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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------

We welcome discussion, comments, and feedback.

Comments

[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.

[hl]

But then you would lose the usability of the 'canon type ' classification, no? Animé is not actually of a different canon type or source type than USA comics, or that Argentinian historietas. The same way that a TV show from Argentina is not from a different canon type than a TV show from USA. It's just that the fandoms are separate, and that's why you have the parallel 'Fandoms by Community' scheme, no?

(am a otw volunteer but not part of the wiki committee, commenting here completely unofficially as an interested wiki user)

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

But then you would lose the usability of the 'canon type ' classification, no?

How so? I don't know what Argentinian historietas are and I'm not sure about Animé but Anime (the Japanese one) is definitely a different canon type than comics (also, not all comics are American). But you are right, a TV show from Argentina is no different canon type than a TV show from the USA, if by TV show you mean Live Action TV Series, which is what we usually mean when we say Television. I guess my point is the Animation & Sequential Art cat tries to be too many different things at the same time. If we need to have parent categories like Animation or Sequential Art, I would imagine a Fandom by Canon Type category to look something like this:

Category:Animation
.....Category:Anime
.....Category:Cartoons
Category:Books & Literature
Category:Sequential Art
.....Category:Comics
.....Category:Manga
.....Category:Manhwa
Category:Film
Category:Games
Category:Live Action TV Series
Category:Real People
.....Category:Actor RPF
.....Category:Historical RPF
.....Category:Music RPF
..........Category:American Idol
..........Category:Bandom
..........Category:Duran Duran
..........Category:Eminem
..........Category:J-Pop
..........Category:Popslash
.....Category:Sports RPF
Category:Radio
Category:Theater

[hl]

And again, I posit they're not different sources at all -- I don't see why you would think so. Live Action TV Series are also in different languages in different countries, have different aesthetic and cultural clichés and plot types, probably have genre differences, etc. Manga and comics and manhwa and historietas (which is also a translation of the term manga, and manhwa, and comics) are not substantially different in any other sense that all those. The only difference is a classification one based on fandom culture. What is then the argument to separate comics (which apparently encompasses not USA stuff too. Like what?) and manga?

(sorry, animé is how anime is written in Spanish; I sometimes flub when I write in English. Though you may have supposed they were the same, no? They're not really written substantially different. Are you finding this discussion disagreeable or aggressive? Why the reaction?)

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

Live Action TV Series are also in different languages in different countries, have different aesthetic and cultural clichés and plot types, probably have genre differences, etc.

Which is why they could all have their own subcategories, if there are enough pages of one type.

What is then the argument to separate comics (which apparently encompasses not USA stuff too. Like what?) and manga?

To answer the "like what" question: French comics, Belgian comics, German comics...

The argument for separating comics and manga is that it's a useful distinction (different styles of art, different structure, different tropes, differences in format and presentation, etc.), makes the categories smaller, and helps Fanlore users to find what they are looking for.

Are you finding this discussion disagreeable or aggressive? Why the reaction?

What makes you think that?

[hl]

I thought that was obvious from how I wrote it! It appeared to me that it was a disingenuous question -- but it seems I misread the tone, apologies.

I really don't see german or french or belgian or argentinian or whatever comics as more similar to USA comics than to manga. And though I think the separation makes sense in some ways (for example, it will be cool to be able to browse separately when one would wants to look, say, only manga pages, because the fandoms are separated communities and thus it makes sense people would want to browse that way), I would still like it better if there were also way to browse all the pages about the same types of canon, including sequential art (I would browse that way, for example, the same way I would browse all Book fandoms).

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

Sorry, didn't get a comment notification.

I really don't see german or french or belgian or argentinian or whatever comics as more similar to USA comics than to manga.

Except someone looking for them (speaking for German/French/Belgian comics) would look for comics, not for manga, because they are commonly called comics. (The German word for comics is Comics and for manga is Manga. Just saying!)

I would still like it better if there were also way to browse all the pages about the same types of canon

There is no technical reason why there can't be both, you can add as many categories to a page as you want, and in some cases Fanlore does include everything in the parent category and in the more specific category at the same time. However, the only example I can think of is the fanworks category which has 9,301 members - not something that is a great way to browse fanworks (but helpful when adding date cats to all these thousand of pages and images). Generally the rules say that this is not the way categories are supposed to work, but that's simply a matter of policy.

I just want to point out that our definitions of "same type of canon" are not the same. Moving pictures are not the same type of canon to me as something where I have to turn a page to see what happens next. It would make just as much sense to me to group everything printed on paper (Manga/Comics/Books) in one category and all moving pictures (Anime/Live Action TV/Film/Cartoons) in another. I would still say these categories are too big, unwieldy and try to be too many things at the same time.

[aethel]

We wouldn't make an Anime & Manga subcategory under Sequential Art&Animation, because as others have pointed out, it's a fandom, and as a fandom category it would be used differently from a format category. If we put Anime & Manga under Fandoms by Canon Type, it would be confusing to readers because the contents of the category wouldn't match the contents of, say, Books & Literature. (An alternative would be to not list every major canon format under Fandoms by Canon Type, but only to list the types, like RPF and Books & Literature, where there might not be an all-encompassing umbrella fan community and/or people just want to have a list.)

The current subcategories under Fandoms by Community would stay where they are.

I don't see the difference between RPF and Real People either. No one is required to create an RPF category for the plan to work.

"Comics" is a problematic category; technically, it describes a format, but I've seen it used to refer only to DC/Marvel fandom.

I am not actually sure what you are describing in the last paragraph. As I understand it, J-pop is a fandom; therefore, a J-pop category could be created that could be sorted under "Music RPF" or "Real People" and under "Fandoms by Community". The pages in the J-pop category would include Jpop.

[elf]

"Comics" is a problematic category; technically, it describes a format, but I've seen it used to refer only to DC/Marvel fandom.

Biggest comics fandom I can think of outside of those is Elfquest. There are also small indie-comic fandoms like Cerebus and Flaming Carrot. And if Chick Tracts have a fandom, I suppose it counts as comics fandom. (There are parody tracts.)

[liviapenn]

Also, webcomics.