Standards

Style

Remember that this is Fancyclopedia, not the completely separate (and excellent) Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Entries should emphasize the significance of the subject to fandom, not merely to science fiction. Pros we cover are mainly sff artists, authors, editors and specialist literary agents. In general, actors and other media professionals, game designers and scientists should be omitted, unless they are actifen. Entries deemed irrelevant or tangential to fandom may be deleted.

Also, although we try to be complete, we also strive to be both fannish and encyclopedic. Be concise.

If in doubt, leave it out! While we don’t require extensive citations and attributions of sources (tho they’re great if you’ve got them), we recognize that memory is fallible. If you are uncertain of a fact, it’s better to omit it altogether than to add something questionable.

• Facts you’re unsure of and extraneous details can be added under the Discussion tab.
• If you research someone or something and come up blank, save another researcher trouble by putting details on the Discussion page and adding the article to the list of Missing Information.
• Please don't write entries describing events as current or future ("is currently", "in a forthcoming"), as they will become confusing with time. (This includes details on the current contents of websites, including Fanac.org — they change frequently — just provide a link to the site.) The exception is conventions that can say "will be held."
• If quoting more than a line or two from an old fanzine:

Place a space before and between each paragraph. 

So it looks like this. 

Templates

We use mediawiki Templates to collect structured data. For example Template:Person or Template:Convention which should be included with {{person | born=????}} or {{convention}}. The template pages give documentation on the arguments, all of which are optional, though you might get nag messages if obvious things, like the year of a convention, are missed.

Unicode

Mediawiki handles Unicode well, but it can be difficult to find the characters on keyboards, so assume users will be often searching without them. Page names should use the accents in names, places and publications, but a redirect should be written for the ASCII form. Use "'- rather than the typographic “”‘’— in titles, more freedom is allowed in the content.

People

In Fancyclopedia people are generally fans and/or pros, or fictional. We generally don't write entries for people outside the SF community at all, but when we do, we categorize them as mundane. If an entry doesn't have one of these three categories, it falls through the cracks in the indexing system.

We have a more-or-less standard approach for people entries. (Notes are in <pointy brackets>):

''(Did you mean [[Jo Fanne]]?)'' (July 4, 1932 – July 31, 1999) '''Joe Phan''' (né Joseph Mundane, aka '''Jophan'''<boldface names used in fandom>), a [[New York]] [[fan]] active in the 1950s.... Blah, blah, blah. Lorem ipsum...His friend, [[Joan Femfan]], described him as....<ref>says me</ref> <The biography goes here. It may be short or it may occupy hundreds of lines. If long, subheadings make for better readability. In general, it is best to begin with the person’s major accomplishments in fandom and put mundane details such as birthplace and livelihood at the end. Don't spend a lot of time on pros’ accomplishments unless they are fan-related — we link to SFE for that. <Do mention fans’ spouses, day jobs, and other facts that round out the picture of a fan’s life and personality. As Jack Speer complained in Fancy1, “The biografies usually give date and place of birth, and sometimes physical characteristics, but for the most part are given over to the fan's entrance and career in fandom, and his preferences as to promags, fanzines, fans, etc, to the virtual exclusion of information about his schooling, family background, jobs, &c, which would be useful in understanding the person.” Put this after fan and sf accomplishments. > * {{SFE|name=phan_joe}}. <for pros with listings in the SF Encyclopedia> * {{link | website=https://www.JoePhan.org|text=Website.}}<We are moving away from hiding websites in the bottom templates.> * [[Joe Phan's Eofandom Reminiscence]]. * [https://fanac.org/fanzines/OldFanzine/OldFanzine1.pdf “Really Cool Fan Article”] by Joe in ''[[Old Fanzine]] 1, April 31, 1956. * https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/2619/joe_phan FindaGrave entry. ] {{fanzines}} <list zines the fan edited or published; skip this section altogether if empty> * [[Fanzine 1]] [1973-77] * [[Apazine 2]] [1988-95] (for [[FAPA]]) * [[Fanzine 3]] [1994] (with [[Another Fan]]) {{recognition}} <skip this section altogether if empty> * 1989 — [[Fantasticon 3]] <a GoHship> * 1990 — '''[[1990 Best Novel Hugo]]''' for ''Waterworld'' * 1991 — [[1991 Best Novel Hugo]] nominee for ''Fireworld'' * 1992 — [[Filk Hall of Fame]] <Award winners only. Only mention nominations for Hugo Awards before 2010, where nomination itself is notable. Skip minor pro awards> ___<br> <references /> {{person | born=1932 | died=1999}} [[Category:fan]] <and/or pro or mundane> [[Category:US]] <or wherever> <if appropriate:> [[Category:artist]] [[Category:filk]]

You can add photos of people, their artwork, quotes, etc.

