User:Brian Kendig/Fansite links

This is my own scratch page for trying to come up with a consistent policy proposal regarding links from Wikipedia to fansites. It is not yet {{proposed}}. Please feel free to discuss on the talk page.

The web contains a wealth of fansites which cover every conceivable fandom. These fansites sometimes contain more information in more detail than is yet available in Wikipedia. Articles about popular fandoms often accumulate links to several of these fansites in their External links section; the justification usually given for adding these links is that they provide additional information beyond what's contained in Wikipedia and are useful to readers.

However, remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a web directory. Web directories and search engines exist to help people find information. Wikipedia exists to contain information; it is not Wikipedia's purpose to point users to other web sites.

A variety of problems can arise from using Wikipedia to provide links to fansites:

There is no objective way to decide when a fansite is "good enough" to list in Wikipedia, nor any fair way to decide when a site should be excluded. Attempts to remove one fansite while leaving others can start revert wars.
Many fansite administrators list their own sites out of vanity and an interest in getting more traffic, not because their sites provide useful information to Wikipedia readers.
Competition arises when people want their own fansites to appear first on the list. Many also prefer to describe their sites with subjective "hype" terms (such as "The Internet's best site for..." or "The most extensive collection of...") to advance their placement in search engines.
Most fansites tend to have short lives. Linking to them from Wikipedia can result in dead links which have to be found and removed.
By making your own subjective choice of what fan sites to link from a Wikipedia article, you are doing a disservice by limiting readers who may rely on the links which you chose instead of looking to see what other sites are available about the fandom.

Links to fansites are appropriate in some limited situations:

If there is one predominant fansite which is generally recognized to be the authority on its fandom, then link to its home page from the most general article to which it applies. For example, if there is a fansite specifically recognized as the authority on the Firefly television series, then link its home page from Firefly (TV series), not from every article about every Firefly character and episode.
If there is a fan page which contains substantively more information than is in the corresponding Wikipedia article - for example, a fan page specifically about one particular character in Firefly, with more details than are yet in Wikipedia - then link to it from that one particular Wikipedia article. In this case, the information on it should eventually be copied into the Wikipedia article with permission, or paraphrased if permission cannot be obtained, and then the fansite link should be removed or added to Sources.

If there is more than one web site which could be seen as an authority, then avoid listing any of them. Link to the appropriate category on a web directory instead.

It is a bad idea to use a template to link to the same set of fansite home pages from a large number of articles. Use a variable template so that each article can link to a specific page with more information, but don't put this variable template into an article unless there really is something to link to which contains more information than the Wikipedia article already contains.

Avoid linking from Wikipedia articles to fan forums or discussion threads on them.