I've been trying to add more entries to Fanlore about podfic and have run into a bit of an issue. When I was creating new pages I was titling them "Title (podfic)" to help distinguish that this was an entry about the podfic not about the fic, which normally has the same title.
The problem though, is that this goes against current Fanlore policies to only add an honourific to an entry if there's a conflicting entry of the same name and there's a need to disambiguate. So the gardeners, rightly, were changing the names of the pages I created to remove the honourific.
And while I totally understand the reason for the policy, it still made me nervous because without the (podfic) in the title it just wasn't as clear that the entry was a podfic entry. Sure enough, one of the entries I made was later edited in a way to make it seem more like a fic entry (it's since been changed back and with other additions).
So I'd like to have a conversation about what we can do to make sure that podfic entries are welcomed on Fanlore and that future editors, trying to be helpful but not aware that the entry is a podfic entry, won't end up morphing the entries into fic entries. I've spoken to some individual podficcers about this as well as some of the Fanlore gardeners, and here's some of the suggestions we've come up with so far:
klb suggested that one way to deal with it is to include "podfic" in the title, but not as an honourific. So "Title podfic" would be how the pages are named. Most of the time, in fannish day-to-day conversations, people will often specify when they're talking about a podfic if the context of the situation doesn't already imply it. And when you look at places like AO3 or general fandom comms, many podficcers add that sort of distinction when they post their work. So adding "podfic" to the title does reflect podfic fandom today.
Sparcicle suggested that we add a note to the top of podfic pages saying "This page is about the podfic. For the story, see Title (story)."
This will give an immediate visual clue to those viewing the page that this is a page for the podfic and gives them a link to the fic page (or the opportunity to create a page for the fic if it doesn't already exist, as it won't in most cases).
There was some debate in the talk page where this was brought up that (story) is perhaps not the correct honourific and, while I'm throwing my 2 cents in, I'd like to say that I'd prefer to see the fic getting an honourific like (fanfic) instead, since the podfic is a story too (as are vids and comics and many other fanarts). In fact, what the fic and podfic share is the story, what we need to disambiguate is which medium the story is being told in.
aethel suggested adding a grey banner to the infobox to make it clearer that the template is a podfic template.
Personally, I think I like options 2 and 3 together best, but I thought I'd ask others how they feel before I start creating a bunch more pages. And please feel free to add more suggestions!
The problem though, is that this goes against current Fanlore policies to only add an honourific to an entry if there's a conflicting entry of the same name and there's a need to disambiguate. So the gardeners, rightly, were changing the names of the pages I created to remove the honourific.
And while I totally understand the reason for the policy, it still made me nervous because without the (podfic) in the title it just wasn't as clear that the entry was a podfic entry. Sure enough, one of the entries I made was later edited in a way to make it seem more like a fic entry (it's since been changed back and with other additions).
So I'd like to have a conversation about what we can do to make sure that podfic entries are welcomed on Fanlore and that future editors, trying to be helpful but not aware that the entry is a podfic entry, won't end up morphing the entries into fic entries. I've spoken to some individual podficcers about this as well as some of the Fanlore gardeners, and here's some of the suggestions we've come up with so far:
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Sparcicle suggested that we add a note to the top of podfic pages saying "This page is about the podfic. For the story, see Title (story)."
This will give an immediate visual clue to those viewing the page that this is a page for the podfic and gives them a link to the fic page (or the opportunity to create a page for the fic if it doesn't already exist, as it won't in most cases).
There was some debate in the talk page where this was brought up that (story) is perhaps not the correct honourific and, while I'm throwing my 2 cents in, I'd like to say that I'd prefer to see the fic getting an honourific like (fanfic) instead, since the podfic is a story too (as are vids and comics and many other fanarts). In fact, what the fic and podfic share is the story, what we need to disambiguate is which medium the story is being told in.
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Personally, I think I like options 2 and 3 together best, but I thought I'd ask others how they feel before I start creating a bunch more pages. And please feel free to add more suggestions!
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Adding a disambiguation line sounds like a good idea!
