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

*prays the html goes through*

[(Anonymous)]

I hear you saying that the way we're approaching this is going to make animanga fans angry.

On it's own, the technical aspects of creating categories in Fanlore doesn't seem like that big of a deal, and truthfully, it isn't. It's just a way making the wiki more streamlined, and I get that.

But it's not it's own. The OTW's baggage is Fanlore's baggage, and at this point I think that anything that even looks like deliberate erasure or neglect toward anime/manga fans is going to make some people angry. Even worse, it's going to make many more fans indifferent to the project once they hear rumors about the OTW from their angry friends.

This particular issue may be totally innocuous, but from three steps back (and the vast majority of non-Western fans right now are at least three steps back and one platform over), it will look like a pattern that includes the Yuletide fiasco, the problem with naming the servers, and the tag wrangling issue that happened mostly behind closed doors but that a bunch of people know about from the failfandom meme.

From a technical perspective, this post and it's suggestions make a lot of sense. But from a PR perspective...? Everyone says they want anime/manga fans (and gaming fans, and jpop fans, etc) to feel welcome at Fanlore/OTW/AO3. And the approach people seem to be taking towards this is, "We'll set it up, create the boundaries and lines, make everything neat before we invite anyone over." Like they're cleaning the house for a visiting guest.

And that? Is the problem. You don't want to treat these people like guests or children or people you are inviting into your already built world. You want these people to help build the world with you.

I know the sentiment is coming from a good place, but I don't think treating animanga fans like guests in your home is a good idea if you want to integrate them into the community. Fanlore is supposed to be a wiki built by fans from the ground up, fans who decide how they want to record their history. But...there are hardly any non-Western media fans here because Fanlore hasn't done an outreach yet. ¯\(°_°)/¯

Just to pull from your own post - The reason we made this post is that we know that we need the input of people who are involved with animanga fandoms to help us figure out how to structure this part of the wiki, and we'd like to get that sorted out before we begin the project of greater outreach to animanga fans.

So...who are you asking, exactly, if you want the opinions of animanga fans, but you haven't made an effort to recruit animanga fans for the project yet? I don't understand that. Because it sounds like you're asking the existing Fanlore community (majority Western fandoms, DW based) how to structure an animanga/other area. This comes across as very backward to me.

I don't think you should create the structure first and then decide on the right time to invite the anime/manga fans in. I think you should start with a sizable population of animanga fans, and then let them help create the structure that they're supposed to be a part of. Only right now, I don't think Fanlore has a diverse enough selection of animanga fans to make decisions about stuff like this.

Re: *prays the html goes through*

[rbarenblat]

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.

[branchandroot]

I'll jump in, here.

I would recommend emphasizing, in any outreach, that the anime/manga side of the wiki is a work in progress and very unfinished. And then be ready to field suggestions for structure that differ significantly from the way the Western media pages and categories are structured. The sources act very differently, and the fandoms act pretty differently too. One size is not going to fit all, not when that one size has, to date, been completely based on only one shape of sources.

This is why I howled about doing outreach a lot, lot sooner, because now Fanlore is going to have to retrofit some things. I think that should be acknowledged going into this. But it isn't actually too late, as long as the anime/manga (and other!) fans who are invited in are not expected to just make do with what's already there. There should be an expectation that contributions will result in organic change.

One general style recommendation for outreach posts: they should not be in that perky "this is something new, come try it!" tone with exclamation points. I think they'll have a better chance of being heard if they acknowledge that Fanlore is missing representation from a/m and has been for a while, and that the people currently on the boards and committees sincerely want to fix that problem. OTW, if it's on the horizon of most a/m fans at all, has some history to live down, and seeming to ignore that won't help the organization's case. So I'd recommend a slightly more humble "hey, we're missing you guys, we'd really like to see you, do you want to make this thing talk about you too?".

[rbarenblat]

Thank you for the gentle advice on the issue of tone. It's easy for those of us who really like the wiki and/or the org behind it, and want to share that with others, to come across as perky and full of exclamation points. (I know I fall into that pattern a lot of the time.) But you raise good points here, and we will do our best to take them to heart.

fwiw, I think everyone on the wiki committee (and for that matter everyone on the board) acknowledges that Fanlore is missing representation from animanga fans (among others), and we sincerely do want to figure out a way to fix that. For my part, I hope that conversations like this one are a good start.