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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