Talk:FanFiction.Net

Post popular sections and Long fan fiction works
I do not believe that either of these sections need to be included on this article, especially the long fan fiction works. Fanfiction.net is a fast moving website with new fanfictions posted everyday. These sections would both need a lot of upkeep as the information in them become outdated much faster than other data and research conducted. The content in both of these sections rely solely on the primary source of the website. OsseusIgni (talk) 13:51, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Do we really need a list of "notable" fanfiction with over 500,000 words?
There's a section FanFiction.Net which lists fanfiction entries on the site with over 500,000 words. (There was previously another section with 100,000 words or more but deemed "popular" without reliable sources to back up, but I decided to bust that out on the spot for being definitely uncyclopediac). I was considering going WP:BOLD and deleting the section for being WP:FANCRUFT unworthy of being listed on a Wikipedia article (unlike List of longest novels, which is definitely interest of many people), but I decided to ask first. (And don't ever ask me about Sonic's Ultimate Harem.) 22:37, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I have made an attempt to improve the section, providing sources.  O.N.R.  (talk) 00:40, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Please note that an article shouldn't rely on too many primary sources. Also, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. ❤︎PrincessPandaWiki  (talk | contribs) 21:41, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Inclusion of primary-sourced information
I would like to know why you think information on most popular sections, list of longest fanfiction (table has been commented out for now), and disallowed fanfiction types are worthy of being on Wikipedia. I disagree because they rely on primary sources and Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, making them likely WP:FANCRUFT. It's better to discuss here than engage in an edit war. (NOTE: Above section is obsolete, it was for a problem I previously tried to solve after submitting the section.) ❤︎PrincessPandaWiki  (talk | contribs) 20:15, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

"most popular erotica website" redux
It has been questioned before on these pages, but so far the claim that fanfiction.net is "the most popular erotica website for women" remains in the article. There are many reasons to be dubious about this claim and its current placement:


 * The claim is very dated. Even if we accept that it was true in 2011, nine years later the internet has changed significantly.  Is it still the case?  In that time, AO3 has overtaken FFN as the most popular fanfiction website, after all.
 * "most popular" is unhelpfully undefined. What do we mean by "most popular" here?  How was this measured?  The article cited for the claim doesn't tell us. (And the book mentioned at the end of the article, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, doesn't seem to make the claim at all, so that's no help).
 * "Most popular erotica website" isn't quite the claim the source actually makes: Ogas writes that it is 'the world's most popular "erotic" site for women' - scare quotes original. Is an '"erotic" site' the same thing as an 'erotica site'?  I would suggest not.
 * Our article in the very next paragraph goes on to say that "The MA rating and explicit violent and/or sexual themes are forbidden." How meaningful is it to describe a website which bans explicit sexual content and work suitable for adults only as an "erotica site"?  How meaningful is it to describe a site which has millions of words of content which is totally uninterested in sex or romance as an "erotica site"?  I would suggest not very.

For all of these reasons, I have weakened the claim somewhat to the rather more defendable:

In 2011, Ogi Ogas described Fanfiction.net as 'the world's most popular "erotic" site for women'.

Longest fanfiction
This article names "The Loud House: Revamped" as the longest piece of fanfiction ever written, but fails to mention that much of its content is copy-pasted from other people's writing (mainly FANDOM/Wikia articles) and uses a "script structure" (i.e. written like a film script with names and directions), something which FFN expressly disallowed in the past (and still disallows according to its rules) yet for some reason gives this particular work a pass. The parts of the fiction which are self-written are written in an incredibly simplistic manner, no higher than an elementary school standard of writing, and in some cases can simply be an entire page of onomatopoeia (i.e. KRRAAABBBOOOOOMMMM). It is less a fanfiction and more an outright brazen attempt at making the longest piece of literature through any means necessary without logic, passion, or even skill. I can provide evidence for these two claims should it somehow be required.

