author's name on the title page [of every fanzine novel]

[morgandawn]

Posting this here at the request of a non-DW member who is working hard on Fanlore fanzine entries. She tells me she's in contact with the Fanlore Gardeners, but thought that others may be witnessing similar issues.

PS. Yes, she has entered thousands of fanzines since July.  Amazing.

Edited PPS. In re-reading her entry, it occurs to me that adding an author's name to every fanzine novel when there are no existing duplicates is overkill. It is a good tool *when* there *are* duplicates - but it seems (if I read her comments correctly)  it causes problems when used in every case as the 'norm'.

"Hey, Can I just have folks revisit this decision to put the name of an author's name on the title page [of every fanzine novel]? I think it's creating a lot of problems.

: makes it difficult for a user to search for the name of a novel she or he wants to find. Most folks don't make a distinction between "search" and "go." And even knowing the difference and then using them doesn't get the information needed. The odd search engine just snarls all this up even more.

: makes it difficult to accurately enter information, creating duplicates and worse

: creates problems down the road when (1) one enters a novel without knowing the author and then locates the author later, this causes confusion and makes more work, (2) one uses a pre-1995 name with initials and then finds out the full name can be used after all (3) one uses a name that later turns out to be one the author says she or he doesn't want used. Every single one of these instances require some fancy footwork and duplications of a lot of effort.

: brings up the political issues of putting an author on the title header but not the artist, which I've been told if the art is "noteworthy" then the artist should also be included, difficult for the same reasons as author names, but also because one often doesn't have the cover on hand AND is also asked to decide what's noteworthy and what isn't

: and why a single author on a novel, but not a single author anthology? It seems awfully arbitrary.

Can folks revisit this decision? I mean, I've added thousands of zines in the last six weeks (revising all of them will be a big headache) but I've still got thousands and thousands to go. Why not nip this now? Please?

Mrs. Potato Head"

Comments

[christycorr]

She's contacted the wiki committee, and we're discussing this in our next meeting. Suggestions and opinions would be much appreciated, though!

[morgandawn]

I like the idea of adding the fandom to duplicate fanzines with the same title rather than wading into author/artist/naming conventions. There may be a few corner cases where there are 2+ zines in the same fandom with the same name, but that should be rare and handled as a one off.

[elf]

I believe there are several (as in, more than two) Trekzines with the name "IDIC," but that's rather understandable, and I would expect, rather rare. The handful of duplicate names are probably better dealt with by disambiguation pages than a policy that affects thousands of other zines.

[ratcreature]

I agreed with this in the wiki talk but I'll second that here too. I have the same problems when editing there. I have entered less zines (though some too), but collated a whole lot into lists so that they can be found and so on and added stuff and proofread, looked for duplicates, and this name thing is a lot of hassle. It makes it harder to find duplicates because the search engine sucks so much and it adds dozens of variations, none of which the search engine necessarily finds even if you click search not go. It forces everyone to move pages around constantly and then edit the links in the lists, and get rid of double redirects which is also extra work (because that's what happens if a zine is first entered as "random title - sue f." then later it turns out that sue fangirl is okay with the full name online so it gets moved to "random title - sue fangirl" only then it turns out it wasn't a novel after all but an anthology of related stories and it gets moved to "random title (fandom x)", because others with random title already exist, and you have double redirects.

I also dislike that artist thing.

[morgandawn]

the only time I've added an author/fandom to a zine title is when there is already one with the same name. hopefully, if we follow that as a rule there will be fewer edits down the road.

on a side note: I go back to the pages I create from time to time to see what edits/changes the Gardeners make so I can do it right the next time. although like Mrs P, when transferring this much data over, total compliance is hard.

[meg_r]

I know little about zines, but my problem with this is that some of the stories being labelled zines were first published online, and I don't see why the zine version should take precedence. Plus we could end up with two pages; one for the zine and one for the original version. Perhaps stories ought to be filed under their original form, i.e. if it's first published online it should follow the same format as other online stories, with a note to say it was also later published as a zine? (I know it's not always possible to tell!)

[ratcreature]

But why has the author to be there at all, online or zine? I mean, why not just the title, unless you need some clarification? It works for wikipedia to have book titles just as titles, like The Dispossessed it just that not "The Dispossessed - Ursula LeGuin" or any thing like that.

[meg_r]

Yeah, I guess. I don't object to dispensing with having the author there, though it could get confusing; it seems likely articles about fanworks will make up a significant chunk of fanlore, and a lot of them don't have very distintive titles. And if you are going to dispense with creators on one type of fanwork, what about others, like vids, which are mostly just named after the song?

