Fanlore is a fandom wiki dedicated to preserving the history of transformative fanworks and the fandoms from which they have arisen.

The beta version of Fanlore was launched in September 2008, and the wiki came out of beta in December 2010. In November 2019, the wiki passed 50,000 articles; and in January 2021, one million edits had been made by more than 50,000 registered users. As of September 2025, Fanlore has over 150,000 registered users and 79,000 articles with over 1.6 million edits.

Fanlore is a living archive of fandom history, created by fans for the benefit of fans. It aims to document fandom history and preserve current discussions and debates by recording events as they happen. Fanlore also provides context for outside media, academics, and newcomers to fandom, presented in a format where fans maintain control over their own representation.

Our Mission

Fanlore’s mission is to engage fans from a wide variety of communities that create and enjoy fanworks, and to provide them with a platform to record and share their histories, experiences, and traditions.

Fanlore’s guiding principles are that:

  • Fan communities—their practices, products and passions—both past and present, are worthy of both preservation and celebration.
  • Each fannish voice is valid and valuable; there is no single “truth” or history to fandom, but rather, each perspective contributes to & demonstrates a rich and diverse heritage. This collective history is not dictated or owned by a single person, author, or organization: it belongs to fan communities as a whole.
  • Fanlore treasures the unique fannish style of scholarship: self-reflective, articulate, analytic, personal, passionate, tolerant, and accessible to a diverse audience.

Our Team

The OTW supports all of its projects, and many committees contribute to the Fanlore project in some capacity. However, if you’d like to help exclusively with Fanlore work, check out the Fanlore committee. The Fanlore committee maintains the wiki at large. This includes supporting wiki editors and establishing a flexible infrastructure to define and organize the wiki’s content.

Outside of the Fanlore committee itself, Systems also provides support for the Fanlore project as they manage the servers Fanlore runs on, assist with MediaWiki software updates, and provide general tech support to the project as needed.

Get Involved

Opportunities to volunteer for Fanlore are typically posted once or twice a year on the OTW Volunteering page. For answers to common questions about volunteering and recruitment, take a look at our Volunteering FAQ.

Volunteer recruitment is announced on the OTW website and in AO3 news posts. It is also shared on all social media sites where we actively post. If you want to make sure you hear about the latest recruitment opportunities, check out our OTW News by Email service. This allows you to sign up to receive an email notification whenever we publish a news post (including recruitment calls).

If you’d like to contribute to Fanlore without volunteering, you are encouraged to edit the wiki yourself. All Fanlore content is created by fans. Anyone who is interested is encouraged to create an account and share ownership of the wiki’s content. Fans are encouraged to contribute by creating new articles, adding details to pages, or contributing their own point of view to articles to update, debate, or widen their understanding of topics.

If you have any other volunteering questions, reach out to our Volunteers & Recruiting committee. They handle recruitment and induction for all OTW committees.

Learn More

You can learn more about Fanlore on the OTW website FAQ as well as on Fanlore’s FAQ. If you have other questions, contact the Fanlore committee.