Status of Fanwork Categories

[aethel]

Since response to the fanwork category proposal post was positive, we have started creating the proposed fanwork subcategories. So far, we have added:

* Zine Fandom
* Podfics
* Fanfiction
* Vids

and updated the corresponding templates. Now the Fanworks category contains only 348 pages, down from over 11,000! Check out the current Fanworks category.

The fanart categories haven't been created yet because we wanted to double check on what categories are needed. Because these categories would be added manually, and there are over 29,000 image files on Fanlore to sort through, we want to do it right the first time, if possible. So far, the proposed list includes:

* Category:Artworks
** Category:Zine Covers
** Category:Doujinshi Covers
** Category:Manips
** Category:Icons
** Category:Banners
** Category:Drawings

1. Are these good category names?
2. Anything missing?
3. Would zine covers with drawn artwork be given both the Zine Covers and Drawings categories?
4. Zine Covers needs to be further subdivied since there are so many examples on the wiki. (What is a useful way to do this? Fandom? Style? Decade? Do we want to distinguish between "art covers" and text-only covers?)
5. No one has requested this yet, but how about a "Calendars" category? There are quite a few articles about print calendars on the wiki.

Commenters on the last post also requested other templates and categories. So far, we have a template (but no category) for Template:FanFilm and related stuff. Also proposed:

*Filk
*Podcasts (needs a template first) new template
*Tape Zines (might have to be added manually?)

Regarding Filk, we have a filk album template (and an unused songbook template), but no dedicated categories other than Filk Music. We have a brand new filksong template that needs some feedback from filk experts. Do we want a new category like Filk Songs & Albums? Like this:
* Category:Filk Music (existing)
** Filk Songs & Albums (new)

Or do we want separate categories? Like this:

* Category:Filk Music (existing)
** Filk Songs (new)
** Filk Albums (new)

Comments

[ratcreature]

The "drawings" category will cause you all kinds of trouble when sorting things. First people won't be sure whether you mean it as a catch-all in opposition to "manips" and they should put painted fanart in that category, even though those are not "drawings" in the narrow sense, and if it's not a catchall, you won't have anywhere to put paintings. Further, in many cases people won't be sure whether something is a "drawing" or a "painting", either because you can't tell the media, because it might be mixed media with drawn and painted parts, because it is all done digital and nobody could possibly say whether the line of pixels counts as drawn or painted.

ETA: For subdividing artworks, perhaps dA's system could give ideas. I find it less than ideal, but then it is hard to come up with a category tree, and at least it's an approach that works somewhat in practice.

Since currently most fanart seems to be zine covers and interior art (and that distinction would be an obvious way to cut the huge number of zine images into two), there probably is no need to set up many categories for the rest to subdivide those, but if you if you wanted to set up more diverse categories for fanart to encourage documenation, there could be some for the digital fanart categories like animated gifs and the like, generally these meme arts, fannish skins&themes (could go together with banners & wallpapers & mood/emoticon sets in a broader category of customization art), then virtual 3D art (poser and the like). Obviously painting and mixed media (I'd suggest not separating digital & traditional there because both are often mixed and it can be impossible to tell from just a digital copy how an artwork was made), drawings (though the problem I mentioned above of delineating it against painting remains), cartoons&comics (not as source fandom but as fanart medium), typographic art (like images made up from text and letter and such), papercraft & folding (like paper cut-out art, fannish origami), photography (like fans doing photos of action figures in funny places, photo comics, other fannish photography), manips (thoug again there is a sorting problem to draw boundaries between mixed media, collage and one kind of manip and digital painting and another kind of manip, especially when you have no meta info from the artist, but a Fanlore editor wants to archive and sort a piece fanart they've seen somewhere and then uploaded to the wiki), real 3D art (sculptures, miniatures, dioramas, models...). Then various artisan crafts, like costumery, dolls & plushies, jewelry, fibercrafts, cake designs...

[aethel]

Thanks, ratcreature! You have good points about Drawings, and I hadn't thought to look at deviantart.

I wouldn't think to look under Customization for wallpaper or icons, but I don't know what else to call it.

Photography sounds easy to implement.

I love all the fancraft subcategories, though I'm afraid some of them would never be used. Still, we could start with
* Fan Crafts (or Artisan Crafts)
** Dolls & Plushies
** Textiles
*** Clothing? (we have a lot of t-shirt images)

I think someone suggested "Fan Crafts" a while ago as a general Fan Activity category, but nothing came of the conversation. We could create it now:
*Category:Fan Activities
** Category:Visual Art
*** Category:Fan Crafts
?