[ratcreature]

I think it would actually be kind of cool to have disambiguation pages for songs where vids to it are collected under the song, that way you'd see right away which songs are really popular for vidding. And you need the disambiguation pages in any case to help find things, only with the author names added right away often you don't notice that a disambiguation was needed because you added half a dozen stories called "Redemption" by such-and-such, without ever noticing that "Redemption" is blank. As for the non-distinctive titles, the same applies to anthology titles, where usually the fandom is enough, though a few times I needed a year to distinguish. I don't mind authors in titles to distinguish things either, but I think it is inconvenient to make this the default.

[morgandawn]

I think meg is talking about something entirely different than the original point (apples vs oranges). from a data entry/data recovery perspective adding the author title to every zine (whether it was published first online or in print format) is proving to be problematic for a number of reasons

How we should be handling online novels that were later published is another question.

[ratcreature]

A number of stories where first published online though, and then reprinted as zines, not the other way around, however now they are entered first in their zine form, because zines are being added in large batches. And it doesn't make much sense to have two entries for those anymore than for stories that were zines first and then put online, because either way it's just different editions of the same thing.

[morgandawn]

moving on to this second/seperate question (how to handle the same version of online vs. zine fan fic)

first off - I am talking only about novels . online stories collected in anthology zines might be handled differently (for logistic reasons). so let's start off by thinking about novels..

1. are we adding stubs for every novel written and published online? usually online novels are listed under author name (along with all her other work) with a link to the online version. so are we deciding that every online novel that has been written gets its own unique page seperate and apart from the author page?

2. if we're not going to create an stub for every novel published online, then we'd add a comment in the zine stub of the novel saying: story originally published online (with a link to where).

3. the tricky part comes in those cases where someone decided: hey, I am going to create a seperate stub just for this one online novel - and then someone comes along and later wants to add an entry for the zine.

in that situation - there might need to be merging done of the two.

so the bigger question should be: are we asking people to create stubs for every online novel? and if we are, then are we asking people to *also* create stubs for every story written? or is there some middle ground (create a stub only for certain subset of online novels/stories)

does this help frame the question?

[ratcreature]

I don't think this problem really exists. I mean, of course in theory it does, but in practice separate pages for novels or stories are going to be created when someone is interested in writing something about that story or in cataloging it. I created pages for some online stories and not for others without following any sort of policy. Just like I did lists of most fanworks for some authors, and just listed a few examples for others. There is no consistency.

Just like there are pages for some fansite/communities others are just links in the fandom's page. Obviously we are never going to have a comprehensive all encompassing index of all fanworks ever, so the selection will always be arbitrary, especially with so few people participating in the wiki.

As cataloging approach, considering the little info that is there on some zines, it would make just as much sense to just have lists under the publisher's name or on the fandom page for the irrelevant zines nobody took much notice of in the first place, but there is interest to create lots of zine pages, and since fanlore doesn't presume to judge what is important there are a ton separate pages. I imagine if someone wants to represent the scope of their online fandom and created a page for every online fanwork in their fandom, fanlore would have that. As I understand it there are really no policies about that one way or another, so what fanworks get a page depends solely on whether someone bothers to create it.

However, well liked and popular stories are obviously more likely to have want to write about them, because they have more likely talk associated with the story (kerfuffles, spin-offs, art, shared universes, whatever) that someone will want to mention, and those stories are also more likely to exist in zine form if they were first online, because popular stories are liked for that.

And I still think there should not be separate articles for print and online editions.

[morgandawn]

nods in agreement. I think we should have one entry with comments/data as needed (ex. fanzine with comments on 'this was originally online. or 'online story also printed in zine format, with x pages and here is the cover).

Mrs.Potato Head here:

[(Anonymous)]

I'm all for one-stop shopping. Get the name of the novel/anthology out there and add notes to where it can be found, how it originated, and such. Too many separate pages makes things too complicated and doesn't add anything you can't put on a main page.

Mrs. Potato Head

Mrs.Potato Head here:

[(Anonymous)]

As for zines, I'm cataloging the paper ones because they're a unique paper trail of history, one that is the mothership of a lot of "modern" fandom. Zines are also somewhat of a finite source, as less and less of them have been published in recent years.

If someone wishes to catalog online fiction, they're certainly welcome to do that! If it matters to someone, they'll write about it. And the way I figure it, there's something out there for everyone. :-) That's the beauty of the wiki.

MPH

Re: Mrs.Potato Head here:

[ratcreature]

I definitely think it's cool you are entering so many zines. My main point was more that print zines aren't really fundamentally different from online fiction (well, except fewer in number probably) or added under different rules, but that it is more random chance that right now zines are added in bunch, when in six months someone might just as well add stubs for a whole bunch of online fiction, because some fandom's archive is about to vanish and they want more than screencaps or something, because that fandom is their favorite thing.

Mrs.Potato Head here:

[(Anonymous)]

I just got an email from Christy on the committee with a decision about the single author novel thing. Problem is, (and I'm sure it's me), but it's confusing. I replied to her asking for clarification and asked her to post the info here (or if I can) and anywhere else it needs to be so we're all on the same page!

MPH