Fan History Wiki
| Wiki size: | 905,978 article pages see stats |
(As of: 17 January 2012 - stats frozen)
Description[edit]
Fan History Wiki was a fan-run project dedicated to preserving, documenting and writing fandom history. Fan History also included a directory of people in fandom.
History[edit]
Fan History was 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 of Michela Ecks. It moved off of FanFiction.net about six months later, and spent several years at writersu.s5.com, then on its own domain and otherwise in a state of flux. The site eventually folded, with some of content being moved to a precursor of the current wiki, FanWorks.org, and in an unpublished fanzine. During this period, Laura's research into the history of fan fiction and fandom continued.
At its old location, Fan History was not inviting enough participation on the part of wider fandom. This fact spurred its move to its own domain with MediaWiki software in May 2006. In March 2008, the FanFictionNetBot was run in order to help Fan History meet its goal of becoming a fandom directory. The bot helped create over 450,000 articles about FanFiction.Net users. In July 2008, Fan History became a limited liability corporation known as Fan History LLC. In July 2008, Fan History revised its privacy policies in response to criticisms from Livejournal fandom. In August 2008, both a Dutch and a Spanish version of the wiki project were launched. In December of 2009, Fan History converted its copyright to CC-BY-SA-3.0. In November of 2010, Fan History announced that it was closed to editing, with exceptions.[1]
Involvement with the wiki community[edit]
Fan History had been represented at RecentChangesCamp 2008. Fan History also helped co-facilitate Wiki Wednesday Chicago in June and July 2008.