A mini-introduction and a call for brainstorming!

[cin1607]

Hey all!

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Cin and I’m new on the wiki committee this year. *waves* I see that back in September, ratcreature made a brilliant suggestion that we post themed challenges to this comm to stir up more regular waves of activity and enthusiasm and updates to the wiki. Plus, it would give us good excuses to go poke our fannish friends and say, “Hey! They’re talking about X on fanlore this week. Do you remember that? Let’s create/update a page for that on the wiki!” I love the idea! I intend to grab that ball and run with it!

If you check out the original thread, you’ll see a lot of good suggestions already, but I’d like to spend a little time before I throw out the first official challenge and do some brainstorming. What would you like to see? What would work? What might not? At this point, I’ve seen:

What was your first fandom?

What was your first fandom community?

Focus on conventions.

Focus on holiday exchanges.

Did you come into fandom between (pick a span of dates)? Which fandom? Do you remember X event from then? (“It was May, 1999. Ricky Martin was at the top of the music charts, and The Phantom Menace ate fandom!”)

Focus on specific fandoms, or specific fandom events. (“Hey X-Files slash fans, do you remember the “Kiss heard ‘round the world?”)

I think we can have a lot of fun with this! Start lobbing ideas. I’ll take notes and if we get a bundle, I’ll do a poll and we can hopefully get the first up and running next week. :)

Comments

[ratcreature]

If the wiki committee is taking a more active interest, maybe they could finally give an answer about the image policy? Or rather the lack thereof? That has been first raised in the first week of beta (as can be seen on the fanlore:issues page) and has come up multiple times on talk pages, and we still have no guidelines how to handle potentially disturbing images that are on topic for an article.

Obviously most fannish images are fairly harmless, at most not-worksafe, so there have been no real problems so far, but I still think we need clearer rules for expansion, because frankly I've come across plenty of disturbing images in fandom. I've seen fanart that was gory, and upsetting with violence and non-con and such, also with really young characters (which on top of everything else may have legal problems for visitors to see and have on their computers, even if it is drawn rather than photos, depending on where they live, not to mention that also laws wrt violence in porn differ between regions).

It's one thing to consider the whole wiki adult/not-worksafe, so that you have to expect to some penis on any page, but it gets rather more tricky if someone for example gives examples for say Deatheater art, with a torture porn orgy involving say Fenrir/Draco rape, which would neatly combine violence, bestiality, and underage child rape with muggle hunting going on in the background. IMO there should be some image policy ensuring that you don't come across truly shocking images without some warning or an extra click, even if the image fit the topic of the article, like I wouldn't want to see mutilated bodies to illustrate torture fic, or violent sexual fanart to illustrate the rapefic article, etc. because I wouldn't necessarily expect pictures, even if I intentionally go to that kind of page.

[meri_oddities]

The wiki committee is definitely taking a more active interest in everything about the wiki. As you know, there's a lot that needs to be done and we can't do everything at once. But the content policy is on our list of things we need to discuss and make a decision about. We will get to it. That might sound like we're putting you off, but we're not.

[ratcreature]

I'm sorry if I came across as snarky, I don't mean to harp on the new people or anything, it's just that this issue has been frustrating me, because it's been since 2008 so this is not "at once", and despite asking several times nobody ever heard anything back except that the committee was "discussing it" or talking with other OTW projects and so on.

[meri_oddities]

I understand your frustration. And We will address this shortly. We'll announce it here and on the News page when we get something written up and ready for comment.