Publications

Fanzines, semiprozines and prozines, plus websites and books about fandom. Novels, in general, should be described on their author’s page, and only when particularly significant to fandom.

'''''Phan's Zine''''' was a [[fanzine]] [[pubbed]] by [[Joe Phan]].... Description, including author or editor, where published, period of publication, impact, etc. If it isn’t a fanzine or a prozine, explain its relevance to fandom.<ref>really</ref> {{prizes}} * 1990 — '''[[1990 Best Fanzine Hugo]]''' <tab head=top> (For fanzines) Issue || Date || Pages || Notes 1 || September 4, 1956 || 25 || [[Ditto]]. Cover by [[Bill Rotsler]]. Contributors include [[Arthur C. Clarke]] and [[Rick Sneary]]. 5 || July 1957 || 42 || [[Mimeo]]. Mostly a [[letterzine]]. Announces Joe Faned’s CoA at Miskatonic University. 6 || September 1957 || 100 || [[Offset]]. First annish. Last issue. </tab> {{fanzineindex|name=Phan's Zine|dir=Fanac.org page}} <For zines on Fanac.> ___<br> <references /> {{publication | year = 1978}} or {{publication | start=1978 | end=1992}} [[Category:Fanzine]] <or whatever; if category is apazine, newszine, fanthology, clubzine, etc., also include category fanzine.> [[Category:US]] <or whatever>

Where Am I?

In general, the place categories reflect where something actually happened. So websites, fanzines, books, etc., are categorized as from the place where they were published. If an Australian fan visiting Toronto publishes a fanthology of articles by a fan in Tel Aviv, that publication should be labeled “canada.”

People should be categorized with everywhere they have done significant fanac.

Northern Ireland

Pages pertaining to Northern Ireland should be tagged both “ireland” and “UK” through the 1960s; afterward, “UK” is sufficient.

Locales

Countries, states, cities (hotels and houses should be Venues). Describe the fannish activity that has happened there. Include attributes or fanac of the area fans. Don't create locale unless it has fannish significance. Specifically, if the only thing you can say about a locale is "Such-and-such convention was held in X" it should not get a locale page.

It is common for larger cities to have suburbs or nearby cities in which fannish events happened. Do not create a separate locale for each of them, but add a redirection to the main city. For example, "Boston, MA" is a locale. The Boston suburbs of Cambridge, Brookline, Waltham, Newton, Danvers also all hosted Boston-area conventions or clubs. All of them should redirect to Boston.

(How far away is far away enough to warrant a separate locale? It's a judgment call, and depends on how the fandom in that area views it. Always ask, "How do the people themselves see themselves?" If you don't know the answer to that, a good rule is to ask yourself how you'd explain it to a person unfamiliar with the area. (E.g. if a convention was held in Downers Grove and someone in London asked you where it was held would you say (always assuming you wanted to inform) "Downers Grove, IL" or "a Chicago suburb"?

Venues

Buildings, such as hotels and houses. Use the current name for hotels that have changed name. (Old names of the hotel should redirect to the current name.)

As with locales, venues should be created only when a site has more than trivial importance, where you could tell a fannish story about the site rather than just saying "Five X-cons were held there in the 90s."

If a venue is memorable because of a specific event in fanhistory, describe it on a page about the event rather than creating a venue page.

Awards

We try to document awards given to each person, but because we are Fancyclopedia, we have a strong focus on fan awards: Awards which are

1. given by fans
2. primarily for fannish activities

We also document pro awards, but only wins and only for major awards. We document nominations only for the Hugo Awards. We do not document Nebula nominations and normally document Nebula wins only in the form "Two Best Novel Nebulas" without bothering to break them out by year.

