Status of Fanwork Categories

[aethel]

Since response to the fanwork category proposal post was positive, we have started creating the proposed fanwork subcategories. So far, we have added:

* Zine Fandom
* Podfics
* Fanfiction
* Vids

and updated the corresponding templates. Now the Fanworks category contains only 348 pages, down from over 11,000! Check out the current Fanworks category.

The fanart categories haven't been created yet because we wanted to double check on what categories are needed. Because these categories would be added manually, and there are over 29,000 image files on Fanlore to sort through, we want to do it right the first time, if possible. So far, the proposed list includes:

* Category:Artworks
** Category:Zine Covers
** Category:Doujinshi Covers
** Category:Manips
** Category:Icons
** Category:Banners
** Category:Drawings

1. Are these good category names?
2. Anything missing?
3. Would zine covers with drawn artwork be given both the Zine Covers and Drawings categories?
4. Zine Covers needs to be further subdivied since there are so many examples on the wiki. (What is a useful way to do this? Fandom? Style? Decade? Do we want to distinguish between "art covers" and text-only covers?)
5. No one has requested this yet, but how about a "Calendars" category? There are quite a few articles about print calendars on the wiki.

Commenters on the last post also requested other templates and categories. So far, we have a template (but no category) for Template:FanFilm and related stuff. Also proposed:

*Filk
*Podcasts (needs a template first) new template
*Tape Zines (might have to be added manually?)

Regarding Filk, we have a filk album template (and an unused songbook template), but no dedicated categories other than Filk Music. We have a brand new filksong template that needs some feedback from filk experts. Do we want a new category like Filk Songs & Albums? Like this:
* Category:Filk Music (existing)
** Filk Songs & Albums (new)

Or do we want separate categories? Like this:

* Category:Filk Music (existing)
** Filk Songs (new)
** Filk Albums (new)

Comments

[ratcreature]

The "drawings" category will cause you all kinds of trouble when sorting things. First people won't be sure whether you mean it as a catch-all in opposition to "manips" and they should put painted fanart in that category, even though those are not "drawings" in the narrow sense, and if it's not a catchall, you won't have anywhere to put paintings. Further, in many cases people won't be sure whether something is a "drawing" or a "painting", either because you can't tell the media, because it might be mixed media with drawn and painted parts, because it is all done digital and nobody could possibly say whether the line of pixels counts as drawn or painted.

ETA: For subdividing artworks, perhaps dA's system could give ideas. I find it less than ideal, but then it is hard to come up with a category tree, and at least it's an approach that works somewhat in practice.

Since currently most fanart seems to be zine covers and interior art (and that distinction would be an obvious way to cut the huge number of zine images into two), there probably is no need to set up many categories for the rest to subdivide those, but if you if you wanted to set up more diverse categories for fanart to encourage documenation, there could be some for the digital fanart categories like animated gifs and the like, generally these meme arts, fannish skins&themes (could go together with banners & wallpapers & mood/emoticon sets in a broader category of customization art), then virtual 3D art (poser and the like). Obviously painting and mixed media (I'd suggest not separating digital & traditional there because both are often mixed and it can be impossible to tell from just a digital copy how an artwork was made), drawings (though the problem I mentioned above of delineating it against painting remains), cartoons&comics (not as source fandom but as fanart medium), typographic art (like images made up from text and letter and such), papercraft & folding (like paper cut-out art, fannish origami), photography (like fans doing photos of action figures in funny places, photo comics, other fannish photography), manips (thoug again there is a sorting problem to draw boundaries between mixed media, collage and one kind of manip and digital painting and another kind of manip, especially when you have no meta info from the artist, but a Fanlore editor wants to archive and sort a piece fanart they've seen somewhere and then uploaded to the wiki), real 3D art (sculptures, miniatures, dioramas, models...). Then various artisan crafts, like costumery, dolls & plushies, jewelry, fibercrafts, cake designs...

[aethel]

Thanks, ratcreature! You have good points about Drawings, and I hadn't thought to look at deviantart.

I wouldn't think to look under Customization for wallpaper or icons, but I don't know what else to call it.

Photography sounds easy to implement.

I love all the fancraft subcategories, though I'm afraid some of them would never be used. Still, we could start with
* Fan Crafts (or Artisan Crafts)
** Dolls & Plushies
** Textiles
*** Clothing? (we have a lot of t-shirt images)

I think someone suggested "Fan Crafts" a while ago as a general Fan Activity category, but nothing came of the conversation. We could create it now:
*Category:Fan Activities
** Category:Visual Art
*** Category:Fan Crafts
?

[ratcreature]

I don't think the common definition of "Visual Arts" includes Artisan Crafts, so that subcategorisation is misleading for the user. If you look for example at the wikipedia page for "visual arts" the subsections are drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, filmmaking, computer art, plastic arts & sculpture.

However if you separate arts and crafts at the top level alongside each other you run into the problem that people won't easily know where to put the three-dimensional fannish arts, because few of those are the traditional sculpture, but more often things that people associate with "crafts", like fannish dioramas, where dioramas are a typical thing people associate with school crafting lessons, or modified dolls and action figures (rather than sculpting from scratch), or really modding stuff in fannish styles in general.

But that is better than to put all crafts as a subsection of visual arts, I would never look for it there.

[aethel]

That sounds reasonable.

Now I'm thinking the category should be called simply "Crafts" since the other Fan Activity subcategories don't have "fan" in the name. Plus, it looks like I was the only one asking for "Fan Crafts". :/