Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
Even if the license change applied only to material started after the present, it would make future collaboration possible David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:11 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Laura, Thanks for your work on the proposal. I hadn't looked at fanhistory in any detail before, and enjoyed discovering it's lifecycle through your blog. On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:51 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: I may not have time to respond to your comments in detail, but I think it is important to say that I appreciate the way that you are approaching this. Critical analysis of the potential import of this project is much easier if the project has a well defined mission, and the project leaders are only interested in the migration if it is a good fit within the WMF mission. I agree with John here. Your approach and proposal are greatly appreciated. Educational projects aimed at educating others, providing material for future research, or gathering useful knowledge are certainly ones we should give consideration to adopting. The copyright issues is a sticking point, as geni notes -- I strongly recommend that you look into changing your license, regardless of the result of this proposal, so that you can better work with other projects in the future. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
Jon, after rereading my post, I apologize for the snappy tone. I don't think you deliberately tried to bend the facts, probably were just a bit loosely phrasing your argument. Erik Zachte ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
Erik suggested I post this to the list for further discussion. Sincerely, Laura Hale *Introduction* Fan History Wiki is a project dedicated to documenting the history of fan communities, and to a lesser extent, documenting the history of online communities, popular culture and the tools that go to support these. The purpose of this document is to provide a general overview of Fan History, and to explain why this project would be a good fit for the Wikimedia Foundation. *Proposal* *About Fan History* Fan History is a wiki that runs on Mediawiki. It currently gets about 60,000 visitors a month, has over 820,000 articles, and a small but dedicated contributor base. Laura Hale created it in May 2006 as a means of centralizing existing information, and getting more people involved in the process of documenting the history of fandom. Current objectives for the project include: * Document the history of fan communities. * Preserve the history of fandom, especially in areas that are deemed at risk like Geocities. * Provide academics operating in fandom starting points for additional research and to provide academics with comprehensive data sets. * 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 members of fandom a tool to promote their work, their projects, charity efforts by fans. * Provide members of fandom a platform to share stories about what happened in fandom so that important incidents won't be forgotten. * 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. * Reasons why Fan History Wiki would be a good fit for WMF:* * WMF is trying to be more female friendly in terms of developing its contributor base. Fan History's primary contributor base and audience is female. * A largely female audience is a historical truth for popular culture fandom based around movies, and television. The audience around manga and anime is becoming increasingly female. In most areas, the academics entering the field are female. Major popular culture obsession items at the moment where there is a large female base include Twilight, Harry Potter, Star Trek. * Fan History’s inclusion amongst foundation projects can be a selling point for outreach in that area. If needing to point to a similar female dominated group doing similar work, the Organization for Transformative Works can be cited. * Our scope allows for more esoteric information that could not be included in Wikipedia, Wikiversity or Wikinews that would still help work towards a greater good. * The WMF Foundation supports quality resources that anyone can edit. Fan History is primarily a cultural historical anthropology project dedicated to documenting the history of fandom. * People have tried to do such research on Wikipedia in the past but it frequently gets deleted because of the lack of research, it is original research or it isn’t notable. In terms of popular culture studies, Fan History provides a place to do that. * Fan History being part of the Foundation would allow closer relationships with the science fiction community, the academic community and others with a vested interest in the topic. * We’re already being used as an academic source in some places because the research we do on the wiki is not being done by anyone else. With more attention and increased awareness, this can be increased. That attention and use should reflect back on other WMF projects to justify those sources as credible. * Fan History can be used as leverage to develop relationships with programs like the Popular Culture studies work done at USC and MIT. * This would be a big step towards getting professional historians and cultural anthropologists to using Wikipedia related projects more. Some would like such a platform to do their own work and are hesitant to do it on more commercial sites like Wikia. * Fan History’s preservation work would foster good will, improve credibility of WMF projects, generate additional press and help WMF in creating good relationships with other organizations. * We are doing important preservation work related to sites that are closing like Geocities and
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
