1. Introducing the fandom
[1.1] The creation of widely available and fully searchable online repositories of knowledge has resulted in the two most popular go-to references for people around the world, with Google queries and Wikipedia searches serving as the two jumping-off points for today's online seekers of knowledge. Users and administrators maintain online databases, encyclopedias, and wikis with both specialist-created and crowdsourced information, sometimes for profit (as with subscriber-only access to certain encyclopedias or dictionaries) and sometimes not (as with Wikipedia). It is therefore no surprise that fan communities create their own spaces to secure and archive their specialist knowledge, repurposing tools originally meant for nonfictional, factual content to instead present fictional information. That is to say, fictional and canonical information is presented in a wiki format associated with encyclopedias using the conceit that the story world is actually factual and real—a strategy made famous by Sherlock Holmes fandom, which calls this conceit the Sherlockian Game or the Great Game (https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Great_Game).
[1.2] One such space is Fandom.com (https://www.fandom.com/), known as Wikia in 2004 when it was founded, a site colonized early by fans who populated the now-familiar wiki infrastructure with details of compelling interest to fantasy and science fiction fans in particular. In addition to providing all sorts of relevant information regarding fictional story worlds, the site also provides a social platform for fans to interact. Fandom.com thus joins together the world of fans, their fandoms, and their beloved worlds and characters. Fans use the same tools as well as the same writing and editing processes that historians use to generate a repository of human knowledge, thereby engaging in a rigorous process to accurately summarize and represent the canonical elements of these fantastic worlds, such as character, plot, and setting.
[1.3] An analysis of the fan process of creating a factual resource shows that these fandoms' citizens use many of the same strategies as historians. In addition, fan-made histories of creative texts are important in terms of the long-term preservation of popular artworks as a collective product of humanity. The examples I provide below are a snapshot of current work at Fandom.com, showing how and why fans create the content they do. They show how fans utilize the same strategies that historians use.
2. Making (fannish) history
[2.1] A glance at a random page for the Dragon Ball fandom (https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Special:Random)—one of Fandom.com's top wikis, alongside Marvel Cinematic Universe, One Piece, Harry Potter, and Minecraft—shows that the web page's structure provides immediate entry. Random links are great starting points for browsing a community, finding pages to edit and improve, or learning a random piece of information about the fandom or property. These pages, which may focus on specific texts within a fandom, characters, places, or plot events, are generally structured with a profile image at the top right accompanied by descriptive contextualizing information, which, depending on the topic, can include such things as publisher, release date, character names, and chronology. The body of the wiki contains text, links, and images organized under different subtitles, with a "Categories" section at the bottom that should be familiar to anybody who has seen a wiki.
[2.2] Wiki pages are structured differently according to the element described. A typical character profile will include a biography, physical characteristics, relationships, and skills (the last common in worlds with heroic themes). Entries on video games include various game-specific aspects such as drops, strategies, and other game plays, as well as technical features like codes, sounds, and graphics. Pages describing complex worlds like Tolkien's Middle-earth include cosmology, myths, songs, societies, objects, languages, and geography, which are accurately and creatively described as well as exhaustively sourced, with references to Tolkien's relevant primary texts (figure 1).
Figure 1. Sample Fandom.com wiki page for the One Ring. (https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/One_Ring).
[2.3] The information provided in these wiki pages describes a fictional world, but the content is derived from the world's canon, be it a book series, a TV show, or a filmic universe, and in that regard is treated as real. However, in some pages, the real world intersects, as in a behind-the-scenes section or the inclusion of an author's or showrunner's comments. In most cases, the ideal is to properly source every factual assertion made, with the general goal being to produce a text that acts like a bible to which other fans might turn for accurate information, with the relevant entries presented from the point of view of the story world and assuming its reality. Table 1 provides some examples of the work that wiki pages do at Fandom.com.
| Element | Example | Notable features | Link | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simple game character | Creeper from the Minecraft wiki |
|
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Creeper | ||
| Game character with story | Jin Kazama from the Tekken wiki |
|
https://tekken.fandom.com/wiki/Jin_Kazama | ||
| Plot | Avengers: Infinity War from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) wiki |
|
https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Avengers:_Infinity_War | ||
| Character | Harry Potter from the Harry Potter wiki |
|
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Harry_Potter#Physical_appearance | ||
| Setting | Middle-earth from the Lord of the Rings wiki |
|
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Middle-earth | ||
| Random element (e.g., fictional language) | High Valyrian from the Game of Thrones wiki |
|
https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/High_Valyrian | ||
[2.4] In fantastic worlds and fictional universes, canon is treated as history. This focus on canon is important because the concept of canon is important in the history creation process, with original authors acting as the god-creators of the fictional worlds, with every word mined for details that must be recorded and every utterance examined as a source of infallible information supplemental to the original works. (Of course, these fictional worlds are not free of plot holes and inconsistencies, which are commonly pointed out by wiki users.) Dense links and footnotes source the facts provided—an historian's strategy that implies research and rigor.
