fanlore | committee post: Seeking a few good anime and manga fans!

The Fanlore wiki committee has been brainstorming this year about outreach to different fan communities, especially fan communities which are unrepresented or under-represented on Fanlore. Anime, manga, and related communities are an area where we’d like to do some outreach.

Before we really dive in to trying to spread the word about Fanlore in various anime and manga communities, we want to make sure that we’ve created a good wiki structure in which fans can add pages. Here are the category pages for anime and manga as things stand now:

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Anime
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Manga

We probably need to reexamine how the above format categories are assigned to fandom pages. Do we want anime movies to be in the Film category? Anime/Manga may also need a separate Fandom by Source Community category (and what should we call it?). One issue we’ve become aware of is that the terms “anime” and “manga” may exclude similar material created in countries other than Japan (manhua in China, for example). We’re not sure what the right answers are. Here are a few ideas:

Option 1: Merge the Anime category with Cartoons and the Manga category with Comics.

Anime + Cartoons → Cartoons
Manga + Comics → Comics

Option 2: Create a new category, Animation, for the combined Anime and Cartoons categories. Merge the Manga category with Comics.

Anime + Cartoons → Animation
Manga + Comics → Comics

Option 3:
? something we haven’t even thought of yet!

We’re hoping for a system that will accommodate many needs, including those of manhua, manhwa, and a variety of animation and comics fandoms from around the world. If you have knowledge in these areas, we definitely want to hear from you! We hope to find a few fans who are excited about the prospect of chronicling and preserving anime or manga fandoms and their histories, who can help us 1) figure out how best to structure this corner of the wiki and 2) reach out to anime and manga communities for more participation once we have a good structure in place.

Might you be that person? Let us know by dropping a comment on this post, or contact us using our contact form. And please feel free to signal-boost this post on your own journal or in the fannish spaces you frequent. Thanks!

Edited to add: ~~stay tuned -- a new post is coming from the Fanlore wiki committee which contains a new proposal for how to handle categories on the wiki, based in large part on response to this post.~~ We've made a follow-up post, which is here: Category proposal.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

To clarify, the "anime" and "manga" categories mentioned in the post are actually structured as format categories and NOT fandom categories, which is why we were pondering Anime/Manga as a separate Fandom by Source Community category--in other words, maybe it should have a fandom category instead of the current structure, where the intended use of the categories is unclear. Already under Fandom by Source Community we have SF fandom and Furry Fandom, and if we created a "media fandom" or "animanga fandom" category, that is where it would probably go. Or we could just move the current Anime and Manga categories there, where they make more sense.

The current parent category, Fandoms by Source Text, has a number of different format subcategories that basically list titles of source texts--Television, Books & Literature, Film, Comics, Cartoons, Anime, Manga, Games, Radio, Theater, Real People. These categories were instituted before we got fandom categories, and now we also have individual "fandom by source text" categories all listed together under the main category, not sorted by format or fannish tradition. So, rethinking how we were using the format categories seemed like a good idea.

For Fandoms by Source Text, I think I'd suggest making "larger" top level categories.

I like the suggestion to put Animation as a category above Cartoons and Anime.

But I think it should go even further? Usually, one does not do top level searches that often (I compare how I use wikipedia and how the users moved on another wiki I helped out with), but instead goes directly to the word one does know. However, working backwards from a search term and then going parallell through categories is good - and thats where a smart category system is really useful for the user.

Print fandoms ->
  Books & Literature
  Sequential Art ->
    Comics (or Superhero Comics, depending on what the category actual contains)
    Bande dessinée
    Manhua
    Manga ->
       OEL Manga
       Manga
       Doujinshi / Fanproduced manga
etc etc.

committee post: Seeking a few good anime and manga fans!

Fandoms by Source Community

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