Note: I am getting on a plane to go on vacation in less than 12 hours (eep) so please understand that I might not be able to give responses to this comment, but these are some thoughts that I had sent earlier in response to Paraka's last email to the gardeners list.
klb suggested that one way to deal with it is to include "podfic" in the title, but not as an honourific. So "Title podfic" would be how the pages are named. Most of the time, in fannish day-to-day conversations, people will often specify when they're talking about a podfic if the context of the situation doesn't already imply it. And when you look at places like AO3 or general fandom comms, many podficcers add that sort of distinction when they post their work. So adding "podfic" to the title does reflect podfic fandom today.
I really like this suggestion! And I'm sort of facepalming that we didn't think of it. I think as an actual gardener (but not a committee member)-- just personally speaking, I often fall into the trap of "but this is the rule so we must do it this way, and everything must be the same, in order to be organized and not confusing" but as aethel pointed out, fandom is a big place and we should ideally be responding with flexibility in order to reflect how people are actually doing things, even if it doesn't fit perfectly into some theoretical idea of what things *should* look like.
And also as a wiki contributor I tend to think of what will be best in the long term for much larger groups of future wiki participants-- so my priority is generally simpler procedures for creating pages, the same processes for every fanwork, etc., and then I sort of forget, "oh yeah, people will also just be USING the wiki, like, to look things up and find information, duh." And using "Title Of Story Podfic" would be best in that case as well, as Paraka also points out, because it seems to me that's how people would *search* for the podfic page, if they were looking for it-- they'd search for "Such And Such Podfic".
And then as klb points out, podfic is also special case compared to other currently existing types of fanworks, in that generally, disambiguation is usually only needed in the case of a very short generic title like "Alone" or "Masks", or if it's a very common fandom injoke/reference like (this is just a made up example) "Me and Thee" in Starsky & Hutch fandom, where that's the name of a zine and an archive and a mailing list and a couple of stories and also someone's pseud and so on, and those can usually be worked out by the "first come first served" rule and by creating disambiguation pages not automatically, but mostly only as needed.
But a podfic 95% of the time will have the same title as a text fic, so the page creation guidelines should probably reflect that podfic titling conventions are different than other types of fanwork titling conventions.
So, my general priority would still be that the shortest/simplest title & shortest/simplest page creation system is best, but I think in this case I've come around to the idea that the shortest/simplest system for podfic pages *should* include the info that the work is a podfic. It's less confusing and also it's less challenging for the casual wiki editor than creating disambiguation pages.
I'm not sure yet about whether it should be "Title of Story Podfic" or "Title of Story (podfic)." The second way looks neater, I think, but it might confuse the casual wiki editor into thinking that they would always need to put (vid) or (zine) other details in the title of a page, and also I worry about offending people if we say "No, that rule is just for podfic," "Well, why are there special rules just for podfic!"
These are really just minor concerns though, I guess I don't have a strong preference either way.
There was some debate in the talk page where this was brought up that (story) is perhaps not the correct honourific and, while I'm throwing my 2 cents in, I'd like to say that I'd prefer to see the fic getting an honourific like (fanfic) instead, since the podfic is a story too (as are vids and comics and many other fanarts). In fact, what the fic and podfic share is the story, what we need to disambiguate is which medium the story is being told in.
Right, different mediums are also stories, but a story in zine format is labeled "zine," in audio format "podfic" and then in text format, currently, "story."
But the problem is, there's not that much difference between "story" and "fanfic," I don't think-- in the sense that they are both umbrella terms and literally both mean more than just "text based internet fan fiction." I mean, a zine is fanfic, a podfic is fanfic, a fan comic is fanfic. If we changed to "fanfic" to indicate the internet text version of a story, wouldn't we equally be saying "these works aren't really fanfic?"
I mean, "story" is inexact, but I don't know if there is a more exact term that is actually, currently in active use in fandom, to mean just an internet-posted text-based story and not stories in other mediums.
The only one that I can think of that has actually been commonly used in fandom would be back in the day when people used "zinefic" and "netfic" to distinguish between those two media types, but I don't think we'd have much luck trying to get people to use "netfic" now.
And this is where we get into the issue that Fanlore is (ideally) descriptive, not prescriptive, meaning, in this case, that we would prioritize using the terms that are already *being* used, and not be like an anthropologist and say "We've decided to label this sort of thing 'textfic' even though nobody in fandom actually uses that term."
Anyway. I don't think I was around when "story" was chosen, but I always assumed that the thought process there was "how easy is this going to be for large groups of people in the long run, including lots of casual editors," and using "fanfic" instead of "story" opens up all those variations of spelling, as someone pointed out on one of the talk page discussions-- now you're not just having problems with non-standardized labeling like "TS fic" and "Sentinel fic" and "The Sentinel fic," -- now you're adding a whole new problem point where people are creating duplicate pages/making unsuccessful searches because there is the ambiguity of "fic," "fanfic," "fan fic," "fan fiction," "fanfiction," etc. So in that sense, "story" has an advantage just because it's harder to mess up.
no subject
klb suggested that one way to deal with it is to include "podfic" in the title, but not as an honourific. So "Title podfic" would be how the pages are named. Most of the time, in fannish day-to-day conversations, people will often specify when they're talking about a podfic if the context of the situation doesn't already imply it. And when you look at places like AO3 or general fandom comms, many podficcers add that sort of distinction when they post their work. So adding "podfic" to the title does reflect podfic fandom today.