Why the heck not? My only concern would be that the topic of fan history might be a bit specialized by itself. Why not call it Wikitribes and extend the concept to other subcultures and microhistories of small communities? I know of someone working with the oral history of Philadelphia jazz musicians, for example, who would probably be quite interested in contributing to a wiki project such as this. I think for too long we have shunted off some of our more interesting proposals to Wikia, and a commercial environment that may not be appropriately conducive for these projects. Thanks, Pharos On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com wrote: Erik suggested I post this to the list for further discussion. Sincerely, Laura Hale *Introduction* Fan History Wiki is a project dedicated to documenting the history of fan communities, and to a lesser extent, documenting the history of online communities, popular culture and the tools that go to support these. The purpose of this document is to provide a general overview of Fan History, and to explain why this project would be a good fit for the Wikimedia Foundation. *Proposal* *About Fan History* Fan History is a wiki that runs on Mediawiki. It currently gets about 60,000 visitors a month, has over 820,000 articles, and a small but dedicated contributor base. Laura Hale created it in May 2006 as a means of centralizing existing information, and getting more people involved in the process of documenting the history of fandom. Current objectives for the project include: * Document the history of fan communities. * Preserve the history of fandom, especially in areas that are deemed at risk like Geocities. * Provide academics operating in fandom starting points for additional research and to provide academics with comprehensive data sets. * 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 members of fandom a tool to promote their work, their projects, charity efforts by fans. * Provide members of fandom a platform to share stories about what happened in fandom so that important incidents won't be forgotten. * 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. * Reasons why Fan History Wiki would be a good fit for WMF:* * WMF is trying to be more female friendly in terms of developing its contributor base. Fan History's primary contributor base and audience is female. * A largely female audience is a historical truth for popular culture fandom based around movies, and television. The audience around manga and anime is becoming increasingly female. In most areas, the academics entering the field are female. Major popular culture obsession items at the moment where there is a large female base include Twilight, Harry Potter, Star Trek. * Fan History’s inclusion amongst foundation projects can be a selling point for outreach in that area. If needing to point to a similar female dominated group doing similar work, the Organization for Transformative Works can be cited. * Our scope allows for more esoteric information that could not be included in Wikipedia, Wikiversity or Wikinews that would still help work towards a greater good. * The WMF Foundation supports quality resources that anyone can edit. Fan History is primarily a cultural historical anthropology project dedicated to documenting the history of fandom. * People have tried to do such research on Wikipedia in the past but it frequently gets deleted because of the lack of research, it is original research or it isn’t notable. In terms of popular culture studies, Fan History provides a place to do that. * Fan History being part of the Foundation would allow closer relationships with the science fiction community, the academic community and others with a vested interest in the topic. * We’re already being used as an academic source in some places because the research we do on the wiki is not being done by anyone else. With more attention and increased awareness, this can be increased. That attention and use should reflect back on other WMF projects to justify
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com wrote: Fan History would be a good fit for helping the Wikimedia Foundation in terms of helping the Foundation meet some of its goals towards providing information, helping establish credibility and gaining a more female contributor base. I for one think Fan History is a great project, and an example of the kinds of areas Wikimedia should be branching out towards. A related issue worth thinking about... Laura has blogged earlier about why Fan History wouldn't join Wikia: http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=963 Obviously one of the core reasons (Fan History is a business) must have changed between when Laura wrote that (September 20) and now. And (without knowing anything about how discussions with Wikia went beyond that blog post) I presume the possibility of joining Wikia is still open. So the question is, what difference does it make for a wiki and its community to be part of a non-profit set of projects versus an ad-supported for-profit one? Quite a bit, I would say, in the long-term strategic sense of spreading a free culture movement based on sharing and collaboration. If Fan History became part of Wikimedia, it would be time to admit that, in some ways, Wikia and WMF are now competitors. -Sage ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
I don't think that the WMF acquiring FanHistory would make them a competitor with Wikia, after all, Meta already has a propsosal for a Wikitainment ( http://wmf4.me/EFf2D ) which goes to show that the WMF community wants something like this. Why not merge that proposal and FH into one. It would give those wanting their entertainment fix (that isn't allowed on Wikipedia) a headstart of 800k articles, and a vibrant community. -Jon On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:00, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.comragesoss%2bwikipe...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com wrote: Fan History would be a good fit for helping the Wikimedia Foundation in terms of helping the Foundation meet some of its goals towards providing information, helping establish credibility and gaining a more female contributor base. I for one think Fan History is a great project, and an example of the kinds of areas Wikimedia should be branching out towards. A related issue worth thinking about... Laura has blogged earlier about why Fan History wouldn't join Wikia: http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=963 Obviously one of the core reasons (Fan History is a business) must have changed between when Laura wrote that (September 20) and now. And (without knowing anything about how discussions with Wikia went beyond that blog post) I presume the possibility of joining Wikia is still open. So the question is, what difference does it make for a wiki and its community to be part of a non-profit set of projects versus an ad-supported for-profit one? Quite a bit, I would say, in the long-term strategic sense of spreading a free culture movement based on sharing and collaboration. If Fan History became part of Wikimedia, it would be time to admit that, in some ways, Wikia and WMF are now competitors. -Sage ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Jon [[User:ShakataGaNai]] http://snowulf.com/ - Blog http://snowulf.imagekind.com/ - Pictures This has been a test of the emergency sig system. