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

[aethel]

Hi! Sorry about the delayed response. I like most of these changes and forwarded them to the committee--so far no objections. There are a couple of items I'm ambivalent about:
1.
> - Under "Sequential Art" have the "Manga" subcategory, and under "Animation" have the "Anime" subcategory.

Given your plan to categorize fandom pages instead of fandom categories under Canon Types, this would actually be very easy to implement since we've already got the Anime and Manga categories. However, I think it will look a little weird if they are the only subcategories. Can we add other country/region/continent subcategories? Like, do we want a "U.S. Comics & Graphic Novels" category? Admittedly, there's only 27 pages in the current Comics category, and some of them are not actually fandoms. http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Comics

Doro also proposed something upthread that appeals to me--have overlapping categories so everyone can have the categories they find useful. All sequential art goes in "Sequential Art", all comics from Japan go in Manga, etc. (If we did this, we would definitely need a U.S. Comics category as well) I made a little diagram of the result:



Existing categories in white, new categories in pink, renamed Real People category in light pink.

2.
I'm also not sure about the naming of the comics fandom category. Do comics fans call it "Comic Book Fandom"? "Comics Fandom", "Comic Book Fandom", a disambiguation along the lines of "Comics Fandom (U.S.?? comic books)" or whatever is fine by me as long as comics fans actually call it that.

3. There is no 3.

(BTW, I changed the "Science Fiction" category to read "Science Fiction Fandom"... and then I realized maybe it should be called "Science Fiction & Fantasy Fandom"??)

ETA: To clarify, if we adopt all your changes and start doing stuff on the actual wiki today, I would be delighted! (I don't think we can do it today, though; I have to go check....) I think point #1 above would be easy to fix later on.

[kylara]

Can we add other country/region/continent subcategories? Like, do we want a "U.S. Comics & Graphic Novels" category?

That sounds fantastic. I was under the impression we'd have subcategories when any group/set/selection gets big enough, which is how I thought categories were working anyway? And optimistically we'll have many anime and manga entries, so we still have use for those categories.

For these "overlapping" categories, just so I understand: canon type and fandom community wouldn't be separated anymore? I'll read through Doro's thread more thoroughly tomorrow, but I'd like to have a better idea how this would work. Just looking at the diagram, it seems redundant for anime and manga (and potentially other sub-categories) to be listed twice, as both top level and sub-categories.


Do comics fans call it "Comic Book Fandom"?

Good question; I personally don't really know! And I don't want to inflict titles on others. It looked to me like a descriptive term rather than an identity, which is why I suggested it, but I should've checked on that before saying anything. According to Google, "comics fandom" has 64,400 results; "comic book fandom" has 114,000 results. There is also apparently a "Father of Comic Book Fandom" Jerry Bails, so it seems the term has been in use for a while. All I know is what Google tells me.


3. There is no 3.

You can't fool me! Where has the cabal hidden it?! ;)


maybe it should be called "Science Fiction & Fantasy Fandom"??

That sounds good to me, but as with comic book fandom I'm not sure if that's intended as a description or an identity. Maybe ask the community?

At this point, I think the category proposal is ready to be implemented? Details can be tweaked along the way of course. Although I'm still not sure about the overlapping category suggestion; will re-read at normal hours, it might compute then.