committee post: Category proposal

[aethel]

The Fanlore wiki committee would like to thank everyone who's participated in our recent conversation about categories and anime / manga / related fandoms. Several commentors on that thread sparked the following idea (especially branchandroot -- thanks, branchandroot!), and we'd like to know what you think about it.

The idea is this: what if we remove all of the format categories, and replace them with a flat, non-hierarchical list of fandom categories? Here's a visual representation of how things work now:


[ Image Description: The "Fandoms by Source Text" category, encompassing both medium-based categories like "Film", "Real People", and "Gaming", and individual fandom categories like "Harry Potter" and "World of Warcraft". The "Fandoms By Source Community" category is unused. ]

Basically, we're rethinking how the category hierarchy for Fandoms by Source Text works. "Fandoms by Source Text" includes all fandoms that are focused on a single "text" or set of texts, like Final Fantasy, Jane Austen, or Brokeback Mountain. Currently, there are a number of "format" categories underneath the main "Fandoms by Source Text" category that we inherited from multifandom archive structure--these categories are not much used at all because a) the wiki isn't a fanfic archive and b) we now have categories for individual fandoms. Meanwhile, "Fandoms by Source Text" has a sibling category that is underused: Fandoms by Source Community, for fandoms that don't correspond neatly to a single canon text. Like Media Fandom, Anime & Manga Fandom, Filk, Vidding, J-pop, Manhwa, etc.

The restructuring plan has two parts:

1. Delete all of the format categories from Fandoms by Source Text, leaving a flat, non-hierarchical list of fandom categories.

2. Make better use of Fandoms by Source Community by moving the Anime, Manga, Real People, and Comics(?) categories there.

And then fans can make as many more fandom categories as they need, according to the naming conventions within their own communities. (We also recognize that some fannish traditions have arisen which don’t consider themselves part of an overall fannish culture; it’s not our intention to prescribe categories for those traditions, but rather to let those fan communities self-define as they will.)

Here's a visual aid for the proposed changes:


[ Image Description: "Fandoms by Source Text" category now encompasses only fandom categories like "Coffee Prince" and "Blake’s 7". The "Fandoms by Source Community" category now has categories for things like "Media Fandom", "K-Drama", and "Gaming". These in turn also lead to individual fandom categories, e.g. "Media Fandom" leads to "Blake’s 7" and "Harry Potter" while "K-Drama" leads to "Coffee Prince". ]

(This is a rough sketch to illustrate how potential fandom categories might be linked to one another and is not intended to be complete or prescriptive.)

Categories to be deleted:
Books & Literature
Cartoons
Film
Games (?)
Radio
Television
Theater
(and "Real People" could be renamed or split into whatever categories people choose.)

---

Here are some examples for how wiki pages might be categorized according to the plan.

No fandom that has a fandom category needs to have a page categorized under Fandoms by Source Text. For example:

Category:Fandoms by Source Text
.....Category:Harry Potter
...........Harry Potter (the page)

So the page "Harry Potter" would get the Harry Potter category and no other category.

And:

Category:Fandoms by Source Text
.....Homestuck (the page)

The page "Homestuck" would get the Fandoms by Source Text category because there is no "Homestuck" category yet.

And:

Category:Fandoms by Source Text
.....Category:Naruto
.........Naruto (the page)

Category:Fandoms by Source Community
....Category:Anime & Manga
........Category:Naruto
.............Naruto (the page)

The page "Naruto" would get the Naruto category.

And:

Category:Fandoms by Source Text
.....Category:Blake's 7
.........Blake's 7 (the page)

Category:Fandoms by Source Community
.....Category:Media Fandom
.........Category:Blake's 7
.............Blake's 7 (the page)


The page "Blake's 7" would get the Blake's 7 category, but would no longer have a "Television" category. Each fandom category would be its own thing.

---

Would this proposed solution -- getting rid of format categories such as "Television" and "Film" and letting each fandom category (including "Anime & Manga," "Manhwa," etc) be its own thing -- work for you? We want your input; please tell us what you think!

(If there are no objections to the plan above, please feel free to start moving categories on May 28. If you need help with wiki stuff, please don’t hesitate to contact the gardeners for assistance or leave a comment to this post.)

EDIT June 23: See the revised proposal here

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

This is less a complaint and more an alternate data point, since I realise you can't make everyone happy: not everyone who creates fanworks is part of a single coherent "community" for the relevant canon, and I have this niggling feeling that the way you've set things up could replicate the same rigid bias towards the POV of the majority within the separate subfandoms that you're trying to get rid of in the wiki as a whole. I'm not sure how you'd fix it though :/

[facetofcathy]

I think this is an excellent point.

There's a discussion from back in 2008 on a talk page that I can't find again, where an editor asked about the very concept of organizing by source text in relationship to fans who are fans of the fic for a pairing and don't care about the canon at all.

I was also having a discussion on my journal about the idea of fans intentionally seeking out characters to slash, rather than finding a source slashable. And I feel that fans do both of those things for fandoms that other fans access via the canon.

But, none of this matters when it comes to writing the page. I think we could all do with remembering that categories put on a fandom page in no way limit or permit or indicate content of that page. So if I were to go to the Stargate Atlantis page, which is a Fandom by Source Text and start writing about fans who have never seen a single episode, but love the fic, I can do that. I should do that, in fact.

I made a page about the Fanwork DM of the Rings which is a thing a guy made independent of transformative works fandom but which meets any definition of transformative work and also has a community of fans around it, just like any Sam/Frodo 121 part WIP does. So this page is in the LOTR category because it is like all the other things in that category even if Shamus himself has never even heard of those other things and he just thinks he made a webcomic.

All of which is saying that, yes, I think the wiki has and will always have a broad POV of transformative works fandom (that still includes but isn't focused on other sorts of fannish activities) and I think that's totally okay.

[naraht]

There's a discussion from back in 2008 on a talk page that I can't find again, where an editor asked about the very concept of organizing by source text in relationship to fans who are fans of the fic for a pairing and don't care about the canon at all.

I was also having a discussion on my journal about the idea of fans intentionally seeking out characters to slash, rather than finding a source slashable. And I feel that fans do both of those things for fandoms that other fans access via the canon.

I find myself amused/interested by the idea of having a "Source material: fanon" category for fandoms that are particularly non-canon-regarding in this way.

[sqbr]

I think there are two issues here: Usability, and the sense of inclusion. I agree that it probably doesn't make much of a difference from a useability point of view, but I have this unhelpfully nebulous instinct that people are going to look at the classification for their fandom and go "Well, I don't relate to it that way, so I mustn't be the sort of fan they want editing the page".

[franzeska]

I think that's fair. Unless people have edited wikis a lot before, they tend to already feel unwelcome or like they don't have the authority to edit. If most people were already very comfortable, seeing a strange-seeming category might not have much of an effect, but as it is...

[sqbr]

*nods*

At the same time, it will be very hard to make everyone feel equally welcome. There are as many different ways of being a fan as there are fans!