I really like this suggestion! And I'm sort of facepalming that we didn't think of it. I think as an actual gardener (but not a committee member)-- just personally speaking, I often fall into the trap of "but this is the rule so we must do it this way, and everything must be the same, in order to be organized and not confusing" but as aethel pointed out, fandom is a big place and we should ideally be responding with flexibility in order to reflect how people are actually doing things, even if it doesn't fit perfectly into some theoretical idea of what things *should* look like.
And also as a wiki contributor I tend to think of what will be best in the long term for much larger groups of future wiki participants-- so my priority is generally simpler procedures for creating pages, the same processes for every fanwork, etc., and then I sort of forget, "oh yeah, people will also just be USING the wiki, like, to look things up and find information, duh." And using "Title Of Story Podfic" would be best in that case as well, as Paraka also points out, because it seems to me that's how people would *search* for the podfic page, if they were looking for it-- they'd search for "Such And Such Podfic".
And then as klb points out, podfic is also special case compared to other currently existing types of fanworks, in that generally, disambiguation is usually only needed in the case of a very short generic title like "Alone" or "Masks", or if it's a very common fandom injoke/reference like (this is just a made up example) "Me and Thee" in Starsky & Hutch fandom, where that's the name of a zine and an archive and a mailing list and a couple of stories and also someone's pseud and so on, and those can usually be worked out by the "first come first served" rule and by creating disambiguation pages not automatically, but mostly only as needed.
But a podfic 95% of the time will have the same title as a text fic, so the page creation guidelines should probably reflect that podfic titling conventions are different than other types of fanwork titling conventions.
So, my general priority would still be that the shortest/simplest title & shortest/simplest page creation system is best, but I think in this case I've come around to the idea that the shortest/simplest system for podfic pages *should* include the info that the work is a podfic. It's less confusing and also it's less challenging for the casual wiki editor than creating disambiguation pages.
I'm not sure yet about whether it should be "Title of Story Podfic" or "Title of Story (podfic)." The second way looks neater, I think, but it might confuse the casual wiki editor into thinking that they would always need to put (vid) or (zine) other details in the title of a page, and also I worry about offending people if we say "No, that rule is just for podfic," "Well, why are there special rules just for podfic!"
These are really just minor concerns though, I guess I don't have a strong preference either way.
There was some debate in the talk page where this was brought up that (story) is perhaps not the correct honourific and, while I'm throwing my 2 cents in, I'd like to say that I'd prefer to see the fic getting an honourific like (fanfic) instead, since the podfic is a story too (as are vids and comics and many other fanarts). In fact, what the fic and podfic share is the story, what we need to disambiguate is which medium the story is being told in.
Right, different mediums are also stories, but a story in zine format is labeled "zine," in audio format "podfic" and then in text format, currently, "story."
But the problem is, there's not that much difference between "story" and "fanfic," I don't think-- in the sense that they are both umbrella terms and literally both mean more than just "text based internet fan fiction." I mean, a zine is fanfic, a podfic is fanfic, a fan comic is fanfic. If we changed to "fanfic" to indicate the internet text version of a story, wouldn't we equally be saying "these works aren't really fanfic?"
I mean, "story" is inexact, but I don't know if there is a more exact term that is actually, currently in active use in fandom, to mean just an internet-posted text-based story and not stories in other mediums.
The only one that I can think of that has actually been commonly used in fandom would be back in the day when people used "zinefic" and "netfic" to distinguish between those two media types, but I don't think we'd have much luck trying to get people to use "netfic" now.
And this is where we get into the issue that Fanlore is (ideally) descriptive, not prescriptive, meaning, in this case, that we would prioritize using the terms that are already *being* used, and not be like an anthropologist and say "We've decided to label this sort of thing 'textfic' even though nobody in fandom actually uses that term."
Anyway. I don't think I was around when "story" was chosen, but I always assumed that the thought process there was "how easy is this going to be for large groups of people in the long run, including lots of casual editors," and using "fanfic" instead of "story" opens up all those variations of spelling, as someone pointed out on one of the talk page discussions-- now you're not just having problems with non-standardized labeling like "TS fic" and "Sentinel fic" and "The Sentinel fic," -- now you're adding a whole new problem point where people are creating duplicate pages/making unsuccessful searches because there is the ambiguity of "fic," "fanfic," "fan fic," "fan fiction," "fanfiction," etc. So in that sense, "story" has an advantage just because it's harder to mess up.