Fandom Wikis

Almost everyone with internet access is familiar with Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia. But fewer people are familiar with the smaller wiki sites available.

Individual wikis work much like the larger website from which they derive. Users add and edit content as they see fit. They may contribute to corrections or purposely add humorous mistakes. (The Colbert Report's wiki and its devotion to the show's parody, even to the point of satirizing their own pages, comes to mind.) And most importantly, for this blog anyways, most wikis do not require users to make an account to make minor edits. They can all be done anonymously.

The open, sandbox style technology has attracted wide use. Wiki sites exist for almost every conceivable fandom. Books, movies, shows, comics, games, music – any medium can have a fandom and a wiki. Unsurprisingly, large ones like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Simpsons, World of Warcraft, and Star Trek all have well-known and active wikis. Even smaller or obscure fandoms may have such sites. The 1991 cartoon Rugrats, for example, even has a wiki. At this point, it’s almost expected that every fandom has a wiki, no matter how small or incomplete. (Somewhat surprisingly, however, wikis also exist for phenomenon such as fandom behavior. Fanlore archives and explains fannish behavior, fandoms, and participants. And I definitely often draw from it.)

The wikis have become such attractive appeal because they embrace the principles of “freedom, transparency, fluidity, emergence, collective intelligence, and relative anonymity”. They are open to everyone with a clear instructions and guidelines. The pages are not planned out, but rather created when needed. They are not written linearly, but are added to and edited over time, often by people who are knowledgeable about the subject at hand. All six make the sites welcoming and easy to use. It makes them much more open to participatory culture, which is what makes up fandom.

Fandom wikis ultimately help to augment the culture. They can act as a gathering place for fans to document important information about the object of obsession. The wikis serve as an easily accessible area to assemble and arrange information according to that fandom’s interests. One dedicated to a TV show, for example, may have pages for each episode, character, and actor. Another based on a video game, in contrast, may focus on providing pages that contain detailed walkthroughs for each level, as well as pages devoted to game achievements, items, characters, and enemies.

But a lot of this information can still be found on the original Wikipedia. So why specific fandom wikis?

“While Wikipedia does contain entries on fictional stories, places, and characters, a key tension among Wikipedians involves the concept of fancruft, a derogatory term meaning overly-detailed information that is seen as only relevant to the most passionate fans. Wikipedians frequently debate whether pages chronicling the fictional worlds of anime or videogames require the level of detail that some desire, often making the site inhospitable to hardcore fans of fiction that it rarely is for fans of non-fictional topics… While all of these topics have elaborate sets of pages created within Wikipedia, their stand-alone fan wikis thrive as spaces to document their fictional worlds with elaborate detail.”

Full text here.

 

This is where smaller wikis step in. The “overly-detailed information” is exactly what makes up fandom, or an obsession with a particular cultural object. Fans fixate over the details. True, some may be more devoted to Doctor Who than others and are able to name every single episode, both Classic and New Who.  But all fans, regardless of level, can benefit from specific fan wikis. A more casual fan just might not read them as in-depth as a more hardcore fan might. The creation and use of individual wiki sites still enhances the fandom experience and its participatory culture.