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

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"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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?

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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

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