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

[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.