Interesting. What I'd heard on tumblr was that Fanlore's atmosphere is highly hostile to new contributors, and that take has never been one I've seen anyone disagree with until now. I think Fanlore may have a bit of an image problem.
It may just be that I haven't come across the drama myself (I am just one person after all and have a weird knack in fandom for somehow avoiding drama and then getting blindsided by it years later when people are mad at me for not knowing about some drama that just never once came up in my life somehow) but yeah it may just be an image problem or people not understanding wiki editing trying to edit some fanlore article and then being upset when they get something wrong and get their edit reversed (Ive also edited a lot of wikipedia pages over the years and the drama over there can be insane sometimes but that does mean I already had wiki editing experience before ai ever tried to edit fanlore so idk what its like for completely new to wiki editing editors). Its very easy to let your first interaction being someone correcting you color your entire view of a website
This raises an interesting point, which is that most people I've known have said that they found the atmosphere unwelcoming not because their edits were removed, but because their edits were removed, their page ideas were removed, and they were never directed to where to learn how to format something. So the vibe is "if you mess up, people are furious, and you're never given a link to a tutorial on formatting you could use to learn". Additionally, a complaint I see a lot is that you need to have an academic level citation to share, and that sources that are perfectly valid are not accepted due to the standards being too high.
I want to reiterate that I myself have never tried editing it - I don't have anything I can think of to add, for one thing, and for another I try to avoid wikis lest I get sucked into reading them for multiple hours - so none of these opinions are mine or are things that I believe without question. However, when a lot of people warn you away from a specific site, even if you take it with a grain of salt and try to be skeptical, it's natural for you to go, "Ah yes, I've heard about that place." and have your view of it skewed by years of that. For all I know, everyone involved is perfectly kind and cordial there, but on a subconscious level the wariness remains.
I have no idea how Fanlore ended up with this reputation other than my non-hot take of "social media twists the truth". I think, though, that people at Fanlore may want to think about some kind of social media outreach to encourage people to try out browsing and editing it and see if that helps combat the idea of it as hostile. Hard to incorrectly judge something you've had positive experience with, after all.
and they were never directed to where to learn how to format something
I think some of that may be due to the difference between the mobile version of the site and the desktop version. When you are on the mobile version and look at the side bar, it only lists a couple of things. But when you are on the desktop version, the sidebar includes the editing cheatsheet, templates, a sandbox, a site policies page, and the New Visitor Portal which leads to a tutorial and many help pages. So if you are on desktop and don't realize that mobile users do not have all of these resources listed directly on every single page like you do, you probably aren't going to be trying to direct people towards them all that often, especially if you aren't one of the actual volunteer staffers and are just some other user trying to also edit the site and keep things accurate/tidy/etc. This could probably be fixed by having those actually linked on the mobile site.
Additionally, a complaint I see a lot is that you need to have an academic level citation to share, and that sources that are perfectly valid are not accepted due to the standards being too high.
As for this, the most common things I've seen people try to do (though both of these Ive only seen like twice each) has been either trying to link to password-locked pages which goes against fanlore's policies or is something that while not disallowed on fanlore, is disallowed on wikipedia called Original Research. And while that's not disallowed on fanlore, because anyone can edit on fanlore and many people are going to be used to wikipedia's rules, its very easy for random editors to not realize that fanlore doesn't disallow OR and reverse edits that do it or those that are aware still might revert and OR edit if the person didn't cite themselves per the citation requirements page. Here is the page on citation requirements for more info on that kind of thing. Not sure how to fix that kind of issue really.
And yeah if your experience is only or mostly being told its a terrible place to be, it makes complete sense to be wary! I would have been too if I had had any experience like that with it prior to editing there myself. I don't blame you on that at all. I do highly highly doubt you have nothing to add but can totally respect not wanting to accidentally deep dive into another wiki. Ive been there too 😅
Unfortunately I have to second this. As a longtime contributor to Fanlore myself, I've seen several new editors come in with a lot of enthusiasm only to leave with hurt feelings after being reprimanded for creating new stubs and wanted categories. It was very uncomfortable seeing this happen, especially since they were being reprimanded for doing exactly what the public Fanlore guidelines tell new users to do. Apparently the gardeners decided on new guidelines a long time ago, but no efforts have ever been made to change the old ones, or even make the new rules public.
The atmosphere in the Discord especially has made me feel like I can't encourage new users to join Fanlore, because unless they can read minds, they'll just have people gossiping behind their back as if their contributions are making the website worse. On one occasion a new, very active user came into the Discord hoping to talk with other users, only to find that people had been complaining about them without making any effort to let them know about the secret new rules that they were breaking. I left the server entirely after that happened, and I can't in good conscience tell other fans to try putting time and effort into a website that's going to treat them like this.
I think I know the instance you're talking about, and though unintentional, I believe I may have contributed to that gossip and for that I will apologise profusely. It got called out at one point, maybe it was you though I can't remember, and since then I've been actively trying to avoid that kind of thing and self-reflecting when and where I can as to how to improve the experience of new editors. How successful it's been is another matter, and there's some bigger questions and dialogue to be had about how to foster a genuinely welcoming and helpful atmosphere regarding the site.
I haven't spoken about this before except in private, so I'm glad to hear that someone else was bothered enough to call it out. It wasn't an isolated incident, though. Since I've been there I've seen at least one prolific user be told by longtime contributors to stop creating stubs unless they could make a full page. It was implied pretty heavily that their work was damaging the site. Obviously, they left Fanlore. That was baffling to me, because not only do Fanlore guidelines say to create stubs wherever you can, but I've created plenty of them myself and no one ever told me to stop.
Even if none of that had happened, I still don't feel like I can recommend a website where there are secret rules that only a few select people know about. I was in the Discord server myself for some time, and I don't know what these new guidelines are even supposed to be. As far as I could tell they were just being decided in private conversations, and one single answer would be relayed into the server when someone asked a specific question. That's not a functional system, and in my time there I didn't see any interest in fixing it.
I'd like to see Fanlore grow and improve too, but the atmosphere right now is erratic to say the least.
This was basically what I'd been told - that if you didn't make the whole article yourself in full, if you produced a stub, you'd just get your work deleted. No one mentioned the secret rules, though, which is one of the worst ways to run any site I can imagine but especially a wiki. If a site isn't willing to make its' rules something people can know and there's a dedicated gossip corner in the form of the Discord, then it can't really be a surprise that people who know of it also don't use it.
IDK, maybe some people are having very positive experiences with it or maybe things have changed - I haven't been involved, I wouldn't know - but it appears, from the outside looking in, to be a place where you can either put in a ton of effort and get reprimanded, or put in none and not get that. And with how toxic most of fandom is already these days I can't see many people wanting to wade into that. People don't want more drama in their lives, they want less.
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