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Friday, September 21st, 2012 03:24 pm
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!
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012 09:37 pm (UTC)
I agree with Doro, save that I don't feel as strongly about not adding disambig lines that go to pages that don't exist yet. To me it just says: there is this other thing with the same title out there, you might've heard of it, but this isn't about that. I would add a similar line to a vid page, for instance, if I knew there were two with the same name, or that used the same music, to avoid confusion and to help editors who might want to start the other page.

Frankly I think all this is a considerable over-reaction to a single mistake by a new editor. People have made plenty of dafter errors on Fanlore, and it's a lot easier to fix the occasional mistake than to add a draft of new guidelines to "protect" podfic pages from "vandalism".
klb: (Default)
[personal profile] klb
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012 10:03 pm (UTC)
Sorry if this is repeating myself, but I don't feel that the issue here is that one edit, but the fact that if that reader viewed the podfic page as a mistake/oversight/inconsiderate treatment of that fanwork's title, other readers were probably viewing it that way as well (and viewing other podfic pages that way), without going as far as to edit the content in response. I would feel much more comfortable if that tension were resolved, so readers didn't feel like podfic pages were claiming to *own* the titles of the fics they are so closely intertwined with, or taking the place of the fics, or anything like that. Pretty much every solution proposed here would resolve that tension, I think.