A fan wiki is a wiki created by fans of a popular culture topic. Fan wikis, which are a part of fandoms, cover television shows, film franchises, video games, comics, sports, and other topics. The primary purpose of a fan wiki is to document its topic area through collaborative editing. Fan wikis document their subjects at varying levels of detail. They also serve narrative and creative functions. Some present analysis, fan theories and fiction, and video game strategy guides and walkthroughs, while others only document official canon. Media and cultural studies scholars have studied fan wikis as forms of participatory culture that enable fans to build community.
Fan wikis were first published in the early-to-mid-2000s, some as a result of fans collaborating on Wikipedia and then forming their own separate wikis. Many fan wikis are hosted on Fandom, a for-profit wiki hosting service. Since the mid-2010s, some fan wiki communities have left Fandom over disagreements about advertising, outdated software, and corporate control.
A fan wiki is a wiki [lower-alpha 1] that is created by fans, primarily to document an object of popular culture. Fan wikis cover television shows, film franchises, video games, comic books, sports, and other topics. [1] They are a part of fandoms, which are subcultures dedicated to a common popular culture interest. The digital humanities scholar Jason Mittell stated in 2013 that fan wikis were "[o]ne of the most popular and widespread uses of wikis". [2]
Fan wikis usually operate according to internal policies. Editors reach decisions through discussion and consensus decision-making. Some wikis are more hierarchical, while others operate more collectively. They usually appoint a small group of editors to serve as system operators (sysops) or administrators, who have additional powers to enforce rules. [3] Many fan wikis have rules that require editors to provide citations to reliable sources to verify their claims. For example, on The Tudors fan wiki, editors tended to rely upon scholarly nonfiction and traditional media sources in discussions. [4]
Fan wikis document and analyze their topic areas at different levels of detail. They are also spaces where editors can collaborate on creative works, including generating fan fiction and fan theory. Fans use fan wikis to interact with people with similar interests and assert cultural ownership over their wiki's subject. [5]
A fan wiki's basic purpose is to document its topic area. [6] They generally cover their objects of study in depth; editors create extensive film character biographies, describe video game plots in detail, and present trivia about television episode productions. [7] Wikipedia editors, by contrast, disfavor describing fictional elements at a high level of detail, referring to such material using the derogatory term fancruft . Mittell provides an example of fan wikis' level of detail: in 2010, the article for the minor character Daultay Dofine on Wookieepedia, a Star Wars franchise wiki, was about 3,500 words long and had been awarded featured status by the community for its high quality of writing. By contrast, the Dofine page on Wikipedia redirected readers to a list of minor Star Wars characters that did not have a description of the character. [8]
Fan wikis also document their topics at different levels of detail. [8] Some, such as the Battlestar Galactica Wiki, only cover the television show's official canon, [9] while others, like Lostpedia, allow editors to analyze the show's themes and plot, summarize fan fiction and parodies, and speculate about the show. [10] Fan wikis, such as the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha, are often more comprehensive than official materials. [11] Many video game wikis document game mechanics and include walkthroughs and strategy guides. [12]
Fan wikis serve a narrative and creative function. Editors create their own narrative of a franchise, known as a fanon, based on their own interpretation of the wiki's subject. [13] When editors hyperlink between and categorize articles, or update navigation lists, they creatively interpret the subject by connecting different topics and themes. [14] Mittell compared editors' use of those tools on fan wikis to scholars writing reference texts about and annotated editions of "classical literature and mythology". In both cases, the creators analyze their subject and create "alternative narratives", which readers consult to fill gaps in their knowledge. [15] Editors may also create or rely upon visual representations of their subject. In a case study of Lostpedia, the narrative scholar Laura Daniel Buchholz stated that editors organized their perception of the show based on the geography of the island and the creation of competing fan maps. [16] Likewise, the information science scholar Olle Sköld compared the editors of the Dark Souls wiki to ecologists who explored, analyzed, and documented the landscape of Dark Souls 2 . [17]
On some fan wikis, fans present their own theories based on speculation and original research. On wikis like Lostpedia and the American television series Supernatural wiki, there are dedicated pages for analysis of concepts, themes, and plot elements. [18] Heroes Wiki, a wiki for the American television series, likewise featured spoilers and fan theories about future episodes and plot developments. [19] Others, like the Battlestar Galactica Wiki and the Doctor Who franchise wiki, prohibit fan fiction or fan theories. [20]
Fan wikis serve a communal role. They allow editors with similar interests to share in their enthusiasm and knowledge of a franchise. Mittell and the media and cultural studies scholar Henry Jones have analyzed fan wikis as paratexts, which are a set of works that accompany and interact with a text. [21] As part of fan wiki communities, editors work collaboratively to create a shared work. [22] Some editors develop expertise in their wiki's policies and assist in tasks such as determining consensus, while others become familiar with evaluating the reliability of sources. [23]
Fan wikis sometimes collaborate with their subjects. For example, the Star Trek Beyond writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung consulted Memory Alpha and its administrators during the film's production, and Lucasfilm's Star Wars database manager contributed to Wookieepedia. [24] Lostpedia became a part of the show's canon when its administrators worked with the runners of an official alternate reality game called the Lost Experience to hide clues on the wiki. [25]
Early fan wikis started in the early 2000s. Many fan wikis formed out of Wikipedia over disputes about the level of detail that should be provided in articles. [26] These included fans of the television show Battlestar Galactica , [27] as well as fans of the Star Wars franchise, who founded Wookieepedia after facing complaints about the "overabundance of minutiae related to Star Wars appearing on Wikipedia". [26]
In 2004, the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and the former Wikipedia board chair Angela Beesley founded Fandom as WikiCities, a for-profit wiki hosting service that hosted regional wikis for cities. In 2006, the company attracted venture capital funding and changed its name to Wikia. [28] Wikia then began to assimilate independent fan wikis, such as Memory Alpha (a Star Trek fan wiki) and Wowpedia (a World of Warcraft fan wiki). [29] In the late 2010s—after Fandom and Gamepedia were acquired and consolidated by the private equity firm TPG Inc.—several wikis began to leave the service, including the RuneScape , Zelda , and Minecraft wikis. Those wiki communities cited Fandom's advertising methods, issues with security and outdated software, and corporate control as reasons for migrating. [30]
A wiki is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker, after which it has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software. MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second. Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages. The software has more than 1,000 configuration settings and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom, wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia.
Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project ; multiple Wikisources make up the overall project of Wikisource. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003, under the name Project Sourceberg, a play on Project Gutenberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name.
Open-source journalism, a close cousin to citizen journalism or participatory journalism, is a term coined in the title of a 1999 article by Andrew Leonard of Salon.com. Although the term was not actually used in the body text of Leonard's article, the headline encapsulated a collaboration between users of the internet technology blog Slashdot and a writer for Jane's Intelligence Review. The writer, Johan J. Ingles-le Nobel, had solicited feedback on a story about cyberterrorism from Slashdot readers, and then re-wrote his story based on that feedback and compensated the Slashdot writers whose information and words he used.
Wookieepedia: The Star Wars Wiki is an online encyclopedia for information about the Star Wars universe—including information on all the films, books, television series, the Star Wars Expanded Universe, any upcoming Star Wars material, and more. It is a wiki with some articles reaching up to 60,000 words, and is written almost entirely from an in-universe perspective. The name is a portmanteau of Wookiee and encyclopedia, a pun on the name of Wikipedia. The logo, too, is a visual pun showing the incomplete second Death Star as opposed to Wikipedia's incomplete "jigsaw logo".
A media franchise, also known as a multimedia franchise, is a collection of related media in which several derivative works have been produced from an original creative work of fiction, such as a film, a work of literature, a television program or a video game. Bob Iger, chief executive of The Walt Disney Company, defined the word franchise as "something that creates value across multiple businesses and across multiple territories over a long period of time".
Lostpedia is a wiki-powered online encyclopedia of information regarding the American television drama Lost. Launched on September 22, 2005, by Kevin Croy, the site uses MediaWiki software to maintain a user-created database of information. The site's content is under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-nd), which means that it is available free to the public, but cannot be used for commercial purposes and should not be modified by people who are not part of the community of the website. Lostpedia is supported by revenue from advertising; the site has not made information regarding financial details public. As of April 2019, the site contains an estimated 7,380 articles. On December 18, 2008, the site became a part of Wikia.
Jason Mittell is a professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury College whose research interests include the history of television, media, culture, new media, and digital humanities. He is author of four books, Genre and Television (2004), Television and American Culture (2009), Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, and Narrative Theory and Adaptation. He also co-edited How To Watch Television and co-authored The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. His digital-humanities activities focus primarily on videographic media criticism and, in 2015, he co-founded the first "Scholarship in Sound & Image" workshop, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Moreover, he is journal manager and co-editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Studies, published by the Open Library of Humanities and supported by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
Fan fiction or fanfiction, also known as fan fic, fanfic, fic or FF, is fiction written in an amateur capacity by fans as a form of fan labor, unauthorized by, but based on, an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator(s) as a basis for their writing and can retain the original characters and settings, add their own, or both. Fan fiction ranges in length from a few sentences to novel-length and can be based on fictional and non-fictional media, including novels, movies, comics, television shows, musical groups, cartoons, anime and manga, and video games.
Wikipedia Review is an Internet forum and blog for the discussion of Wikimedia Foundation projects, in particular the content and conflicts of Wikipedia. Wikipedia Review sought to act as a watchdog website, scrutinizing Wikipedia and reporting on its flaws. It provides an independent forum to discuss Wikipedia editors and their influence on Wikipedia content. At its peak, participants included current Wikipedia editors, former Wikipedia editors, users banned from Wikipedia, and people who had never edited. Though the site is still partially running, the last post was on 31 May 2012.
Fandom is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics. The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.
Supernatural Wiki, also known as SuperWiki, is a wiki-powered online encyclopedia for the CW's horror television series Supernatural, associated projects and events.
Warcraft Wiki is a wiki about the Warcraft fictional universe. It covers all of the Warcraft games, including the MMORPG World of Warcraft. It is both a specialized wiki built around the Warcraft universe and a collaborative space for players to develop and publish strategies for Warcraft games. It was officially announced on 25 October 2010.
Ideological bias on Wikipedia, especially in its English-language edition, has been the subject of academic analysis and public criticism of the project. Questions relate to whether its content is biased due to the political, religious, or other ideologies its volunteer editors may adhere to. These all draw concerns as to the possible effects this may have on the encyclopedia's reliability.
Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture is a nonfiction book of academic scholarship written in 1992 by television and media studies scholar Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers explores fan culture and examines fans' social and cultural impacts.
In Wikipedia and similar wikis, an edit count is a record of the number of edits performed by a certain editor, or by all editors on a particular page. An edit, in this context, is an individually recorded change to the content of a page. Within Wikimedia projects, a number of tools exist to determine and compare edit counts, resulting in their usage for various purposes, with both positive and negative effects.
The Wind Repertory Project (WRP) is an online database of music written for wind instruments. Built on the MediaWiki framework, the WRP is primarily intended as a reference work for band directors and other musicians.