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Jon Davis w...@konsoletek.com wrote: I don't think that the WMF acquiring FanHistory would make them a competitor with Wikia, after all, Meta already has a propsosal for a Wikitainment ( http://wmf4.me/EFf2D ) which goes to show that the WMF community wants something like this. If there are projects that are potentially in the scope of both the WMF and Wikia, how are they not in competition (for mind-share and for userbase)? Obviously in many respects, the relationship between WMF and Wikia is mutually beneficial, particularly in terms of building interoperable free software and freely licensed cultural works. But Wikia benefits much more from the existence of WMF projects than vice-versa, and Wikia has tried aggressively to become the (ad-bearing) host for wikis on the periphery of Wikimedia's scope. I see part of Wikimedia's mission (as part of the free culture movement) as helping to give people sense of ownership in their culture(s), as something they participate in versue something they merely consume. And there is some attenuation of that ownership when collaborative projects take place in highly commercialized contexts; there is a sense that, rather than working solely for the fun of it and for the benefit of other members of your society, you are working for the financial benefit of a company. Many people are fine with that, but as the WMF community reactions to the possibility of ads has shown in the past, some are not fine with that. So I think the more free culture that takes place outside of commercial contexts, the more successful it will be in the long run. -Sage ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
At first glance, my inclination would be recycle bin the proposal, but after reading comments, I think there is some merit to the proposal. I would support bringing this in and expanding it to cover group dynamics (Wikitribes). This project could be valuable to sociology and psychology as it provides information on groups and their mindsets. Also, I would think that the information could be easily brought over to Wikipedia and used to beef up articles on notable fan groups. From: Jon Davis w...@konsoletek.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, November 18, 2009 11:58:24 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family While Laura kinda forgot it, for those that don't feel like scrolling and cant operate google. FanHistory can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/ As for my brief view of this, I think it is an idea that definitely has merit. The biggest concern I would have voiced was NPOV and while FH wasn't run under NPOV, they've done a fairly decent job of keeping it to a minimum or keeping to MPOV (from what Laura tells me). I think it is worth sticking the proposal on Meta, but I think if FH were to join the WMF, it should have an expanded focus. I'm not sure what that expansion should be, maybe all popculture, not just fandom itself. Lets look at what Wikipedia is not, that people want to post or do post (And gets removed) and see if we can be worked into FH. -Jon Disclaimer: I was an admin on FanHistory for a while. On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:53, Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com wrote: Erik suggested I post this to the list for further discussion. Sincerely, Laura Hale *Introduction* Fan History Wiki is a project dedicated to documenting the history of fan communities, and to a lesser extent, documenting the history of online communities, popular culture and the tools that go to support these. The purpose of this document is to provide a general overview of Fan History, and to explain why this project would be a good fit for the Wikimedia Foundation. *Proposal* *About Fan History* Fan History is a wiki that runs on Mediawiki. It currently gets about 60,000 visitors a month, has over 820,000 articles, and a small but dedicated contributor base. Laura Hale created it in May 2006 as a means of centralizing existing information, and getting more people involved in the process of documenting the history of fandom. Current objectives for the project include: * Document the history of fan communities. * Preserve the history of fandom, especially in areas that are deemed at risk like Geocities. * Provide academics operating in fandom starting points for additional research and to provide academics with comprehensive data sets. * 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 members of fandom a tool to promote their work, their projects, charity efforts by fans. * Provide members of fandom a platform to share stories about what happened in fandom so that important incidents won't be forgotten. * 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. * Reasons why Fan History Wiki would be a good fit for WMF:* * WMF is trying to be more female friendly in terms of developing its contributor base. Fan History's primary contributor base and audience is female. * A largely female audience is a historical truth for popular culture fandom based around movies, and television. The audience around manga and anime is becoming increasingly female. In most areas, the academics entering the field are female. Major popular culture obsession items at the moment where there is a large female base include Twilight, Harry Potter, Star Trek. * Fan History’s inclusion amongst foundation projects can be a selling point for outreach in that area. If needing to point to a similar female dominated group doing similar work, the Organization for Transformative Works can be cited. * Our scope allows for more esoteric information that could not be included in Wikipedia, Wikiversity or Wikinews that would still help work
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: So the question is, what difference does it make for a wiki and its community to be part of a non-profit set of projects versus an ad-supported for-profit one? Quite a bit, I would say, in the long-term strategic sense of spreading a free culture movement based on sharing and collaboration. If Fan History became part of Wikimedia, it would be time to admit that, in some ways, Wikia and WMF are now competitors. These are exactly the kinds of questions that the Expanding Content Task Force is exploring for the strategic planning process: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Expanding_Content The underlying question is, when should Wikimedia say yes to projects that want to become part of the Wikimedia universe? Answering this question will make it clear what to do with proposals like Laura's (which, in turn, makes an excellent, concrete example to help us think through the higher-level question). =Eugene -- == Eugene Eric Kim http://xri.net/=eekim Blue Oxen Associates http://www.blueoxen.com/ == ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
