This isn't a matter of public interest, so I don't see a good reason to violate Xydexx's copyright. He has a point about the paucity of good coverage, which I replied to as follows:
It's a problem. Want to fix it? The tools are in your own hands. Just start writing comprehensive, neutral articles and publish them daily, on Flayrah, WikiFur, or a site of your own choosing. Simple.
No?
Good content doesn't write itself. A high-quality information source requires ongoing effort by skilled contributors willing to put in a lot of time. Furry fandom has too few people dedicated to the task; those who are lack the time to do a truly professional job of it.
You put together AC's conbook. Imagine you had to handle a work that was a hundred times the size; to figure out what topics to cover and who to write each article; to review drafts and send them back for improvement. It would be a full-time job - one which would never end, as new topics appear and old ones require updates. Indeed, most traditional encyclopedias and newspapers spend a great deal on writers, researchers and editors.
Wiki technology allows more people to participate in the process, replacing the question of "who can write this" with "can we trust who wrote this?" Similarly, news sites make it easy for individual authors to submit material. But this has not removed the need for skilled experts to write good copy in the first place. It just removes barriers to them doing so.
To put this in perspective: the first draft of
this article took four days to research and write. It was subjected to a
picky review process (involving a skilled reviewer) that added several more days of work. This is what it takes for an experienced editor to cover a relatively well-known individual in the fandom, and only to a level considered "good."
Articles like this simply cannot be written for most furry topics because the sources don't exist. If you want a trusted Wikipedia-style encyclopedia of furry fandom, it will be far smaller than WikiFur. Maybe a few hundred articles.
Now, citations are not the only way to win a reader's trust. But for most topics, there are very few people who you
could trust to write an article by themselves without relying on other sources - and it's unlikely you could get such people to spend a whole week on it.
News has the complication of being produced to a deadline, often on topics which the authors are not intimately familiar with. Even professional journalists cannot take a week over each story. They have a day or two before it is old news. Fans may only have a few hours to spend on all the topics of the past few days.
As for credibility . . . that's a function of expertise and trustworthiness. Real-world expertise is usually demonstrated by qualifications and experience; in fandom, the latter dominates. Ideally, the most experienced might write the articles, but they're usually busy doing the very things that make them experts.
Trustworthiness tends to come down to "were they right before, and is there any reason to think they're not right now?" We trust those who have delivered accurate information on a variety of topics; ideally on matters they are not
directly involved with. You might trust an artist to cover the work of others, but not their own.
Flayrah (after 2006, at least) lacked credibility because most posters were directly involved with the subject of their posts. They were, by and large, not news articles but press releases.
The Flayrah of 2002 had a greater variety of stories. But don't look on the past with rose-tinted glasses. Most posts were announcements, brief quotes or links to other works with at most a paragraph or two of analysis. What little original content existed tended to come with a significant dollop of opinion. Arguably that and the comments were the most interesting part of the whole site.
Don't believe me? Check out "on this day" and "historical debates" for yourself.
