topics such as Michael Jackson's death.

In addition, Fan History wiki was occasionally linked to as a reference site. This includes links from blogs to the wiki's various terminology pages and even references in more mainstream publications such as Wired Magazine, Y!Pulse and Mashable. In November, 2009, Blogcritics book reviewer, Jennifer Williams, linked to Fan History wiki's Russet Noon article as reference in her review of The National Lampoon's Twilight parody, titled Nightlight: A Parody.

In July 2009, Fan History was featured in a Spotlight article on AboutUs where Laura Hale is a Volunteer Sysop.

Some Stats: Collected by Hale

Hale was an avid watcher, collector, and documenter of stats and web traffic.

She often compared the wiki site to other fan sites, over long periods of time, over short periods of time to track the effects of wank and traffic to Fan History Wiki and other venues.

Some samples of these efforts are below.

• 

  Feb-Mar 2009 stats collected by Hale regarding Fan History Wiki, FanLib, Fanlore, and the OTW

• 

  "Statistics regarding Fan History for October 2008. Includes top page that isn't main page or search per day, top keyword that led to Fan History per day, top internal keyword search per day, top non-search referrer per day. Also includes summary."

• 

  collected by Hale who called this one "Fan History traffic August 4 to August 10, 2008 Statcounter"

• 

  Hale created a graphic to show searches at Fan History Wiki for terms related to Cassandra Claire and MsScribe between February 23, 2009 and March 25, 2009

• 

  Hale called this search: "Fan History search traffic growth from August 2007 to February 2009"

• 

  2009 keyword search stats for RaceFail, collected by Hale

• 

  some April 2009 stats, a snapshot

• 

  "Are users on Fan History quickly adopting Google's Chrome browser? It doesn't look like it. Traffic information from Google Analytics for September 2 to September 3, 2008 for Fan History."

• 

  "Fan History Traffic - January 2009 to October 2009"

• 

  Referrers averaged by day for December 2008, Fan History Wiki

• 

  Feb-May 2009 stats

• 

  November 2008-April 2008 Twitter stats for Fan History Wiki

• 

  August 2008-January 2009 Twitter stats for Fan History Wiki

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  Hale labeled this graph: "Fan history referrers for May 2009"

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  "Fan History traffic August 2008 to August 2009"—regarding Fan History Wiki, Fanlore and OTW

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  keyword searches at Fan History Wiki for mpreg, August 2007-June 2009

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  August 2008 stats regarding social networking traffic to Fan History Wiki

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  February 23-March 23, 2009 stats regarding searches for "FanLib" at Fan History Wiki

2010: Fan History Wiki Discontinued Open Public Edits

Posted by Laura Hale to the wiki's main page in November 2010:

As we were down to one active admin and real life issues interfered with our ability to continue to patrol, we’ve decided to lock down the wiki to editing. If you still wish to edit, please e-mail Laura at Fan History dot Com. Special access could possibly be given if you would like to really improve things. The wiki will continue to exists for historical reasons.

Laura expanded on this post on the wiki's blog on November 23, 2010:

Fan History closed to editing: As we were down to one active admin and real life issues interfered with our ability to continue to patrol, we’ve decided to lock down the wiki to editing. If you still wish to edit, please e-mail Laura at Fan History dot Com. Special access could possibly be given if you would like to really improve things. The wiki will continue to exists for historical reasons.

We would love for our interests to peak again and to open it again. If there are a few people who might like to admin, let me know. Maybe something can be worked out. If you are interested in having a mirror or taking control of it, or you might be interested in integrating it into a non-profit project, drop me a line.

We've had a great run. We really appreciate all the work that contributors have provided. Fandom is seriously fantastic and we’ve all met interesting and awesome people as a result. We could not have created what we did with out you all. I can’t begin to express my gratitude. Thank you fandom for your help.

The Help:Contributing page on Fan History Wiki explained further:

...the admins still wanted to make it possible for people to contribute if they want to. This was done by creating a class of contributors called Writers. Writers cannot delete pages or do other administrative tasks but they can edit articles. If some one should find Fan History Wiki and think it has worth to continue working on, the administrators wanted to give them that opportunity.

Laura Hale's Twitters on November 23, 2010:

• "As soon as we can raise Jon or svip, we're going to do a lock down on all editing to Fan History. It's been an awesome ride."
• "As Fan History editing is turned off, I feel like I should change my e-mail address. :/"
• "No admin interest. We're not deleting, just locking from editing."
• "We've created a writer class. If you still want to contribute, e-mail @purplepopple and she can set you up."

2011: The Last Edits

In 2011, all the wiki's new edits were by Laura Hale either in request to remove something from the wiki or additions of information about sports, specifically Netball.

While Hale considered herself active in the wiki only until February 2011, her last edit was made on 2 August 2011 for the Netball in Tonga page.

Fan History Wiki and Wikimedia

2009

In November 2009, Laura Hale approached the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit umbrella organization that includes Wikipedia and related sites in its projects, and tried unsuccessfully to have "Fan History Wiki" join them.

In early December 2009, Hale prepared a document about this failed proposal. In it, she explained the background and history of the wiki, and then explained how she found "Wikimedia Foundation's" process and mission lacking.

See Case Study: Fan History’s Proposal For Being Acquired by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Closure & Reappearances

Despite an earlier statement that "the wiki will continue to exists for historical reasons,", sometime in early 2013 the Fan History Wiki went completely offline. Its content appears to be only sparsely archived by the Wayback Machine. Archive.is has a few page screencaps here.

With no fanfare, FanHistory.com reappeared at the same URL, seemingly intact, some time before September 6, 2015. Last edit, however, remains the ones made on 2 August 2011, by Laura, for the Netball in Tonga page.

In early 2018, the site was almost completely inaccessible (some of the pages can be found in various archives such as the Wayback Machine), and the main page now goes to a page with the phrase: "Welcome to Saxony Not at all like Prussia!"

Front Page Screenshot Gallery

Click to enlarge and read.

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  October 11, 2007

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  February 19, 2008

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  April 1, 2008

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  May 25, 2008

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  July 13, 2008

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  September 5, 2008

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  October 18, 2008

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  February 11, 2009

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  July 4, 2010

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  November 23, 2011

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  August 29, 2012

External links

• Fan History's Blog (some archived posts); Fan History's Blog (other archive posts)
• Fan History wiki updates on InsaneJournal
• Fan History Wiki on Twitter - automatically tweeted recent changes on the wiki (deleted and purged)
• Fandom news on LiveJournal
• Fanhistory Wiki entry on the Fandom Wank wiki
• Fanhistory.com:Philosophy, ^{Archived version}
• Fanhistory.com:About, ^{Archived version}
• Fanhistory.com:Help:Rules, ^{Archived version}
• Fan History Talk Pages: Laura Hale: [4]; [5], [6], [7]
• Active Talk Pages

Further reading

• fandomnews was a multifandom link roundup community crossposted on several journaling sites that is a project of the wiki. It was moderated by Fan History editors.
• Fanboy Interview with Laura Hale (2008)
• Case Study: Fan History’s Proposal For Being Acquired by the Wikimedia Foundation (2009)
• Conserving fandom: An Interview with Fan History (Laura Hale) (2009)
• An Interview with Fan History (Laura Hale) (2010)
• Hale's description of the wiki on her online resume (alternative link) around 2014

References

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