You've identified exactly the challenge that we're wrestling with on the Fanlore wiki committee -- we want to involve animanga fans in Fanlore, and we know that those of us on the committee aren't deeply involved in those communities (a few Fanlore committee members do consider themselves anime fans, but we know that on the whole, animanga fandoms aren't the ones we're coming out of.) We were thinking that we would start out by asking here, on the Fanlore comm, to see if we could find any animanga fans who are already somewhat involved with Fanlore who might want to help us a) figure out how to structure the wiki better around these fandoms and b) figure out how to do the outreach work we know we need to do. But you raise a good point that even if we can get a few animanga fans involved right now, we might not have a diverse enough selection of animanga fans to make decisions about stuff like this.
Do you think it would be better for us to focus all of our efforts on outreach, even though the current wiki structure around anime and manga and manhua etc is not ideal, and trust that once we have a larger population of animanga fans using the wiki they'll be able to establish the structures that they want and need? Our concern has been that if we start to do the outreach, and people start showing up to explore Fanlore, and they see that the structure isn't intuitive or doesn't match what they think it should be, they'll take that as further evidence that the wiki (and/or the OTW in general) isn't welcoming to them. And that's the last thing we want. You note that anything which even looks like erasure or neglect of animanga fandoms will make animanga fans feel even more slighted, and that's exactly what we don't want. But we're worried that if we have the wrong categories, people will perceive their fandoms to have been neglected or erased even when that wasn't our intention at all.
I don't know what the right answer is, but you've given me/us good food for thought here. Thank you so much.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Re: *prays the html goes through*
Do you think it would be better for us to focus all of our efforts on outreach, even though the current wiki structure around anime and manga and manhua etc is not ideal, and trust that once we have a larger population of animanga fans using the wiki they'll be able to establish the structures that they want and need? Our concern has been that if we start to do the outreach, and people start showing up to explore Fanlore, and they see that the structure isn't intuitive or doesn't match what they think it should be, they'll take that as further evidence that the wiki (and/or the OTW in general) isn't welcoming to them. And that's the last thing we want. You note that anything which even looks like erasure or neglect of animanga fandoms will make animanga fans feel even more slighted, and that's exactly what we don't want. But we're worried that if we have the wrong categories, people will perceive their fandoms to have been neglected or erased even when that wasn't our intention at all.
I don't know what the right answer is, but you've given me/us good food for thought here. Thank you so much.