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

[extempore]

But, before even broaching the topic, an explanation of what the various types of categories are, how they function and how they might be used (or completely ignored) by readers of Fanlore is surely in order.

Oh please yes! What confused me a great deal was that fandom by source text categories seem to be on the same level as "individual fandoms", at least according to the sitemap. It would make more sense to me, if individual fandoms would fall into the various categories like RPF, Manga, Radio etc. I don't know how these things work, but to make it easier, perhaps fandom categories could be connected to their respective "parent folders"? (For more, see below.)

You are right, a lot of the categories didn't make any sense to me - or rather, their hierarchy and placement didn't. It would be great, if they could be made more "understandable" for people who have never before worked on a wiki, for fans who just want to write something about their fandom and not waste time digging through pages of explanations for each strangely named category. ;)

When I started, I was presented with an empty window and the suggestion to "just start typing in the box below". The "see for help" link offered more links to a FAQ. So I went to the "start a new page" site and was confronted with a four-step list - and two of the steps had me stop. A name for a page and the need to format it, sure, that's familiar. But what template to use for what page? And what category? Without additional digging around (and sometimes not even then) there's no way to know that as a newbie. I would have loved to have the three or four most common pages readily linked to make it easy for beginners. For example, the page templates for a source fandom (i.e. the series, book, movie), one for communities, for stories, perhaps for pairings or characters or debates/controversies in fandoms, too. (Of course, that's a highly personal impression on what "most common pages" could be.)

Or perhaps there could be a fool-proof way for peeps like me, something to klick through: say, I want to create a new page for an anime, then I'd follow a prominently placed link called "create new page", from there I could choose which "parent" category, which would be "Fan communities", then "fandom by source text", then I'd click on Anime and would be presented with an empty page where the correct templates and categories are already inserted. Perhaps with a note on how to add the new fandom category or an additional step where I could insert the fandom category (either click on a link to an already existing one or write a new one) and it would be placed in the page as well.

I have no idea, if that would even be doable and I'm sure it's way too much hassle for experienced Wikiwriters. But not all of us are and there will be people who have no idea how the Wiki community works. I pestered Lian and Frogspace, otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have turned away again and not be bothered with adding my share to Fanlore.

And boy, will I ever be able to just write one-sentence replies? -_-;;

tl;dr: A bit easier access for n00bs would be greatly appreciated! =D

[facetofcathy]

No worries on the Teal Dear.

I think this conversation is highlighting that Categories seem really important--and intuitively we think of categorization as this really meaningful thing where we decide where something is kept/what it is--but on Fanlore all a category does from a user's perspective is include the page on an index(es) of similar things. The page isn't "kept" anywhere, and the category doesn't restrictively label the page as belonging to one single topic, and it's also one of the easiest things to correct later.

Sorting out categories so users of Fanlore can find things, and so editors do know what ones to use is important, but it's not something a brand new editor needs to have a firm handle on before they get going. My advice for new editors, and not so new editors, is to spend no time at all worrying about categories for your page. Gardeners or other regular users will come along and fix your page, and as you get experience, you will start to figure it out.

For making new pages from scratch, understanding Templates is a lot more meaningful since the Template you use influences your content (and puts some categories on the page automatically so you never need to even give them a thought). It's also not a big deal to fix it if you decide a different Template is better later.

Which is why I think for this conversation, fans knowledgeable about East Asian source text fandoms could really help by weighing in on the Infoboxes on the Fandom by Source Text Templates that right now are supposed to be generic to all varieties of fandoms. If those need to be customized to really meet the needs of East Asian sourced fandoms that needs, in my opinion, to happen before new editors are recruited.

Now, as to this discussion, I took this post to be directed at fans knowledgeable about East Asian sourced fandoms, but not necessarily Fanlore power users. In that sense, the question is how should Fanlore index those kinds of Fandom pages and what things should go together on the indexes and what should the indexes be named.

Also, I bet Lian and Frogspace were happy to be pestered. This is our hardest hurdle, getting the word out on how really thrilled regular editors are to see new faces. (The answer to that one is really, really thrilled.)

[rbarenblat]

fans knowledgeable about East Asian source text fandoms could really help by weighing in on the Infoboxes on the Fandom by Source Text Templates that right now are supposed to be generic to all varieties of fandoms. If those need to be customized to really meet the needs of East Asian sourced fandoms that needs, in my opinion, to happen before new editors are recruited.

This is an awesome idea. We would love to get input on this from fans knowledgeable about these fandoms. \o/