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

[rbarenblat]

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.

Comments

[salinea]

When I, as a non-native speaker of English who lives in Europe, hear "comics", I think "non-moving pictures telling a story".
well, that'll explain how you never heard of "sequential art" before. And there I thought it meant the expression was much less well known than I thought.

Forcing another phrase which isn't very well known and just comes out of the English mindset again to artificially create an umbrella term for comics, manga, manhua and co is imho just as dismissive and patronizing.
... I really don't follow your argument. It's an expression meant to be a neutral, generic description of the medium. That's what makes it great as a name for a category that is meant to encompass all different regional or distribution-network specific expression of the medium. It makes it clear that the specific American tradition of comics isn't meant to be the defining standard of what's put in that category, with manga & whatnots added as a token effort.

But it seems there's no good solution then! One way is dismissive according to me, the other one is dismissive according to you! What shall we do?

[zebra_in_dream]

It's not neutral or generic and is no less problematic than comic or manga in differentiating on what is included and what isn't. It's a rather unknown term created by Eisner and further established by McCould, it doesn't look like there is much on those term that's not in conjunction with them. No need to muddle the waters even further by yet another term for the same thing.

As for what can one do:
Not umbrella them, if apparently not term serves to umbrella them.
(Or umbrella them one a monthly basis. January goes to Bande dessinée, February goes to Manga, March can be Comic

[salinea]

No need to muddle the waters even further by yet another term for the same thing.
it's because it's not "another term for the same thing" that it is useful.

Not umbrella them, if apparently not term serves to umbrella them.
That might work. Though I assume rbarenblat asked the question as part as the whole fanlore outreach to animanga communities because there's a concern having manga and anime as its own thing makes it a bit ghettoized, plus the problem of excluding similar material created in countries other than Japan. And I do think there are some values in having umbrella categories for works in the same medium, even if that medium has variety of different traditions (perhaps that's cuz I, myself, love the medium in most of those traditions and have fandoms in most of them though :p).

(Or umbrella them one a monthly basis. January goes to Bande dessinée, February goes to Manga, March can be Comic
Err, that's kind of dorky, and probably just as dismissive for the newcomers to fanlore who sees it without knowing it rotates.