Fanlore:Guiding Principles & Aims

Guiding Principles & Aims

Fan communities – their practices, products and passions – both past and present, are worthy of both preservation and celebration.

We aim to provide a platform where we as fans can confidently collect & document our diverse experiences, our knowledge & understanding of the fan communities of which we are a part:

• To preserve our rich fannish heritage and recognise the milestones achieved by those fans who came before;
• To document our fan communities as they are in the present, in order to record and better understand the scope & diversity of these spaces, and provide a record for future fans

Each fannish voice is valid and valuable; there is no single “truth” or history to fandom, but rather, each perspective contributes to & demonstrates a rich and diverse heritage. This collective history is not dictated or owned by a single person, author or organization: it belongs to fan communities on the whole.

Our aim is to provide an environment where individual fans can share and document their understandings and experiences, so that no account is valued above others. We have a Plural Point of View policy to help Fanlore's diversity along, and we have standards for accuracy, citation and coverage. Our aim is to nurture a group ownership ideal, and we hope that a diverse audience will feel confident and empowered to contribute to Fanlore, to access it easily, to understand its material.

We treasure the unique fannish style of scholarship: self-reflective, articulate, analytic, personal, passionate and tolerant, and also accessible to a diverse audience.

We wish to foster what we call fannish scholarship by providing a space and set of policies which allow fans to articulate their reflections. We also believe this will provide us with a space in which fans have control of our own representation to those outside of fandom.