(Archival) Fictopedia

Fictopedia, “an online encyclopedia of user-created fictional information (ficts),” appears to have existed from roughly 2009 – 2018, though the later years came plagued with spam and software failures, and they have since stopped renewing the service where they ran their wiki software. While it ran, the community explained it as follows.

Fictopedia is an online encyclopedia of user-generated, fictional information. Users are free to add or edit any information they wish on any subject with only two limitations. First, the information must be fictional. There are many sites, such as Wikipedia which provide reference information on factual topics; Fictopedia is not one of them. Second, the information should not be about existing, copyrighted fictions (such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Lost). There are many sites already devoted to describing these worlds; Fictopedia is not among them. Fictopedia is about creating new fictions by letting users add, edit and cross-link each others' ideas. There is no limit on genre. For example, information about a fictional New York detective from 1975 is just as welcome as an entry about a medieval fantasy kingdom, or a description of an alien race. The idea is to provide a place where different people's creative impulses (no matter how simple or detailed) can mix together and be expanded by others. The goal is simply to see what happens.

In supplemental explanations, they talk about a lack of interest in consistency, the insistence that only new material appear in their library, and the premise that they write pages as if describing fiction that does already exist, even though it shouldn’t.

What Happened Here?

John (your host for this evening) learned about the experiment too late to participate, but saw enough technical problems—and the CC BY 3.0 license—to realize that somebody could and should grab a copy of the wiki-text “source” for the remaining pages, at least as a personal archive, before it vanished. He kept that local archive private, assuming that the site might return.

Seeing as how Fictopedia has not returned, however, the time has come to release a static archive of the still-extant-in-2018 pages, converted to HTML using Pandoc. For clarity, John didn’t have anything to do with any of the contents. John only converted the wiki-text to HTML, and wrote this index page, for easy reading. The links don't always go anywhere, both because the conversion had no way to distinguish real links from hopeful links other than CSS class, and because the site had degraded significantly by the time the archiving began. Likewise, this process had no access to the history of each page, so any storytelling that may have taken place as “edit wars” on a page—as social media comments suggest happened with the Cabal—or any useful content destroyed by vandalism, won’t appear here.

The 00license page explains the licensing and recommends an attribution style.

The Future

As described, this site contains a static—no longer a -pedia where people can add and edit, unless you file pull requests against the repository—archive of Fictopedia, based on pages with accessible source in mid-to-late 2018. However, more pages should exist, in various automated web archives. As a result, “new” pages (from a decade ago) may occasionally appear on this list without warning.

Because the writers didn't name things consistently, the original wiki relied a lot on aliases getting users to the right page, so the links here may need some adjustments. You'll also notice some odd HTML, probably from trying to insert HTML into the wiki markup or trying to appear as if somebody did that, which could also probably stand some improvement.

Building category pages—that only link back to pages that exist—would also help, in all likelihood.

Quick Comment

John speaking briefly as myself, here, rather than in an abstract third-person role.

As with any crowdsourced repository, I'd call the contents here “uneven.” While you have a couple of extensive worlds that somebody could probably use without much effort, such as the collection of Mystical Oakland articles, and you can find some clever smaller ides such as Glomsday or the fruit-based slam poetry, you’ll also find pages that mostly exist to make a stale pun that nearly everybody made long before Fictopedia even appeared on the scene, such as Ben Dover and Faux News.

Browser beware, I guess. In any writing community of significant size, you’ll probably have a similar breakdown of complete ideas, fragmentary-but-fun ideas, and ideas without much original thought.

I have not edited anything, except maybe fixing a couple of links to point to the correct pages, so please don’t blame me for any off-color or otherwise awful jokes that you might spot. Likewise, don’t credit me with anything good that you might stumble across. Again, I contributed nothing creative to this, other than the conversion and the index pages. Credit (and blame) the Fictopedia community, as required by the licensing terms.