committee post: Category Proposal II

[aethel]

Thank you to everyone who gave us feedback on the category proposal from May 21. As suggested by facetofcathy and others, here's a further revision to that proposal:

Instead of deleting the format categories that currently reside under Fandoms by Source Text, we will move them under another parent category we will create called _Fandoms by Canon Type_. The fandom categories will look something like this:




[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 "Anime & Manga". These in turn also link to individual fandom categories, e.g. "Media Fandom" leads to "Blake’s 7" and "Harry Potter" while "K-Drama" leads to "Coffee Prince". A third parent category, "Fandoms by Canon Type", contains format subcategories like "Books & Literature" and "Film", which in turn link to the fandom categories under "Fandoms by Source Text".]

"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. "Fandoms by Community" lists larger fannish communities that don’t correspond neatly to a single canon text (like Media Fandom, Anime & Manga Fandom, Filk, Vidding, J-pop, etc.).

Here's a graphic depicting the current state of the categories:



[ 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. ]

Summary of changes:
* Rename "Fandoms by Source Community" to "Fandoms by Community"
* Rename "Fandoms by Source Text" to "Fandoms"?
* Move to "Fandoms by Canon Type": Books & Literature, Film, Games, Radio, Real People, Television, Theater
* Move to "Fandoms by Community": Comics
* Create: Sequential Art & Animation, Anime & Manga

This way, everyone can choose how to browse or search for what they want--people interested in all pages about fandoms which arise out of books (for example) can look under Fandoms by Canon Type, people interested in K-drama can look under Fandoms by Community, and people who want to see everything at once can look under Fandoms by Source Text. And fans can still make more fandom categories as needed, but categories under Fandoms by Canon Type would remain fairly stable.

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

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

Category:Fandoms by Canon Type
...Category:Books & Literature
......Category:Harry Potter
.........Harry Potter (the page)

So the page "Harry Potter" would get the Harry Potter category and no other category. Meanwhile, the Harry Potter category would be cross-linked under "Fandoms by Source Text", "Books & Literature", and potentially "Media Fandom".

And:

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

Category:Fandoms by Canon Type
...Category:Sequential Art & Animation
......Homestuck (the page)


The page “Homestuck” would get the Fandoms by Source Text and Sequential Art & Animation categories because there is no “Homestuck” category yet.

And:

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

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

Category:Fandoms by Canon Type
...Category:Sequential Art & Animation
......Category:Naruto
.........Naruto (the page)

The page “Naruto” would get the Naruto category.

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We welcome discussion, comments, and feedback.

Comments

[elf]

* Move to "Fandoms by Canon Type": Books & Literature, Film, Games, Radio, Real People, Television, Theater

Are comic books "Books & Literature?" Potentially add "Graphic novel/comic/manga" category/ies?

Is the SCA a fandom? I could see it as "fandom by community," but it's got a single canon source ("the middle ages") which isn't described well as "Real People."

Where does bandom go? Is there a "canon type: music" category? Or does that all get blended in to "real people?" (I think of them as every bit as separate as movie & tv, but I'm not in either fandom so I don't know if there's more overlap than that.)

I can think of several more canon types that are so small that I believe it's okay that they're not listed (blogs, artwork, sports--which is not a small fandom, but not well-represented in OTW-ish fandoms).

[sqbr]

This seems very sensible to me!

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

This... doesn't make that much sense to me.

Sequential Art&Animation would need subcategories For Anime & Manga and Comics because both are big enough to need their own cats. But then there wouldn't be any pages/files left for the SA&A cat! That would go against Fanlore's best practice when it comes to categories. To me it makes more sense to have an Anime & Manga *and* a Comics cat *instead* of a SA&A.

Fandom by Source Community has currently three subcats: Furry, German-Speaking Fandom, and Science Fiction. All of them with several pages and files. None of them part of your structure?

As I've already said, I think Anime & Manga and Comics belong under Fandoms by Canon Type. RPF is Real People Fiction so I don't see what the difference between RPF and Real People is supposed to be. That's not a useful distinction. For what it's worth, I see it as a canon type thing.

Media Fandom is completely useless as a category for anything because everything can be Media Fandom and if it's not now, it could be in the future. Harry & Johnny was media fandom, Eroica was/is media fandom, and even Popslash is media fandom because it follows in that tradition. It's a glossary term and explains so much about our history (multimedia zines anyone?), but it doesn't work as a category that people add to pages and files, which is what categories are for.