[ratcreature]

I don't think the common definition of "Visual Arts" includes Artisan Crafts, so that subcategorisation is misleading for the user. If you look for example at the wikipedia page for "visual arts" the subsections are drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, filmmaking, computer art, plastic arts & sculpture.

However if you separate arts and crafts at the top level alongside each other you run into the problem that people won't easily know where to put the three-dimensional fannish arts, because few of those are the traditional sculpture, but more often things that people associate with "crafts", like fannish dioramas, where dioramas are a typical thing people associate with school crafting lessons, or modified dolls and action figures (rather than sculpting from scratch), or really modding stuff in fannish styles in general.

But that is better than to put all crafts as a subsection of visual arts, I would never look for it there.

[aethel]

That sounds reasonable.

Now I'm thinking the category should be called simply "Crafts" since the other Fan Activity subcategories don't have "fan" in the name. Plus, it looks like I was the only one asking for "Fan Crafts". :/

[kylara]

I feel very iffy about the Doujinshi Covers category. It'll be a decent amount of work to re-categorize those images, and it's a bit more work for me when uploading new images. I don't mind that so much, but I want to be sure it's worth it -- and I guess I just don't really see it's purpose.

Would this remove the covers from the Doujinshi category (and its subcategories), or would these images be categorized in both? If the purpose is to categorize the images separately and remove them from the Doujinshi category, then maybe a more general category to take all the doujinshi sample images would be better -- but I'm not sure even that's necessary. Right now, doujinshi covers and sample images get moved into doujinshi subcategories based on fandoms, so they're not overwhelming the Doujinshi category or its subcategories. If it's just to categorize them under art, then again I'm not sure why it's just the covers and not sample images as well -- but even some of the covers are just text, not visual artwork.

About clearing up categories to make them more browseable, this has also been brought up for the Vids and Doujinshi categories. When a page is moved into a subcategory, it's not removed from the main category because the template automatically adds the main category, so pages build up in the main category. I think this is something that should be looked into as well. It's not a pressing issue yet, but as the categories continue to grow it might be. The Doujinshi category has nearly 800 pages.

[aethel]

We could have a general "Doujinshi Art" category if that works better. Doujinshi art would be removed from the Doujinshi category, so we'd end up with a hierarchy like this:

Category:Fanworks
*Category:Doujinshi
**Category:Doujinshi Art
*Category:Artworks
**Category:Doujinshi Art

I am envisioning the wank if we create a zine art category and no doujinshi art category, though I guess that's not enough of a justification for the extra work. Hmmm.

As for the template/category issue, we could start creating fandom-specific templates for the largest fandom subcategory/fanwork types and see how it goes. One benefit is that we could tailor the fandom-specific templates to automatically include useful links, and we could pre-populate the "fandom" field.

[elf]

I've got some feedback about filk even though I think I had a lot of influence on the template; looking at it now, I've got maybe different thoughts.

Filk could maybe use a TTTO (to the tune of) line in the template instead of "original." Original tunes would just say "original" in that spot. I believe TTTO filks are the vast majority--but not in recordings, where licensing comes into play.

"Name of fan who wrote the lyrics" is odd--some filks weren't written by fans. Jabberwocky sung to the tune of Greensleeves is a filk favorite. And Leslie Fish gave tunes to a lot of Kipling's poetry. There's potentially an argument that those aren't "really filksongs," but that's not specifically relevant for Fanlore, other than being a potential space for MPoV input.

Performer is weird. Filksongs don't have specific performers unless they're recorded, and those might have several performers. (I mean, might be recorded by several different people on different collections.) Albums have performers; individual songs don't. (If there's a song whose writer refuses to allow anyone else to perform it, that can be noted in the text somewhere.)

Suggestion:
* Category:Filk Music (existing)
** Filk Songs (new)
** Filk Albums (new)
** Filk Books/zines
** Filk fanac

I'm unsure of the proper label for the last two. With a bit of thought, I could maybe come up with differences between the standard Fanzine template & a Filk Zine/Songbook template (Includes sheet music y/n? Includes chords y/n? Single theme/genre or various?) but I haven't got time/energy right now to really sort that out.

Filk fanac: there are filk conventions, filk awards, filk events ("house filks"), and filky websites.

There are enough of all of these things to justify a category set on Fanlore, even if there aren't many there now. Part of the reason Fanlore continues to grow in ficfandom and zines and not so much other areas, is the tendency of wikis to build on what already exists instead of branching into new territory; having the categories available would encourage more pages being built.

[aethel]

Thanks for your feedback! I made the changes you suggested to the Filk Song template.

It'll be easy to create separate "Filk Songs" and "Filk Albums" categories now that we have the templates.