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That's not to say we cannot discuss why they're considered different, just to explain why we don't, under the current templates, lump them together on the same page.
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edited to say - the honor-ific to be added to the podfic page if/when the second fan fiction page is created. In its absence I'd add the 'header' with a red link pointer to the placeholder page for the fanfic page (story or fan fiction -either way). Tweaking the template to automatically include a grey banner would be a simple visual fix.
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Talk:This Never Happened
Talk:Trying to Communicate
Template talk:Podfic
I like
For disambiguation I prefer "xxx (fanfiction)".
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That fic can overshadow anything else is a common problem, not a podfic specific one (there are no individual fanart pages at all as far as I can tell nor a category for fanart to find fanart related entries even though there are thousands of fanrt pieces archived in fanlore mostly as eyecandy in fic and zine articles with little said about them, it's all unlabelled and art itself is either on story pages, on zine pages, though admittedly art-centric publications like doujinshi or calendars have their categories, or on artist pages, regardless that frequently art inspires fic or that sometimes art can be hugely popular while the fic is not all that remarkable). IMO the solution should be editing guidelines, and gardener intervention if someone edits in a way that buries the podfic aspect, not warning boxes everywhere.
I mean, I totally sympathize with the point that it is important not to reinforce the impression that it is all about fic, and to create visibility for podfic, but I don't think an extra podfic header is the way to go.
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(Anonymous) - 2012-09-22 11:50 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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klb suggested that one way to deal with it is to include "podfic" in the title, but not as an honourific. So "Title podfic" would be how the pages are named. Most of the time, in fannish day-to-day conversations, people will often specify when they're talking about a podfic if the context of the situation doesn't already imply it. And when you look at places like AO3 or general fandom comms, many podficcers add that sort of distinction when they post their work. So adding "podfic" to the title does reflect podfic fandom today.
I really like this suggestion! And I'm sort of facepalming that we didn't think of it. I think as an actual gardener (but not a committee member)-- just personally speaking, I often fall into the trap of "but this is the rule so we must do it this way, and everything must be the same, in order to be organized and not confusing" but as aethel pointed out, fandom is a big place and we should ideally be responding with flexibility in order to reflect how people are actually doing things, even if it doesn't fit perfectly into some theoretical idea of what things *should* look like.
And also as a wiki contributor I tend to think of what will be best in the long term for much larger groups of future wiki participants-- so my priority is generally simpler procedures for creating pages, the same processes for every fanwork, etc., and then I sort of forget, "oh yeah, people will also just be USING the wiki, like, to look things up and find information, duh." And using "Title Of Story Podfic" would be best in that case as well, as Paraka also points out, because it seems to me that's how people would *search* for the podfic page, if they were looking for it-- they'd search for "Such And Such Podfic".
And then as klb points out, podfic is also special case compared to other currently existing types of fanworks, in that generally, disambiguation is usually only needed in the case of a very short generic title like "Alone" or "Masks", or if it's a very common fandom injoke/reference like (this is just a made up example) "Me and Thee" in Starsky & Hutch fandom, where that's the name of a zine and an archive and a mailing list and a couple of stories and also someone's pseud and so on, and those can usually be worked out by the "first come first served" rule and by creating disambiguation pages not automatically, but mostly only as needed.
But a podfic 95% of the time will have the same title as a text fic, so the page creation guidelines should probably reflect that podfic titling conventions are different than other types of fanwork titling conventions.
So, my general priority would still be that the shortest/simplest title & shortest/simplest page creation system is best, but I think in this case I've come around to the idea that the shortest/simplest system for podfic pages *should* include the info that the work is a podfic. It's less confusing and also it's less challenging for the casual wiki editor than creating disambiguation pages.
I'm not sure yet about whether it should be "Title of Story Podfic" or "Title of Story (podfic)." The second way looks neater, I think, but it might confuse the casual wiki editor into thinking that they would always need to put (vid) or (zine) other details in the title of a page, and also I worry about offending people if we say "No, that rule is just for podfic," "Well, why are there special rules just for podfic!"
