Ficlets

Article summary

Ficlets was a non-commercial AOL community website dedicated to publishing and archiving ficlets, which are similar to flash fiction. It was founded on 31 October 2006 by Kevin Lawver, although it did not become fully operational until early to mid-March 2007. On 6 June 2008, Lawver severed his employment from AOL and, in turn, departed as system administrator for Ficlets. No new administrator was announced to replace Lawver, leaving the respective duties for the site unmaintained. On 2 December 2008, it was announced on the People Connection Blog that Ficlets would permanently be closed, as of 15 January 2009. On 6 December 2008, a banner was placed at the header of Ficlets pages that announced the closure of the site and a pop-up window was added to the main page that read "Ficlets is going away soon :(". Lawver attempted to save the site to no avail, so he began a "Ficlets Graveyard" to archive all the ficlets written prior to the closing of the site. Lawver announced on 10 January 2009 that, with the help of Ficlets.com programmer Jason Garber and design team Viget Labs, a replacement site entitled Ficly.com would be launched. At the time of the announcement, the Ficly front page consisted of a logo (subtitling the format "A better, shorter story"), a statement of not being active yet, and a form to sign up an e-mail address for notification of the official launch.…

Key claims

1. date of foundation: 2006-10-31 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. The record states that the date of foundation is "2006-10-31". What evidence would count against this claim?
3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

No sources recorded.