Fanlore, our fandom wiki, is devoted to preserving the history of transformative fanworks and the fandoms from which they have arisen. Fanlore is where we preserve our stories, our memories, our conversations. Because it’s a wiki, Fanlore is a site to which anyone can contribute — and we welcome contributions by anyone who considers themselves to be a part of fandom, whether your fandom is media or anime or gaming or RPF or something else entirely!
At Fanlore, we want to preserve our fannish heritage, and we also want to celebrate and document what’s happening in fandom today. If you think something is noteworthy enough to remember, then it’s worth adding to Fanlore. We believe that every fannish voice is valid and valuable; our goal isn’t to tell “the story,” but to tell our many and varied stories.
As of October 20, 2010, Fanlore has 13,396 articles — on subjects ranging from classic Highlander zines to a partial overview of fanart — which have undergone 192,842 edits by 2,613 registered users. And this is just the beginning! The Wiki committee has been hard at work on polishing our policies and our FAQ pages, and we hope to move out of Open Beta by the end of 2010. We can’t wait to see what fans choose to write about from here on out.
Fanlore’s sister project is Open Doors, which is dedicated to offering shelter to at-risk fannish projects. Open Doors collaborated with Fanlore and the Archive of Our Own on the GeoCities Rescue Project, a project aimed at preserving the cross-section of fandom which used to be hosted on (now-defunct) homepage provider GeoCities. Open Doors has also worked with the University of Iowa to create the Fan Culture Preservation Project, a partnership that involves brokering the donations of thousands of fanzines into a special collection in order to ensure that these printed or ephemeral pieces of our fannish history aren’t lost. Open Doors also maintains a variety of Special Collections — fannish multimedia projects and historically important fansites which can’t yet be hosted on the AO3 but which we want to ensure are around now and in the future.
Help us preserve our history and celebrate our art, our voices, and our culture — lend your voice to the documentation of our culture in Fanlore, and to the preservation of our creations within Open Doors, and support the OTW so that these projects can continue to flourish!