These are really just minor concerns though, I guess I don't have a strong preference either way.
There was some debate in the talk page where this was brought up that (story) is perhaps not the correct honourific and, while I'm throwing my 2 cents in, I'd like to say that I'd prefer to see the fic getting an honourific like (fanfic) instead, since the podfic is a story too (as are vids and comics and many other fanarts). In fact, what the fic and podfic share is the story, what we need to disambiguate is which medium the story is being told in.
Right, different mediums are also stories, but a story in zine format is labeled "zine," in audio format "podfic" and then in text format, currently, "story."
But the problem is, there's not that much difference between "story" and "fanfic," I don't think-- in the sense that they are both umbrella terms and literally both mean more than just "text based internet fan fiction." I mean, a zine is fanfic, a podfic is fanfic, a fan comic is fanfic. If we changed to "fanfic" to indicate the internet text version of a story, wouldn't we equally be saying "these works aren't really fanfic?"
I mean, "story" is inexact, but I don't know if there is a more exact term that is actually, currently in active use in fandom, to mean just an internet-posted text-based story and not stories in other mediums.
The only one that I can think of that has actually been commonly used in fandom would be back in the day when people used "zinefic" and "netfic" to distinguish between those two media types, but I don't think we'd have much luck trying to get people to use "netfic" now.
And this is where we get into the issue that Fanlore is (ideally) descriptive, not prescriptive, meaning, in this case, that we would prioritize using the terms that are already *being* used, and not be like an anthropologist and say "We've decided to label this sort of thing 'textfic' even though nobody in fandom actually uses that term."
Anyway. I don't think I was around when "story" was chosen, but I always assumed that the thought process there was "how easy is this going to be for large groups of people in the long run, including lots of casual editors," and using "fanfic" instead of "story" opens up all those variations of spelling, as someone pointed out on one of the talk page discussions-- now you're not just having problems with non-standardized labeling like "TS fic" and "Sentinel fic" and "The Sentinel fic," -- now you're adding a whole new problem point where people are creating duplicate pages/making unsuccessful searches because there is the ambiguity of "fic," "fanfic," "fan fic," "fan fiction," "fanfiction," etc. So in that sense, "story" has an advantage just because it's harder to mess up.
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"The current practice of not disambiguating page names until there's more than one page with the same name has two practical considerations:
1. our search function is not the greatest. if the page is disambiguated, but there's no un-ambiguated version, it's harder to reach the page.
2. if the page is disambiguated, but there's no un-ambiguated version, someone is more likely to create a duplicate entry for the same concept. And then no one will be able to find the original page because they will automatically be sent to the un-ambiguated one when they type the page name into the search bar and hit Enter.
Of course, we could solve these issues by creating the basic name [[Podfic Title]] and redirecting it to the disambiguated version [[Podfic Title (podfic)]], but that is an extra step we would need to remember every time a podfic page is created. Livia makes a good point about not privileging one fanwork type over another. We don't add qualifiers to page names for any other type of fanwork either, so adding the (podfic) could seem like saying Fanlore doesn't think podfic is a real fanwork. And we do think it is a real and valuable type of fanwork! On the other hand, if podficcers themselves think podfic pages need to have the (podfic) in the title, maybe that's a good enough reason to include it. PPOV in action?"
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It's not a honorific (at least not the way I understand it? The dictionary tells me it means "giving or expressing honor or respect"; is there another meaning I'm missing as an EFL speaker?), it's a way to make it possible for several pages with exactly the same name to exist on Fanlore. If the name is not exactly the same (the 24 Hours/24 HOURS example I gave you on one of the talk pages), there is no need for disambiguation in the title of a page. That said, if there is going to be a separate page about a podfic as a fanwork, the naming of the page should follow the naming rules for all fanwork pages, otherwise the treatment of podfic on Fanlore would be not equal to the treatment of other fanworks (see for example Break Like Time: The Fifth Column, a page about a fic trailer for the story of the same name which doesn't have a Fanlore page) and therefore send the message that podfic is not equal. Also, it wouldn't be practical because it means editors would be expected to know that there are different rules for podfic pages than for all other pages, which increases the risk of breaking some editing rules without meaning to.
