Policy Posted for Comment

[meri_oddities]

We've posted the Fandoms as Category policy change to the policies section of Fanlore. We'd like to open it up for comment. You can find it here.

We, the wiki committee, don't work in a vacuum and would like your input on this. If possible, We'd like to have the discussion here on Dreamwidth. It's easy to answer questions and respond to comments. If discussion becomes unwieldy, we can schedule a chat in the Fanlore chat room.

This is only the first of several policies we're working on and are planning to put out for comment in the next few months. So, let us know what you think.

Comments

[djonn]

Coming in late, and sideways, and as someone without a lot of wiki-background:

On a broad general level, this looks to me like a shape-of-the-data problem. What we have is a whole lot of (relatively) unsorted data, and the question is how best it can be sorted via dividing it up into capital-C Categories.

The complication? Categories, from what I'm seeing, are essentially meant to create hierarchy (that is, to organize the data into neat top-down outline or tree form) -- except that the dataset as a whole isn't particularly tree-shaped. And to the extent that it is tree-shaped, there are large chunks of it that belong in more than one tree at the same time -- and the dataset as a whole includes a lot of trees of different sizes.

A further issue, I suspect, is that the term "fandom" is being used to mean two or three different things at once. On one hand, fandoms are communities or groups of people (which takes in things like the filk and costuming communities as well as things like "Gargoyles fandom"). At the same time, "fandom" is also being used here -- specifically, in the context of this discussion -- to describe the sum total of fanworks based on a given source canon (notably as a zine-indexing mechanism). And both of those usages are distinct from the use of "fandom" as a loose synonym for "source canon".

Now I know very little about wiki design (and not too much more about database design generally). But my general suspicion is that if Categories are meant to be applied sparingly and to very large clusters of like items, then they are probably not suitable for gathering up fandom-specific indexes of zines or specific fanworks on a wiki-wide basis. [If I had to develop a standard for when a data-subset should become a Category, I think I'd base it not on the kind of data it is (that is, whatever one is using "fandom" to mean at any given moment) but on the volume of data in the dataset (say, X number of pages with the same tag).