J-pop is Real People and K-Drama is Television? Film? So these would be subcategories of the Fandom by canon type cats. The "pages" explaining what J-pop/K-Drama/Mediafandom, etc. is could stay under fandom by community, but that is not the same as creating fandom by community cats and then adding all the respective fandom cats to these categories.

[msilverstar]

I think there needs to be a Film category on the same level as Television, or it doesn't make any sense.

Most RPF fits into Media Fandom, but that doesn't work very well for historical real people, or politicians.


That said, I'm not sure whether additional hierarchical categorization is really a good idea here. There are so many ways to think about pages. Tagging might be a better way to go.

[meg_r]

You're obviously not going to please everyone, but I think this is a very sensible approach which makes it possible to browse the wiki in several different ways.

[zebra_in_dream]

Why is Sequential Art and Animation a canon type? Wouldn't the former generally fall under Literature (omit books, comics can be books, too) and the later either go under Television, Film or the not covered Direct-to-Video, Webisodes, Pictures etc.
So Naruto would fall under Literature, Film, Television, Video Games, Card Games and a bunch of other stuff.

And is that even canon type? I'd have expected something like Drama, Science Fiction, Fantasy as canon type, or Universally Accepted Canon, Superseded Canon, Contested Canon, Convoluted Canon and similar things.

[kylara]

I like this generally, and I feel that I understand it enough to use it. But I share some of the concerns expressed in above comments for some of the details, and have some new ones.

- "Sequential Art & Animation" should be separated. They are distinct concepts/mediums, to me they're even more distinct than live-action TV and Film are to each other, and they would be more useful separated.

- Under "Sequential Art" have the "Manga" subcategory, and under "Animation" have the "Anime" subcategory.

- From the way it's being used as a fandom community, it sounds as though "Comics" fandom should be "Comic Books" instead. Then it's not confused with webcomics and others. But that might come into conflict with a possible "comic books" subcategory for "Sequential Art", which leads to the next point.

- Perhaps the potentially-confusing fandom community categories should be named with "fandom" attached to make them distinct from canon types, such as "Comic Book fandom", "Anime & Manga fandom", "K-Drama fandom", etc.

- Real People: I feel this could become a source of confusion with the alternative categories for real people who aren't generally considered canon types, e.g. fans, academics such as Henry Jenkins and Susan Napier, and fandom villains like Ogi Ogas. I'm not sure what to suggest, but maybe "Celebrities" or "Celebrities & Real People", to keep it distinct from academics and others?

- "Television" -> "Live Action Television", and "Films" -> "Live Action Films". I understand why you'd want to exclude animation from the already-large TV and Film categories, but it's also annoying that animated (and anime) shows/films are shoved off with the implication they're somehow not worthy because they're animated. This touches on a sore spot for fans of anime and cartoons. By defining TV and Films as live action, that's no longer such a problem or a source of confusion.

- Instead of listing the whole fandom category (e.g. [[Category: Harry Potter]]) under canon types, how about just list the fandom page (e.g. [[Harry Potter]] the page)? If I'm browsing under "Books & Literature" and come across Harry Potter, I don't want to go through the whole Harry Potter category to find and click on the Harry Potter page. The entire Harry Potter category isn't a canon type, so it seems misplaced in there. Then "Books & Literature" (and other canon sources) remains a list of just that.

So instead of this:
Category:Fandoms by Canon Type
...Category:Books & Literature
......Category:Harry Potter
.........Harry Potter (the page)

It's this:
Category:Fandoms by Canon Type
...Category:Books & Literature
......Harry Potter (the page)

Then the Harry Potter page gets both the categories of "Books & Literature" as well as "Harry Potter".

And with this idea combined with the first/second one, instead of this:

Category:Fandoms by Canon Type
...Category:Sequential Art & Animation
......Category:Naruto
.........Naruto (the page)

It's these:

Category:Fandoms by Canon Type
...Category:Sequential Art
......Category:Manga
.........Naruto (the page)

Category:Fandoms by Canon Type
...Category:Animation
......Category:Anime
.........Naruto (the page)

The Naruto page gets [[Category:Naruto]], [[Category:Anime]], and [[Category:Manga]].

This only applies to categories of canon type. For categories by fandom community, keep the [[Category:Naruto]] under [[Cateogry:Anime & Manga fandom]].

So yes, my thoughts, there they are.