I've been noodling around with a FilkSongbook template, but I don't know how useful it is. We could also have a FilkZine template. We could define "Filk Zines" as all zines with some filk-related content and then create Filk Books as a subcategory? Like this:

Filk Music
* Filk Zines
** Filk Books

Zines
* Filk Zines
** Filk Books

?

[elf]

I would think that "filk zine" and "filk songbook" are the same thing. It's just that filkers don't call them zines; they call them "songbooks" or just "books" (because a filk book is obviously a songbook). (IME; YMMV.) I don't know of any "filk zines" that aren't collections of songs, although there might be some with non-song content. Certainly, there are many with editorial notes/intros; could easily be some with an essay or two; not sure there's any that have fic, as opposed to "a fic zine with a song or two included."

Filkers who visit the site would not be likely to look in the "zines" category to find filkbooks. It would make sense to them if they found them there, but they wouldn't necessarily think of categorizing them that way without being told that's where they were. They would, however, look under "filk music." And possibly get confused by the label "filk zines," wondering if someone had made fanfic about filkers or specifically for filk conventions or something like that.

(Hmm, does Fanlore have a way to embed sounds? This question has nothing at all to do with categorization.)

---

Entirely other topic: How are APAs categorized? Are they a subset of zines or their own thing? (What I know of APA fandom could fill whole thimbles, so it's not an area I'm comfortable expounding on; I'm just aware that it runs in somewhat different circles than zineishness.)

[aethel]

APAs are in the Newsletters & Letterzines category.

We do tend to default to "zines" as the generic term for any fannish print periodical. There's also an issue where every zine that includes material related to more than one canon could be labeled a "multimedia zine", even though I understand the term to refer specifically to media fandom zines. I'm not sure what to do about that, especially since I have zero first-hand knowledge of any fannish print tradition.

I had thought that there were zines about filking that did not contain lyrics/chords, but I can't call up any examples at the moment.

[aethel]

so far, I've created these two categories:

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Filk_Albums
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Filk_Songs

(There's an unfortunate side effect wherein the main Albums category is now empty because we don't have any documentation on wizard rock albums. I hope this is temporary.)

[elf]

I can kind-of imagine other fannish Album types (um, Renfaire things? Bands like Avalon Rising? Rocky Horror Picture Show audience participation album?) so I'm not worried about it being wizard rock only.

I should, um, maybe add more songs to the filk songs template. Hm. (When I have more brain. Finding template details & instructions is beyond me right now.)

Other filksongs (which I am listing so I'll remember them, or someone else can add filk template details):
http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Horse-Tamer%27s_Daughter_%28filksong%29
http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_the_Helpers
http://fanlore.org/wiki/My_Old_Man
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Rebel_Pilot%27s_Lament
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Temper_of_Revenge
http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Territory_of_Rigel
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Tie-Fighters_in_the_Sky
http://fanlore.org/wiki/We_Didn%27t_Start_the_Fandom
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Zaphod_Beeblebrox_and_Me

Songs that should get added (when someone who knows about them has time; mentioning it here gives me an email that will work as a reminder for when I've got time):
S-100 Bus
Old Time Religion
Velveteen
Yoda and The Saga Begins (which Weird Al insists are not filk, but damn do they get sung at filksings fairly often)
What Shall We Do With A Drunken Hobbit?
You Bash the Balrog

[aethel]

psst, I just created the Filk Songbooks category.

[turlough]

Hmmm, I have to say that I'm less than happy about the choice of "Manips" for what I presume will be all manner of works using already existing photos. While some are undoubtedly what I've seen called manips in fandoms like SGA and SPN - character photos that's been manipulated through the addition of unrelated photos (aka "his head is pasted on") - many of them aren't.

In the fandoms I hang out in (bandom and previously popslash) works like this or this or this, or what this person does are never, ever called "manips". (Manips, as I defined the term above, simply don't exist in these fandom.) I've seen some people call them "blends" but mostly they're just refered to by size, i.e. "banners" if they're medium/small and "wallpapers" if they're large enough to use as a computer background.

I'm afraid I don't have any concrete suggestions to offer of what to use instead. I mostly just wanted to make you aware that even basic terminology can differ quite radically between different fandoms.

[aethel]

Yeah, I wouldn't call those examples "manips" either. I think of manips as pastede on yay, plus The Theban Band's work. Maybe "photographic art"?

I think we should also have an Animated Gifs category, but that leaves the issue of still images. Hmm.

[ratcreature]

Photographic art sounds more like fans taking photographs to me. You could go with something descriptive, if clunky like "photograph-based digital art" or "photo editing". Some of these I think of just as "digital collage" but not all these designs are based on more than one photo/screen cap.