Adding the word "Podfic" to the name of a podfic, if that's not how the podfic creator named it to begin with, would be forcing a different name on the work and it would set precedent for that kind of approach for other fanwork pages. Forcing a different name on a fanwork is generally something Fanlore doesn't do and I think it's something we really should avoid. (However, if it became general practice for podficcers to include "Podfic" in the name of the podfic it would be part of the page title but so far I haven't seen that practice in naming podfics; the name is easy to find out by checking the entry where the podfic was posted and by checking the cover associated with it.)
Adding a disambiguation line makes sense when there already is a page for the fic, although I would hope it would already be wikilinked in the "Based On" field in the template or in the text of the page. Always adding a disambiguation line with a redlinked non-existing page would suggest that for every podfic page to exist, there would also need to be a corresponding fic page. On the one hand, that's not true, on the other hand, it would elevate the fic page to a higher importance than the podfic page while at the same time marking the podfic as a lesser fanwork that is always in need of the disclaimer that it's not something else.
Frankly, that seems like overkill to me. What's the worse that could happen? Some other editor feels inspired to add more information! That's a good thing. So what if it's about the fic? It's still new information that wasn't there before. Success! What to do with that information is part of what gardeners and other editors are there for. Maybe it should be moved to a separate page. Maybe it should both be on the same page. Maybe it's wrong and needs to be removed. Maybe it should be reworded and moved to a different section. Maybe there need to be new templates for pages that combine more than one fanwork. Maybe one or the other template works fine, depending on the examples in question. These discussions happen on the talk pages of the respective articles. Fanlore articles aren't static. They change over time and they change a lot. Someone adding something in a way you think is wrong? Completely normal and exactly what drives the growths and changes of an article, because everything can be corrected. Also, making mistakes is normal when editing a wiki, especially for new editors, and an essential part of the learning curve when editing a wiki. There is no rule that won't be broken repeatedly by several people. Basing decisions only on the fear that someone might make a mistake is not a good basis for making decisions about wiki editing rules.
Even if we go by the assumption that it was not a mistake and instead the edit of someone who thought that both fic and podfic belong on the same page, it would still hardly be a unique reaction to podfic. Just look at pages about zines made of popular netfic. Also many, many fic pages have sections about podfic on the page. If that's an acceptable way of dealing with this, the other way around shouldn't be a problem either. If the section about a fic gets too big, it can still be moved to a separate page, just like it's done the other way around.
Personally, I like aethel's suggestion best because it clearly marks the page as being about a particular type of fanwork and gives a prominent link in the header that invites the reader to find out more about that particular thing. Also, it treats all fanwork pages the same, improves the templates, and gives us reasons to make even more specific templates, which sounds like an all-around win to me.
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I don't disagree with any of your conclusions about fic and podfic being on the same page as long as the entries aren't both long, or about using aethel's suggestion (and I don't see why they can't both happen. It can be marked as a podfic page but still include some info about the fic that the podfic is a reading of, since that is information closely connected to the podfic), but I do want to clarify that the problem here wasn't that someone *added* info about the fic to the page. The only change they made was from
'''This Never Happened ''' is a Frank Iero/Gerard Way [[podfic]] by klb (3:05:31).
to
'''This Never Happened ''' is a Frank Iero/Gerard Way fanfic originally written by bexless, of which klb made a [[podfic]] (3:05:31).
and from
This was created for [[podficbigbang]]
to
The podfic was created for [[podficbigbang]]
Note that the info that it was written by bexless had already been present on the podfic page, along with a link to the text of the fic, so the addition of the author's name to that first sentence was not new information.
The only reason I'm clarifying that point is because I don't want there to be an implication that it would have inherently been a problem to add information about the fic onto the page about the podfic. Especially if it was added in a subsection further down the page, I doubt anybody would have had much of a problem with this. I feel like this situation has been read in a lot of places as podficcers not wanting any information about the fic on a fanlore page about podfic, and I don't think that's the source of the reaction to the edit at all!
