Short Fiction on the Wiki

You may or may not be aware that the Carl Brandon Society has a brand new wiki! This makes me particularly happy because I love wikis. I like categorizing and organizing information, and I love that the process can be democratized. There can be a lot of drama around wikis (just look at Wikipedia), but ultimately they’re a good thing.

Example: look at the short fiction I’m listing on the blog. It’s great to have it here, and hopefully when people search for multicultural or multiethnic fiction they’ll find the listings. But a wiki has a further advantage of listing and presenting the information in a straightforward, easy to find way. This page will soon be a complete record of the short fiction published by POC in 2009. It won’t be complete just because of me, though. It’ll be complete because other people will come along and add any missing information.

Here on the CBS blog I’m only focusing on 2009 short fiction. But over on the wiki there’s a page for listing 2008 short fiction. And if someone wants to, they can create 2007, 2006, 2005, etc. pages. Plus, there’s a page for listing book-length work and individual author pages.

I very much encourage POC authors to contribute to the wiki. Unlike Wikipedia it’s okay for the authors themselves to add their own information. (For now… I think. I did.) I’d love for the wiki to be one of the most comprehensive repositories for information about SF by and about people of color.