We bought my son a Playstation about a year and a half ago, and I rekindled my love affair with video games – probably in a bad way.  I’ve been playing that thing almost as much as he has.

As a result of playing games like Destiny and Warframe, I find myself looking for help with these incredibly complex, sci-fi multiplayer games on sites like Wikia.  If you haven’t seen this site before, check it out.

It’s basically a network of wikis built around fan groups (or fandoms, as they have come to be called).  Some of these groups are enormous.  Some are relatively tiny.  But all of these groups produce a network of carefully edited and curated information, not including huge forums full of questions and answers.

Many of these fans are NOT kids.  Perhaps you could even argue that the hardest-working contributors are underemployed young people.  I have no evidence to confirm or deny this.  I’m just overwhelmed at how MUCH there is, how carefully and thoroughly it is updated, edited, and critiqued by fans.  A small wiki often has thousands of pages, created and maintained by hundreds of people, sometimes with thousands of comments.

Take, for example, the Destiny wiki.  It has almost 6,000 pages.  And these are web pages, which might be thousands of words long in some cases.  Players of this game have essentially written a set of encyclopedias about the game.  The Call of Duty wiki has over 9,000.

Much like Wikipedia, the quality of these pages varies.  The reliability of these pages, though, is held to a high standard.  Players want accurate information, and many of them will carefully verify and edit information on these pages.

So what am I getting at?

I think that this website, with its almost endlessly ramifying groups and subgroups of “fandoms,” is a wonderful resource of authentic nonfiction writing about things that kids – and adults – care about.  I think it’s what kids are reading and writing, for fun, in their spare time, outside of school, often at great length and with great care.  I think this is a valuable resource and a valuable example of audience and purpose.  And I think I’m going to be using parts of it – a lot – in my writing instruction for some time.

Heads up, though: sometimes people post nasty things in the comments (just like YouTube).  I would recommend selecting pieces and sharing them, if you want to use it for instruction, not just sending kids there to browse (unless you have older students).