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

Forums: how to staff?

[lian]

Rachel, fwiw, I think that the committee needn't even moderate ALL the forums -- from what I'm seeing, you already have a dedicated core user base who might be interested in helping out. I'm not even talking of gardeners; gardening is about a different impulse than moderating (well, to me :P), but both are about being helpful. And creating more diverse roles for Fanlore users to get active would definitely not be detrimental to more involvement (since people who aren't into geeking out about rules minutiae but are still dedicated about Fanlore would have another opportunity to help out!)

I cannot stress how much I second the idea of a forum for community-building. My feeling is that the OTW's organisational structure and precedent wrt (not) trusting external people with responsibility (I mean, the entire staffer/volunteer model) really doesn't map well onto Fanlore.


I have a rather clear case study of why a forum would be good idea, actually :) basically it's just mirroring extempore's story from another angle.

extempore is a friend of mine and Frogspace, and she got involed with Fanlore after recent discussions about OTW and anime/manga representation. What happened was basically that Frogspace and me (to a smaller extent) walked her through editing and what Fanlore is /isn't, etiquette, etc. As you may have seen, it's not that she's incapable of learning/doing so herself; she's neither timid nor clueless. She took to it quickly and in short time created some amazing pages.

However. She still needed one-on-one mentoring and encouragement and help to get started. This one-on-one mentoring is not sustainable if we want to recruit many new people at a time; not to mention that not everyone has a dedicated Fanlore
editor in their circle!

A central gathering place with non-chronological/stable/long-term topics, where people could establish presences for their projects and recruit collaborators could help alleviate that. People interested in the same areas could gather there and plan their projects *before* they moved to the actual wiki and its talk pages. I know, that sounds like outsourcing central wiki functions elsewhere. But. Of course I know a couple of ways to recruit people to work on a page with me (recent changes, talk pages, mostly) but they're limited, and they *presuppose* not only a working knowledge of how Fanlore functions, but being comfortable with these unfamiliar venues. (I love wikis, I edited wikis before, but the one thing I've learned [from managing our work place one] is that one cannot assume a low enough threshold when it comes to encouraging "newbies" to get involved.)

SO -- the paradox of Fanlore editing for new people is that the wiki is about community, but editing itself is a lonely affair.

That's like... people are long gone out of "loneliness" before they acquire that working knowledge, especially if they don't belong to a fandom that has an active editor pool already (atm, that's mainly zines?).

Venue-wise, this DW community is a) rather isolated (I love Dreamwidth, but it's both tiny and relatively unknown) and the journal-model isn't conducive to long-term discussions anyway. (DW/LJ entries are accessed from people's reading lists, mostly, and the lifespan is generally very, very short. Idk about you, but I hesitate to add to "dead" [over a week old] entries.) Nevermind that I would *really* not be interested in being flooded by Zine discussion entries on my reading list; on a forum, each area would be contained; say, I could search out the gaming/anime/manga areas especially.


okay, whoa, I'll stop here because tl;dr, so let me end by saying that I will totally help argue and back you up [like, ask my committee to consider writing a statement of support, although that may be overkill, haha] in case you decide to seriously consider this & take this up to the Board, and help out as much as my time permits!

Re: Forums: how to staff?

[anenko]

SO -- the paradox of Fanlore editing for new people is that the wiki is about community, but editing itself is a lonely affair.

This.