List awards in the year they are given, not the year the work appeared. E.g.:

• 1997 — Past President of the Fan Writers of America for 1951
• 1999 — 1998 Nebula Award for Best Novel
• 2020 — 1945 Best Novel Retro Hugo

Page titles

Mediawiki titles are case sensitive (unlike Wikidot), so we need to be consistent in page names. They should be in title case, which keeps conjunctions and prepositions in lower case. Read up on it here

If uncertain about a phrase, type it in www.titlecase.com which reports for AP-style:

Use lower case: a an and at but by for in of on or the to up

Capitalize: Above About Across Against Along Among Around As Before Behind Below Beneath Beside Between Beyond Down During Except From Inside I Into Is It Like Near Off Since Toward Through Under Until Upon With Within

We will create redirects in Mediawiki as necessary to redirect different usage to the standard, titlecase forms, e.g. "SF writer" will redirect to "SF Writer".

Acronyms/Initialisms should be in ALL CAPS, unless fannish use says otherwise, e.g., LASFS, but gafia. Use redirects as necessary.

The Naming of Names

Names are important, since we want all references to a person or place or thing to go to that P/P/T's page. For that reason we have a simple set of rules for links:

• Pages should be created under the most commonly used form of a name, and where two versions are comparably commonly used, we will use the less ambiguous version. Examples:

1. "Walt Willis", not "Willis" or "WAW" or "Walter A. Willis" (the latter is less ambiguous, but also much less commonly used)
2. "E. E. Smith", not "Doc Smith" or "Edward Elmer Smith, PhD"
3. "LASFS", not "Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society" (Everyone calls it "LASFS".)

• When using initials, use periods and put spaces between them. So "E. E. Smith", not "EE Smith".
• When you are dealing with an ambiguous reference, create a link using an unambiguous form. So if the reference was "When Walt got back to Belfast" you would link it as "When [[Walt Willis|Walt]] got back to Belfast".
• When multiple forms of a name exist, add redirects from the lesser-used forms to the main page, e.g. "WAW" and "Walter A. Willis" should both have redirects to "Walt Willis." However, if a name is misspelled in a quotation, link the correct spelling with a pipe: [[Walt Willis|Walt Willes]] .
• Use redirects only where the form being redirected to is reasonably unique. So, we would not redirect "Walt" to "Walt Willis" because there are other well-known Walts in Fancy.
• Fans change their names for all sorts of reasons, and some use multiple names within fandom. For people who are still active in fandom, title biographical entries with the name they most often use now. For gafiates and deceased fans, use the name they had while notable in fandom. Then add redirects for other names.

A redirect makes a page just a pointer to another page. If we've written up a page named "E. E. Smith", we also want references to "Doc Smith" to point there. We do this by creating a "Doc Smith" page and redirecting it to the "E. E. Smith" page.

A redirect is done by putting the line

#REDIRECT [[E. E. Smith]]

at the top of the page. To point the redirect at a subsection, use

#REDIRECT [[Main Page Name#Subhead]]

(Feel free to ignore this -- the editors will be scurrying around behind the scenes adding redirects as necessary.)

Clashing Names

How do we handle more than one page with the same name? This is pretty complicated, alas, and we have a page devoted to just this topic.

References to Publications

Fancy has the hope of -- eventually -- automatically linking from references to publications in its articles to the publication itself on its companion site, fanac.org. To prepare for that day, we have a simple standard for a very few fanzines and convention publication references. Currently only File 770, Ansible, Ratatosk, and The National Fantasy Fan (TNFF)

To refer to a fanzine as a whole (that is, not to a specific issue) use

''[[File 770]]''

To refer to a specific issue use

{{File770 | issue=23}}

To refer to a specific page, use

{{File770 | issue=23 | page=4}}
{{Ansible | issue=23 | item=4}}
{{Ratatosk | issue=35 | page=2}}
{{TNFF | volume=5 | number=6 | page=12 | text=description}}

The template adds leading 0s as required.

Other Publications

To reference quotations or cite any other publications, you can do something like this:

 “This is my quotation,” he said in ''[[Fan's Scene]]'' 11 ([https://url-goes-here.com April 1, 1959], p. 27). 

Is there already a page for that?

In general, Fancyclopedia is moving away from making readers click all over for related topics and instead grouping broad subjects in longer articles with subheadings.

