Snowflake Challenge #7

[ratcreature]

Challenge #7: In your own space, tell us about 3 fandom resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom!)

This is difficult. Just in challenge #4 I was bemoaning the lack of newbie pages and resources like there used to be easy to find upon joining a new fandom.

That said, for anything not tiny at least there tends to be still a fandom wiki that is easy to find. And those are a great help to keep track of things if for example the canon has a lot of characters and worldbuilding. So I have visited both The Magnus Archives wiki and the Rusty Quill Gaming wiki quite a lot as I was catching up these two podcasts.

The fandom.com/wikia wikis also can be helpful if you want to read fanfic in an unfamiliar fandom and its wikipedia page is truncated of nerdy detail (like fictional character biographies or episode summaries etc.) for aspiring to be an encyclopedia and wanting sources etc.

On DW I follow fandomcalendar, a bulletin board for promoting fandom events like fests, challenges, memes etc. And drawesome, a drawing community to fanartists, still has regular drawing challenges every month.

And finally some self-promotion: IMO for anyone looking to find or post fanart recs, the comm fanart_recs, which I mod, is great.

Comments

[goddess47]

We always welcome self-promotions. I'll have to check that comm out!

You may also want to check to see if there's information on Fanlore on a new fandom... and what's not there can be added by anyone, so even the tiniest of fandoms can have a presence without the work involved in running a full wiki.

But, yes, fandom wikis are a great source of information and are a huge labor of love...

I also love FandomCalendar to see what other fandoms are doing and to maybe catch a fest I've missed.

Thanks for this list!

[ratcreature]

Sadly I have serious issues with Fanlore, its policies, and do not want to promote them. (Not to rehash things, but since I'm always annoyed by vague references myself -- I had a very public fall out/kerfuffle in 2010 after having been very active on Fanlore initially, my public posts about this are here and here, or you can search fail_fandomanon for my pseud, it's the only time I got noticed by that comm except for my thematic lists....) More recently I find the way whole posts with all comments get c&p'ed almost in entirety by editors got even worse, and IMO it's not the way a wiki should "create" content. The most recent image policy proposal kerfuffle wasn't great either. So it's not just ten year old grudges (though I do hold them), but if anything that wiki got worse and more problematic since then.

[goddess47]

And not everything fits everyone, so I so understand about having your own standards and sticking to them. That's a good thing.

[sholio]

I'm really impressive at how active fanart_recs still is! Due in large part to the work you put in rounding up reccers, and a few really prolific reccers there. It's great. :D

[ratcreature]

Yes, that core of prolific reccers has been doing heavy lifting to keep it alive.

[seal_girl]

I recently joined the fanart_rec comm, its a great idea. I might not recognise the fandom, but the talent is amazing. It makes me happy to know there are such creative people out there :)

[ratcreature]

Glad to hear you joined.

I also enjoy looking at fan art for fandoms I'm unfamiliar with. It helps that it's much less time investment than fic, lol.