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]

Can you elaborate, please? I'm not sure I understand all your points there, especially if it was in connection to any of the things I said.

[franzeska]

That wasn't targeted just at comments on this post at all, but rather at all of the discussions about OTW, AO3, Fanlore, and sequential art terminology. :)

One meaning of 'comics' is superhero comics as opposed to other sequential art. Another meaning is all cartooning or all cartooning that's in a strip or book format. The word is used a number of different ways in English. It's simply not true that it always means superhero comics unless you're only talking to certain groups of fans. (In my experience, often English-speaking manga fans or indie/high brow US comics fans who use 'graphic novel', though from what you say, the comics=superheroes thing is used elsewhere too.) English terminology like 'cartoon' and 'comic' just aren't used consistently the same way by everyone.

Getting away from English, there are lots of tradition or region-specific terms for certain types of comics. I'm not trying to deny that. But it's also true that 'comics' is used in a lot of different languages for various different meanings. Filipino comics are 'komiks', for example. 'Komikku' is a loan word in Japanese, used by Japanese people, about Japanese comics. It's not the primary word I'd use in conversation to tell a friend I like to read manga; it's still a word of Japanese that's in active use.

I am not arguing that this makes 'comics' a good category on Fanlore or that anime fandom should adopt the word 'comics'. I am saying that actual usage is way more complicated than comics=superheroes.

[salinea]

Oh, I guess I hadn't been clear. When I said that comics means "American superhero comics" to me, I didn't mean that it was the only meaning of the word. I know it can be used to describe the medium in general as well. I was talking more in term of evocation and connotation of the word.

the comics=superheroes thing is used elsewhere too
Well, in French. And I've spent lots of time in English speaking manga web communities as well.

Thanks for going in detail into what you mean, that was interesting, I didn't know Japanese had adopted the word Komikku! :)