I apologise for top posting but I wish to respond to your post in full while making the absolute show stopper clear. You wiki is not under a free license nor can it's content be released under a free license without an impractical degree of effort The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. Compare to Fan History's copyright page. Fan History created this policy with the following objectives in mind: * Create a copyright policy which does not allow people to reproduce the whole of the content elsewhere without the consent of Fan History; Now you've said; *Compromises Fan History is happy to make:* * Change our copyright from http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistory.com:Copyrights to the same policy used by WMF. Lets see if you have the legal ability to do that. First from your edit window: Please note that all contributions to Fan History Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Fanhistory.com:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! No release of copyright under any license or to Fan history in a way that would allow it to be relicensed. Still lets look at http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistory.com:Copyrights The site does not claim ownership of the content contributed to Fan History. Works are contributed with permission. By submitting content to Fan History for inclusion in its site, you grant Fan History the world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the content for the purpose of displaying and distributing such content through Fan History's systems. But no ability to relicense or indeed allow anyone other than Fan History to legally modify the stuff. The copyright policy goes downhill somewhat from that point with a number of internal contradictions and stuff that doesn't make sense within any one legal syste, (for example you talk about fair use then jump to what is effectively a database copyright claim). 2009/11/18 Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com: Erik suggested I post this to the list for further discussion. Sincerely, Laura Hale I strongly suggest finding a point of contact other than Erik Current objectives for the project include: * Document the history of fan communities. * Preserve the history of fandom, especially in areas that are deemed at risk like Geocities. * Provide academics operating in fandom starting points for additional research and to provide academics with comprehensive data sets. * 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. Within the WMF's objectives. * Provide members of fandom a tool to promote their work, their projects, charity efforts by fans. Outside and their might be issues with charity law. * Provide members of fandom a platform to share stories about what happened in fandom so that important incidents won't be forgotten. * 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. Borderline. * Reasons why Fan History Wiki would be a good fit for WMF:* * WMF is trying to be more female friendly in terms of developing its contributor base. Fan History's primary contributor base and audience is female. * A largely female audience is a historical truth for popular culture fandom based around movies, and television. The audience around manga and anime is becoming increasingly female. In most areas, the academics entering the field are female. Major popular culture obsession items at the moment where there is a large female base include Twilight, Harry Potter, Star Trek. * Fan History’s inclusion amongst foundation projects can be a selling point for outreach in that area. If needing to point to a similar female dominated group doing similar work, the Organization for Transformative Works can be cited. Looks
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Jon Davis w...@konsoletek.com wrote: I don't think that the WMF acquiring FanHistory would make them a competitor with Wikia, after all, Meta already has a propsosal for a Wikitainment ( http://wmf4.me/EFf2D ) which goes to show that the WMF community wants something like this. Why not merge that proposal and FH into one. It would give those wanting their entertainment fix (that isn't allowed on Wikipedia) a headstart of 800k articles, and a vibrant community. I am not seeing 800k articles that would survive in a WMF project. I would like to see examples of well curated content in order to assess it's value. See for example http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Venusian This page is documentation of a user on another website. For some reason, the story that Venusian published on fanfiction.net doesnt exist any longer: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4176851/ Users don't always appreciate being documented on another website, because it takes control away from them and the site with which that have participated: http://www.fanhistory.com/w/index.php?title=XXLatin-LionessXxdiff=1553570oldid=620971 As for a vibrant community, I am seeing mostly pages created by bots. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
Rather than reply to multiple posts, I'm just going to reply to several all at once. As a cavaet, when I say our in the context of Fan History, I am primarily talking from the perspective of our admin team. We have probably five really regular contributors and about 10 people who drop in once a month, every month. The vast majority of people edit once and do not edit again. When we have tried to solicit feedback from the wider community before, we haven't always gotten it unless we approached people one on one. Pharos said: Why not call it Wikitribes and extend the concept to other subcultures and microhistories of small communities? This isn't something that our team would necessarily be opposed to. We'd just want more information on how it would be implemented because our rules and policies are specifically taylored to deal with some of the internal politics of fan communities. http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Rules , http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistory.com:Philosophy , http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Article_deletion , http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Multiple_perspectives , http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Be_a_Fan_History_Reporter are articles that give an idea as to how our policies work and our core philosophy. That said, there is a lot of room in our general scope. We have had a few bands use articles to talk about themselves. (We even encourage this to a degree.) Our end focus tends to be on fans. Thus, there is room to talk about artists and musical movements in our existing structure so long as that can eventually be circled back to deal with the fan community. Jon Davis said: As for my brief view of this, I think it is an idea that definitely has merit. The biggest concern I would have voiced was NPOV and while FH wasn't run under NPOV, they've done a fairly decent job of keeping it to a minimum or keeping to MPOV (from what Laura tells me). Our ideal is to strive towards Neutral Point of View. It just isn't always feasible and we'd rather be up front about that. There are places where people are not going to be neutral. Outside of fandom, there are issues with terminology like pro-abortion vs. pro-choice where people dispute the neutrality of those terms and no one is really happy. In the fan community, this can be extra challenging because many times the people doing the reporting are personally involved in the events AND WE ENCOURAGE THIS. So when you get two people on the side of an event, they are not necessarily going to agree on what events took place or what view to cast on them. What we've done is in areas where we know this is a problem, or where people edit to include first person personal narratives, is to label a section MPOV, http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Help:Multiple_perspectives . The long term goal then is to take that first hand account and integrate it as neutrally as we can into the history. Thus, the two function together. This doesn't always work. http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Russet_Noon is an example. The author of Russet Noon inserted her own perspective. (The author of Russet Noon was eventually banned for blanking.) There just isn't a neutral way that the community can accept her perspective, especially when she was making claims that our Check User show and tell (with permission from the contributors in question) could prove wrong. Her reality just didn't mesh and she was ... yeah. There are challenges to telling history inside small communities where participants have a vested interest in how they cast their involvement. We tried to find solutions that would work for the history we were telling given the audience and subject. Sage Rosse wrote: Obviously one of the core reasons (Fan History is a business) must have changed between when Laura wrote that (September 20) and now. And (without knowing anything about how discussions with Wikia went beyond that blog post) I presume the possibility of joining Wikia is still open. The possibility of working with Wikia is always open. It just isn't likely to happen. They would have to make concessions to get us that they won't make. There are concessions with Wikia that we just won't make. On the flip side, there are concessions that we won't make for Wikia that we would almost definitely be willing to make for WMF. I don't know how much things have changed per say. I do know that we established key areas that we need to work on, that our staff doesn't feel like we can do on our own at this time. We feel that WMF can help us in those areas. Some of this change was a result of our Geocities effort and a few other reasons. Sage Rosse wrote: If Fan History became part of Wikimedia, it would be time to admit that, in some ways, Wikia and WMF are now competitors. I would disagree. I like Wikia. I like what they do in many ways. For projects with specific missions that could be argued for a greater good, like historical preservation or cultural studies, Wikia
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com wrote: John Vandenberg wrote: Users don't always appreciate being documented on another website, because it takes control away from them and the site with which [they] have participated: We looked around for ways to increase our visibility in the fan community, to save us from doing a lot of tedious work by hand, etc. We also later talked to the people at AboutUs on how they handle articles like that. We consulted with folks from wikiFur. Heck, we even talked to the people EncyclopediaDramatica. We looked at how Wikipedia handled these issues. ... As for surviving the move to WMF, if Fan History would need that much content culled in order to be a WMF project, then we would probably decline because we believe that such content is important to our mission. That's life. Not everything works out like you want it. We'd love to explore this further because we believe it could help both projects but if there are no goes, then there are no goes. I may not have time to respond to your comments in detail, but I think it is important to say that I appreciate the way that you are approaching this. Critical analysis of the potential import of this project is much easier if the project has a well defined mission, and the project leaders are only interested in the migration if it is a good fit within the WMF mission. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
Laura, Thanks for your work on the proposal. I hadn't looked at fanhistory in any detail before, and enjoyed discovering it's lifecycle through your blog. On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:51 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: I may not have time to respond to your comments in detail, but I think it is important to say that I appreciate the way that you are approaching this. Critical analysis of the potential import of this project is much easier if the project has a well defined mission, and the project leaders are only interested in the migration if it is a good fit within the WMF mission. I agree with John here. Your approach and proposal are greatly appreciated. Educational projects aimed at educating others, providing material for future research, or gathering useful knowledge are certainly ones we should give consideration to adopting. The copyright issues is a sticking point, as geni notes -- I strongly recommend that you look into changing your license, regardless of the result of this proposal, so that you can better work with other projects in the future. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
