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

[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.

[aethel]

With "canon type", we were trying to describe the media format of the canon rather than its literary genre, except that RPF isn't really a media format, so we couldn't call it that. (I guess we could call it "Fandoms by Canon Format" instead. I don't know if that is clearer.)

Technically, yes, graphic novels are books and animation can be TV or film, but these titles would quickly overwhelm the categories and make them less useful for people looking for book fandoms or live-action tv fandoms. Basically, I don't there is a perfect solution.

[zebra_in_dream]

So you are introducing a crutch term so you can include RPF under media type; using a term hardly known outside of academics to categorize in one category a bunch of very different media types, but are keeping books (does this include artbooks, travelbooks, biographies, etc?) and film (on AO3 that excludes Anime (now to be found included under Sequential Art & Animation in your scheme), but includes Cartoons (now to be found included under Sequential Art & Animation)) as crutches so people don't get confused were to find their stuff.

Are people suddenly supposed to know that Sequential Art means comics and manga and that they apparently need to be kept apart from books and literature (to me that reeks a bit as if comics and manga were lesser than literature).

And where is the cut, when is a book a Book and not a comic or picture book? How much or little animation must be in a movie to consider it as a film? When is a film a film (shown in cinema - of what size, shown only as one single unit, only having x number of parts)? Will they than be dual stuffed under both categories?

And why aren't books part of the potential Media Fandom category? Aren't books media, too?

It seems to me that the whole thing is done rather half-heartedly and one-sided.

a few thoughts, in no particular order

[aethel]

Books are a part of media fandom; in the example diagram, the media fandom category points to Harry Potter as well as Blake's 7.

If editors agree, we can cross-categorized animated films under Films and animated tv series under Television. But the tv category is so big already that it may not make sense to change it. I would like to hear from other editors before making such a change.

One thing to keep in mind is that Fanlore is not the AO3. Someone can post a story based on a YouTube video to AO3 and then that youtube video is listed as a fandom. Which is great! But a lot of those fandoms simply won't get written up for Fanlore unless there's enough fannish activity going on and/or a fan is moved to start a wiki article about it. So the overall number of fandoms and number of canon media formats represented on Fanlore will always be smaller than on AO3. Which I don't say to ignore unusual formats and edge cases, but we don't usually create a category until there's some minimum number of pages (10-15ish) that fit into it. If you can give specific examples of fandoms that will be left out in the cold with this plan, it will be easier for us to address your concerns.

Re: a few thoughts, in no particular order

[zebra_in_dream]

My concern is that this is just the forerunner to test the water after which this half-baked scheme will be applied to AO3.
Sequential Art (under which I wouldn't have searched for comics from any country) and Animation thrown into one pot, but Books & Literature and TV Shows and films separate, despite them being at least a combination like Sequential Art and Animation. Added to that that certain Animations are TV Shows and others are Films, and certain Sequential Arts are Books and/or Literature.
You say that you don't want to place certain categories under certain other categories because they'd contain too many entries, but like this there'd be many doubles in many categories (Will Shrek be Animation or Film or both?)

This looks very much like sorting the pears (Anime) into a scheme with the apples (TV Shows) and throwing a gardenia (RPF) in for good measure.

The categories currently look very much like the system ffn has been using for ages. If you want to shake that up and introduce a new way to categorize fandoms, do it completely and consistently. Don't make it looks like Barefoot Gen isn't Literature, My Neighbor Totoro isn't a Film and The Simpsons isn't a TV Show.