paraka: A baby wearing headphones and holding a mic (Default)
paraka ([personal profile] paraka) wrote in [community profile] fanlore2012-09-21 03:24 pm

Podfic Entries

I've been trying to add more entries to Fanlore about podfic and have run into a bit of an issue. When I was creating new pages I was titling them "Title (podfic)" to help distinguish that this was an entry about the podfic not about the fic, which normally has the same title.

The problem though, is that this goes against current Fanlore policies to only add an honourific to an entry if there's a conflicting entry of the same name and there's a need to disambiguate. So the gardeners, rightly, were changing the names of the pages I created to remove the honourific.

And while I totally understand the reason for the policy, it still made me nervous because without the (podfic) in the title it just wasn't as clear that the entry was a podfic entry. Sure enough, one of the entries I made was later edited in a way to make it seem more like a fic entry (it's since been changed back and with other additions).

So I'd like to have a conversation about what we can do to make sure that podfic entries are welcomed on Fanlore and that future editors, trying to be helpful but not aware that the entry is a podfic entry, won't end up morphing the entries into fic entries. I've spoken to some individual podficcers about this as well as some of the Fanlore gardeners, and here's some of the suggestions we've come up with so far:

[personal profile] 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.

Sparcicle suggested that we add a note to the top of podfic pages saying "This page is about the podfic. For the story, see Title (story)."
This will give an immediate visual clue to those viewing the page that this is a page for the podfic and gives them a link to the fic page (or the opportunity to create a page for the fic if it doesn't already exist, as it won't in most cases).

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.

[personal profile] aethel suggested adding a grey banner to the infobox to make it clearer that the template is a podfic template.

Personally, I think I like options 2 and 3 together best, but I thought I'd ask others how they feel before I start creating a bunch more pages. And please feel free to add more suggestions!
hl: Drawing of Ada Lovelace as a young child, reading a Calculus book (Default)

[personal profile] hl 2012-09-22 12:21 am (UTC)(link)
I'm neutral over how exactly the guideline will end up. Both two pages and one page with two sections sound good to me, and which sounds better depends on how notable are the two works (i.e. a non notable podfic may be OK as a byline or a smaller section in a notable fic's page, and the other way around) and I doubt we will get any bloating. If fanart pieces were notable (which I imagine some are, like all fanworks) I would also make their own pages or put them in shared ones, depending on how their notability is related to another work or not. My only concern is making guidelines that will mean editors would be more reluctant to take up pages and edit -- for example, by requiring them to add sections about works they've no interest in writing about, or by allowing confusing that will mean their work will be overlooked, like in this last case.

To be honest, clarifying fanfiction/podfic/fanart/whatever in the title as a rule doesn't sound so bad to me as a reader, but I'll leave it to the editors that are on those sections of fandom to decide what sounds better.