Don't create pages for "X, someone who does Y", just create a redirect X that points to Y. If something has no independent existence, like awards only given at a particular convention, or someone's pet, add detail to the parent page. The site is about fandom, don't create pages about the things fans do in the rest of their lives

So, for example, "Con runner" redirects to "Con Fandom". Note that we make a point of using the term "conrunners" in the Con Fandom page and we make it bold. This helps the reader who expected a definition of "con runner" to find it.

If XYZ Club has a subgroup that goes jitterbugging every Saturday, note that on the XYZ Club page instead of creating an XYZ Jitterbuggers page. “The History of Kishinev Fandom” goes in the Kishinev page. Ktp.

Use subheadings to break up the text on pages with lots of parts.

Put the relevant categories for the redirected article, if different, on the redirect page. For example, the article for Robert A. Heinlein has a subsection about Stranger in a Strange Land. The Heinlein page is in the “person” category. The redirect page for Stranger has the “book” category.

Links

Wikilinks

To link to another page on Fancyclopedia, use double square brackets [[Like This]]. Note that this will only work if you use the same upper and lowercase configuration as the article name. We have made lowercase redirect around this annoying WikiMedia case sensitivity, but where they don’t exist or you want to use different words, you can use a pipe [[Like This|in this fashion]].

To link to a subsection of a page: [[Main Title#Subsection Title|text you want]].

We encourage you to be lavish with wikilinks to help steer readers to other parts of Fancylopedia. It’s ok to link the same name or term multiple times on a page. (Once per paragraph is probably enough, though.)

What if a wikilink is red?

The first thing you should do is search to make sure the article you’re trying to link to exists and that you have spelled your link and used the same case as its actual title. (Some articles have display titles different from their actual titles, e.g. “Joe Fann” vs. “Joe Fann (IL)”; in such cases, the actual title is in small print below the display title.)

If no article exists, and you don’t want to create one, it’s perfectly all right to leave the redlink. Someone will likely do something about it by and by.

However, please don’t wikilink people, places or things that aren’t appropriate for Fancyclopia entries. If Famous Mundane was a special guest at Hitchiecon 11, and you don’t think fans will automatically know Famous, you can explain who heesh was in a parenthetical note in the Hitchiecon 11 article, or, if need be, make an outlink to some other source. This applies to all such nonfan folks apt to be at fan events as scientists, actors, media personalities, musicians, mainstream publishers, etc.

Outlinks

To link to sites outside Fancyclopedia, you can either use the Link Template or simply enclose the URL and text to be linked in square brackets, like this: [https://sfclub.org Website.] Avoid naked URLs.

Future proofing external site links

A link going dead is not a reason to remove it. If possible, replace offsite failed links with a link to the archived page at the Internet Archive. Report bad links at Fanac to an administrator.

Please avoid using url shortening services, as that introduces another point of failure.

Adding Images

Adding photos or artwork is great. Complete MediaWiki directions are here, but here’s a quick rundown:

Start on the Upload Files page. Upload the image.

Then go to the page you want the image on. Click Edit. Put your cursor where you want the image to go. Click the little box up in the formatting bar with mountains in it. A box will open.

Fill in the filename and the caption. You can use wiki links in captions:

'''[[Joe Fann]] and [[Morojo]] at [[Nycon]] in 1939.''' ''Photo by [[4E]].''

If you want the default alignment (on the right), just click Insert. Otherwise, use the Align pulldown to put it left or center first. You can then preview the page to see how it looks. (Note that photos of people tend to look best when the subject is faced toward the text.)

When you export a photo from Apple Photos, be sure to save it as a .png.

Or, just e-mail us the picture, and we’ll get it posted.

Year links

Use links to year pages very sparingly. Any years in the bottom templates will become links automatically, don't duplicate the links in the article body.

Year links should be avoided in tables or lists.

The exception for using year of publication is for fan-fund trip reports and fanhistory articles, when the dates the events occurred should be used.

Sequences

To provide links forward and backwards in a sequence of conventions, awards etc, use:

{{convention | series=Picocon | before=Picocon 32 | after=Picocon 34 | series1=Eurocon | before1=Eurocon 10 | after1=Eurocon 12}}

See also: How to Edit Pages.