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Frankly I think all this is a considerable over-reaction to a single mistake by a new editor. People have made plenty of dafter errors on Fanlore, and it's a lot easier to fix the occasional mistake than to add a draft of new guidelines to "protect" podfic pages from "vandalism".
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- I'm in favor of the policy that says titles should remain void of precisions until necessary, so, against adding podfic or (podfic). if we have to break that rule though, I prefer (podfic), I think, but I'm kind of.. wavering on that. (also I'm like frogspace, the fact that we're calling the bit in parenthetical "honorific" is ultra-confusing to me as an ESL speaker. That's.... not an honorific, that's a type. Isn't it? But anyway, moving on.
- I like Sparcicle's suggestion; it doesn't change the infobox template, and I disagree with the idea that adding that sentence *suggests* there should be a page for the fic even if there isn't. I think it says, clearly and succintly, "this is an entry for a podfic, and there is/isn't another entry for the story; the two are *different things*", which IMO is a powerful but subtle way to make the point we need to make, and might prove educational in time, so that if the type of well-meaning vandalism we've seen doesn't keep happening, we can easily decide to remove that extra banner/requirement from podfic entries in a year or whatever.
I care about creating guidelines for Gardeners so that they can correct mistakes from eager editors who got confused on the podfic entries, particularly, simply because I woudn't want podfic people who were preparing to start adding podfic to Fanlore to be discouraged thinking they might have to patrol their podfic entries to protect them, not from information additions or PPOV development, but from misguidedness induced by the primacy of fic over everything else in fandom.
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Regarding my suggestion (#2), I don't think that a note should necessarily be a requirement for podfic pages, but that it may be a good addition if an editor anticipates confusion. The idea is to minimize the ambiguity that many podfic page names present without making special rules for podfic pages.
As for the honourific, I think paraka and liviapenn both make good points about "story" versus "fanfic", so I'm ambivalent. I do prefer "fanfic" over "fanfiction", though, because I, at least, don't use "fanfiction" to refer to a single fic ("This is a fanfiction about..." sounds weird to me).
--sparcicle
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It's not that I want to ban people forever from adding fic information to a podfic entry. But as
I know my thoughts are biased, because I'm the one making a lot of podfic entries and the way I've approached making them. The rec information posted is for the podfic, making the entry seemingly about the fic causes confusion with the rest of the entry.
What I would like is to have a clear and easy way for people visiting the page to realize it's a podfic and make it so that people have to think and restructure if they want to add fic information to the page, rather than doing it willy nilly. That way we're less likely to get almost-vandalized pages and instead will get thoughtful and useful information added.
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I'd like to suggest that folks keep in mind the word "vandalize" means to purposely ruin something and to do it with harmful or malicious intent.
In the over three years I've been editing at Fanlore, the instances of actual vandalism (aside from mindless spam) can be counted on one hand.
When folks make changes and additions to pages, it has been done with good faith. People make errors, miscalculate, goof up, misread, and can be clumsy (I've been guilty of all of these things), but they don't vandalize.
Disagreements also not vandalism
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So in short: yes to a disambiguation page and to seperate podfic/fanfic/fanart pages.
Considering that, I like Sparcicle's suggestion, because it makes it easier for me as reader to immediately get to the page I'm looking for, if I accidentially landed on the wrong one - or just to see, what else there is under that name.
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No. Current policy is to disambiguate pages when there is need for disambiguation. If there is one page with "Title", that page is named "Title". When there is more than one page with "Title", all the respective pages get disambiguated accordingly, including the original page. However, that requires more than one page with "Title" to exist.
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regarding the templates
(In the spirit of using clearly labeled infoboxes to prevent bad edits, I also added the labels to fandom templates, though no power on this Earth will stop newbies from filling up these pages with canon trivia. On one occasion someone actually removed all the fandom info on a page and replaced it with canon/production info.
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:FandombyText
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:FandombyText-RPF
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Fandom-RPG
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Fandom
)
Re: regarding the templates
Re: regarding the templates