3. Fandom communities
[3.1] In addition to acting as information repositories, Fandom.com also hosts communities that interact through the website. The software supports common features like member or editor personal pages and profiles, which may be customized using creative layouts and designs. Chat boxes are also integrated in some wikis so fans can communicate with each other. Another common way of communication is through "talk page" editing, where community members edit each other's page using basic and user-friendly coding. Other interactions occur in discussion forums by means of various topic threads, such as reviews or arguments regarding canon. Polls are often conducted to check with the members regarding which characters, images, and pages should be featured each month.
[3.2] Fandom.com citizens take on different roles: They can be contributors of information, readers interested in exploring the fantasy world's lore, or unpaid volunteers who work on the wiki's infrastructure. Administrators oversee the workings of the Fandom.com website. They make sure that editors and contributors adhere to community rules and guidelines as well as maintain the quality of the pages by following the style guides. A wiki will also have a bureaucrat in charge of the fandom's overall space; initially, this is usually the founder. Other users may be granted similar high-level access by the founder or another designated bureaucrat. Specific user roles include content moderators, rollbacks, and bots, as outlined in table 2.
| User level | Role | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Registered user | Users who have created an account and logged in can customize personal pages, upload images and videos, and edit wiki pages. | ||||
| Moderator | Moderators are divided into three categories: content moderators (who have the ability to edit protected parts, rename files, and patrol the community), discussion moderators (who manage discussions in discussion threads), and chat moderators (who have control in chats and police those who do not adhere to community rules). | ||||
| Rollback | Rollback permits users to undo bad edits with one click; this ability is designed to avoid page vandalism. | ||||
| Administrator | Admins or sysops are trusted users who are generally chosen by the community who oversee the staff and their roles; they have higher privileges so they can edit user accounts and maintain the community. | ||||
| Bureaucrat | Bureaucrats have the ability to change or assign user rights as well as to block and unblock users, so this right is generally used in addition to the administrator group. | ||||
| Bot | A bot is any automated process, program, or script that performs tedious or repetitive edits and actions. | ||||
| Check user | Check users have the ability to view users' IP addresses, to see what users have edited using an IP address, and to view user logs; this high-level function is generally available only to fandom staff, wiki managers, and helpers. | ||||
[3.3] Some fandoms create special organizations inspired by the original source material. For example, the Fairy Tail wiki has created what they call site guilds (https://fairytail.fandom.com/wiki/Fairy_Tail_Wiki:Guilds). These comprise members responsible for "guild"-specific tasks like referencing, writing fight summaries, checking grammar, and translating. Regardless of what they call themselves, these task-specific teams work to continuously improve the pages and act as page editors.
[3.4] Related to the administration of the various wikis are the rules that govern the site overall as well as the rules adopted by each individual fandom wiki hosted at the site. Some community guidelines are set by the website developers; others are decided on by admins and community members. These guidelines make sure that the information-generating process is smooth and accurate while also maintaining community rules and standards, as the Minecraft wiki's set of rules illustrates (https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki:Wiki_rules). In addition, for some wikis, page creation and text editing are also governed by style guides, as the Minecraft wiki style guide illustrates (https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki:Style_guide). Overall, the rules are significant in grounding the histories with canon and ensuring consistency as fans collaboratively write history.
4. Conclusion
[4.1] Fandom is a result of self-selection as fans come together to form a community founded on popular culture–sourced material. As Fiske (1992, 30) notes,
[4.2] All popular audiences engage in varying degrees of semiotic productivity, producing meanings and pleasures that pertain to their social situation out of the products of the culture industries. But fans often turn this semiotic productivity into some form of textual production that can circulate among—and thus help to define—the fan community. Fans create a fan culture with its own systems of production and distribution that forms what I shall call a "shadow cultural economy" that lies outside that of the cultural industries yet shares features with them which more normal popular culture lacks.
[4.3] Although Fiske's remarks have long been used in the field of studies of fandoms to describe fictive creations, like fan fiction, the texts produced don't need to be creative; they can be historical, but a kind of historical rooted in a created fantastic world, with sourced data points signaling the rigorous attention to canon paid by the page's creator, just as a historical text's footnotes or reproductions of ancient artifacts indicate authority. Fans engage in "semiotic productivity" as they consume and create wiki pages at Fandom.com, just as they do when engaging in the exchange of creative artworks like fan fiction and GIF sets. Crucially, textual production is a way to define both the community and the entire fandom. This is evident at Fandom.com, which provides a familiar wiki-based backbone permitting different fandoms to gather under an umbrella of textual commonality.
[4.4] These factual fandom sites seek to provide a safe, well-structured, and organized way to provide quality information while also encouraging social interaction among community members. Brennan (2014) attributes the process to the fans' position, which results in a reciprocity and dialogue between the researcher and the subject, in relation to what Brennan terms reflexive and native anthropology. Studying sites like Fandom.com provides insight into the strategies of (historical) documentation and illustrates how software tools are used to organize the work of citizens of an online virtual community while modeling and replicating historical strategies of documentation and sourcing.