Fanlore! It's pretty interesting. Check it out.

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:34:43 GMT

Fanlore is great. It's incredibly useful: it has fannish history, fannish terminology and tropes (also sorted by fandom), fandom overviews and "examples" (=often recs) of fanwork. It documents events like SurveyFail, discussions about the term Mary Sue, and conventions like Vividcon. It also has informations about fans, so if you come into a new fandom you can find out who these people are.
(You could just take a look at the Sitemap, which I found much too late.)
In short, Fanlore is extremely useful, and considering that it's only been online since 2008 the editors have been doing an incredible job.

But because Fanlore is completely dependend on the interests of its editors, it is still patchwork. It has a very detailed page about John Sheppard, a Sheppard/Woolsey page, but the page about the SGA Genficathon has no text. (Although in general the SGA pages are quite good.) It has a normal-sized page on River/Jayne but hardly anything about Zoe Washburne and until recently didn't have an entry about Wash at all. (Still no Zoe/Wash!) It has a page about Displacement (The Longest Three-Week Day), but no page about Donna Noble. Donna Noble! I'm not even in Doctor Who fandom and I know that that's almost a crime.

I have recently started to edit a little bit on Fanlore. It's fun and oddly addicting. There's not much interaction with other editors, which is a bit of a shame (mostly because I really like a "good work!" or "well done!" every now and then, to be honest), but I'm really proud of what little I have done. Editing is not very complicated, neither the technical stuff nor the "what should I write." Start small, it gets easier, and every little bit helps.

The OTW (strangely, the Fanlore page about the OTW is very brief. Maybe modesty, because Fanlore is an OTW project?) regularly ends its link roundups with "If (you have fannish experience/are part of fandom/know something about xxx), why not contribute your own stories and projects to Fanlore? Contributions are welcome from all fans." That is nice, but not enough, and Fanlore could really use more editors.

So I had a great idea: icons! A Teyla icon with sticks in her hands and "Why not contribute your fannish experience to Fanlore?", a Ronon icon that just says "Fanlore. Let's go.", a Rodney icon with him bent over a laptop and as text "Busy correcting stuff on Fanlore. If you're not a complete moron, you can help." or something like that (or more polite, but otoh it's Rodney), and John with, hm, maybe one of his shrugs and "Fanlore's pretty interesting. Check it out."
And of course Kaylee with "Fanlore? Shiny!" And maybe one with Jayne and his hat...

Maybe one day I'll figure out how to make icons.

This was meant to be an editor recruitment post (totally not procrastination on homework *cough*), but I got carried away. In conclusion: Fanlore's pretty interesting. Check it out.

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Fanlore! It's pretty interesting. Check it out.