Fanhistory.com:Geocities preservation project
From Fan History Wiki
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
Yahoo has announced that it will be closing Geocities on October 26, 2009. Given the importance of Geocities in fandom, Fan History wanted to preserve as much of the fannish history we could. Our focus has been on fan fiction archives, fansites, fanzines, stories and terminology.
[edit] Stories
Saving people's stories and archiving them with out permission goes against the fannish ethos. Because of that, we didn't want to save the stories themselves. We wanted to operate inside of fandom's norms. What we did instead was to get the title, author, publishing date, archive name, archive url, summmary, fandom and awards a story has won. This way knowledge of the story's existence can be preserved. People can edit the article to explain its importance in fandom, where to find the story now, explain fandom reactions to the story.
[edit] Editing story pages
When we created the story pages, we didn't use our normal bot developer. Instead, we used an extension which allowed the import of a CSV file in to the wiki. It did not include the full text of the template. Rather, it just took the fields that we had included. If you wish to edit the page, what you need to do is copy and paste the original template from Template:StoryGeoCities on to the page. Replace the field text with what is on those field lines on the page that is already there. Once complete, you need to delete the original information.
[edit] Story deletion
Our deletion policy is similar to that of fanzines. We will delete non-notable stories upon request. See Help:Article deletion#Story article deletion request for information on requesting an article about a story be deleted.
[edit] Fansites
A tremendous number of fansites have been established on Geocities through the years. These have varied from fan-fiction archives, to image galleries, to link lists, to fandom organizations. Several of our admins have been working to develop at minimum stub articles about important Geocities fansites in various fandoms, using our standard Fansite template and occasionally modified versions for specific fandoms. This data has either been added manually or through the import of CSV files with basic info such as URL, site maintainer (if known), dates of activity (if known), general description and a screencapture of the front page of the site. A list of fansites on Geocities was also pulled off the Open Directory Project.
[edit] Fansite deletion
Specific policy on fansite deletion protocol needs to be developed. For now please see the general article on Article deletion.
[edit] Fan fiction archives
There were a lot of popular fan fiction archives on Geocities during the late 1990s for fandoms like Babylon 5 and X-Files. Geocities also hosted archives for small fandoms that were not as active during late 2000s including Zorro, Laverne and Shirley, etc.
[edit] Fan fiction archive deletion
Specific policy on fan fiction archive deletion protocol needs to be developed. For now please see the general article on Article deletion.
[edit] See also
[edit] Related blog entries
- One person cannot do it all… What we should have done differently… on October 27, 2009
- Geocities closing and data saving on October 25, 2009
- Geocities preservation project: Screencapping Geocities on October 22, 2009
- Continue to help us with our Geocities preservation project! on October 15, 2009
- Fanfox: The plugin to make Geocities history saving easier on October 13, 2009
- Putting aside our differences for the greater good of fandom on October 8, 2009
- Please help edit our Geocities fansite articles! on October 6, 2009
- Yay! More positive press for Fan History! on September 22, 2009
- Fanzine history on Geocities on August 30, 2009
- Story article creation continues with great success on July 14, 2009
- Story pages or no story pages… on July 8, 2009
- Geocities preservation project on July 6, 2009
- Geocities is closing! on April 23, 2009
