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

[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/