how much say do fans get over their wiki articles?

[ratcreature]

I think this should be discussed and laid out more clearly, because the practice for some articles seems to differ from what the policies say.

From looking at the policies it seems to me that a fan's say over their wiki article (unlike their personal user page) is mainly due to the Identity Protection policy (when it comes to a say what name(s)/pseud(s) the wiki uses), and the Fanlore:Ethical Standards for Community & Content, which lay out how to be careful when writing about living persons. The most relvant bits of the latter seem to be that things said about fans ought to be accurate and not harmful to them or the communities.

In practice on artist pages in particular we seem to accommodate detailed display and content wishes of the artists, that seem to take precedence. (see the discussion pages for Gayle F and Caren Parnes) The gist of the argument I took away from the last time this came up was that the wiki should accommodate artist's display wishes because otherwise they might ask to have the art removed, especially the higher quality samples they scanned themselves. And while I'm still not sold on the idea that the best way to have artist pages on the wiki is with these huge galleries with many pictures -- aside from the page load issues it seems to me at odds with the "Fanlore is not an archive for all fanworks from every fan" policy that claims "Fanlore will not act as an index of all of the fanworks that any individual fan may have created, though references to individual fanworks and pages for controversial and/or significant fanworks is always desired." -- I was fine with that, but display is one thing, the most recent issue is wrt the content.

I could perhaps see an artist making the argument that she'd rather not have the explicit art displayed prominently on their profile article as falling under the "no harm" rule (depending on public image questions, whether it's the legal name that is associated, also the nature of the pornographic art etc), but the "Back to Back" for example is not pornographic in any way, so I guess it's because the artist doesn't like that piece? I mean, I have no idea, but it was removed because of the artists preference. And it is not so much that I think displaying that cover is essential to the article, but I think it's worth discussing this as the precedent this seems to set.

IMO as much as I enjoy looking at pretty fanart on the wiki, especially for artists who don't have much of an other online presence elsewhere, it is still not a gallery display site, and I'd rather make do with a few crappy pictures than have some special wiki pages that are "endorsed" by the fans they cover, and fully or partially exempt from the standard editing procedures (whether formatting or content), while regularly with all other articles the editorial control is shared between all wiki editors collectively.

At the very least I think there should be discussion of this on a wider basis than a few talk pages.

Comments

[elf]

I suspect this is one of the areas where fh.net has poisoned the well--Laura's "it's HISTORY I'll include it if I want" approach made a lot of people uncomfortable with the whole wiki concept. Some refuse to participate at all; some just insist on the smallest amount of info possible being displayed about them.

And plenty of fans don't want an open record of their more controversial works, or their more explicit ones. I'm not sure how fanlore can negotiate the boundary between "we'd like a useful fan archive" and "artists can remove info they don't want to be seen."

Also, being a wiki & editable by random people, it *needs* consistent policies. Needs something like "covers of fanzines at 72 dpi are always okay;" if there are specific exceptions, those need to be noted somewhere easy to find. Random-New-Helper needs to know whether she can scan the covers of her 25 zines & painstakingly add them to their zine pages, rather than find out after doing so that three of the artists insist on their content not being shown. Telling someone "oh, we removed your contribution because someone else didn't like it" (even if that someone was the artist) is a great way to lose wiki editors.

[ratcreature]

Well, the image policy in general also still seems to be stuck somewhere in a committee, so there is a wider problem with that too.

I think what bothers me is that it feels to me as if there was some sort of final veto like thing, even without reasons given. Obviously it's one thing when someone makes an argument that they do not want their explicit art which was maybe circulated on a smaller scale connected with their name in google on our wiki, when they don't do anything like that with say an own website. That's a reasonable point about exposure, and a fan should have say about that as our policies state.

But with other aspects of articles I don't mind when a fan makes their argument for what/how to present things and is part of the editing consensus of their own article, but their opinion shouldn't necessarily be the final word, much like it wasn't in other content conflicts about maybe more controversial things than a cover in a gallery (like I mentioned in the comment to Doro above).

[graycardinal]

I agree that in this kind of situation, permitting an artist to veto content at will seems unreasonable; maybe the policy that should be invoked in these cases is the "plural POV" policy -- acknowledging that with respect to fanworks, both the creator and the viewer/consumer of art need to be represented among the POVs expressed.