No disrespect intended to Mr. Knudson, and I do not wish to hijack the purpose of this talk page, but I believe TLH:R should be delegitimized as the longest fanfiction based on these extenuating circumstances (i.e. uncited work taken verbatim from hundreds of uncredited co-authors). I do not think it should be honoured on this article, as it is quite frankly an insult to creative literary minds everywhere, nor should FFN continue to feature it as it breaks the "script" rule, and I'd imagine breaks a fair few copyright laws too. Of course, this isn't FFN, so I'll direct that later complaint to their administration.

194.207.183.182 (talk) 15:34, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The fact that a work is badly written, or violates the rules on FFN, doesn't have any bearing on the claim being made in the article – TLH:R either is or is not the longest work on the site. If this is a fact which is worth reporting, it's wikipedia's job to report it correctly – not arbitrarily exclude some works from that because we decide they somehow don't count.
 * That being said, I'm deeply unconvinced that wikipedia ought to report this. The whole reason that The Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest was listed in the first place is because it had gained (a tiny amount of) media attention.  As far as I can see, this new fic has had no reporting on its status outside a random reddit post.  There's a case to be made that mindlessly reporting every new "longest" fic is a WP:WEIGHT problem.  We don't similarly list the works with the most reads/reviews/favourites, and it's not at all clear that "longest work" is really a sufficiently important fact about the website that a 1,000-word article should dedicate a whole subsection to it.  Especially when works which were published on FFN and are actually notable enough to have their own WP entries (My Immortal (fan fiction), Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality), or which were republished as notable works (Master of the Universe, which was published as Fifty Shades of Grey) don't get a single mention in the entire article.
 * So while I disagree with the initial reasoning, I am inclined to agree that we should remove the discussion of TLH:R – and indeed completely rework the section on "Notable long fanfiction works" into a section on "notable works", where the works discussed are actually notable. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 20:16, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Longest fanfiction replacement
Hi, I'm a college student in Etherfire's technical editing class and I'm going to be editing this article for a bit. I'll make a sandbox draft for any major changes.

I agree that removing the notable long fan fiction works and replacing it with a more general section that links to other famous fanfiction that was originally hosted on the site makes a lot of sense. I did that as well as removing the top fandoms tables in my sandbox draft. Any other famous fanfiction that was posted on fanfiction.net you can think of? Editingpersona (talk) 19:41, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles also has a wikipedia page. A good source of works which fans consider noteworthy is the Fanlore category, but there's no easy way to filter those for works which were published on FFN that I can see – and of course "noteworthy enough for a fan to write a fanlore article about it" is a much lower bar than "discussed outside of fannish spaces and therefore due weight for a wikipedia article".  I'll have a look at Anne Jamison's Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World and see what is mentioned there.  It might also be worth seeing if any FFN works were included in Francesca Coppa's The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for a Digital Age? Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 20:01, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Site Content Section changes
So I have been editing the Site Content section in my sandbox draft and I've gotten it to the point where I think it is ready to be published. Since it's a fairly large edit, I wanted to make sure no one has any issues with it. Most notable changes I've made:

Overall, I've tried to make the section similar to the site content/features section on the Archive of Our Own article. I've moved some information around and have also created two sub-sections - "Story Publishing" and "Reader Feedback." I have also removed the "Most Popular sections" because, in my opinion, the information there is WP:Fancruft; information I've added in the "Story Publishing" section should act as a reasonable replacement for this.

The only sub-section I haven't edited is the "Longest Fanfiction" one. For now, my plan is to keep it the same because editing it is going to take a bit of time and research. In my sandbox draft, I made it its own section but I won't be doing this in the article. Editingpersona (talk) 19:27, 9 March 20L22 (UTC)
 * Looks good to me. The only thing I'd note is that Wikipedia's style for section headings is sentence case (MOS:SECTIONS). Keep up the good work. SchreiberBike &#124; ⌨ 20:02, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Digital Writing
— Assignment last updated by Cja2023 (talk) 14:13, 24 October 2023 (UTC)