Categories/templates in Animanga and Translation?

[briar_pipe]

*tiptoes in*

Hi folks! I've been tackling one small boulder in the mountain of fansub information not yet on the wiki, and I have a few questions about categories and templates.

• There is a template for fansubbers/scanlators, labelled WIP. It currently has no subcategory attached. Can we give it one? And if so, is there a neutral term we could use, like "Fan Translators"? That way, we won't need a new template every time a new medium/genre/source country/language is added to the wiki.
  
  
• Should Anime Club pages use the Fan Club Template? Does anyone see anything present in/missing from that template that would make it not work with those?
  
  
• It'd be great to have a category for all the scanlation/fansub-related material besides groups (process, history, websites, terms, fan-created technology, etc.). There are at least 14 pages that fit this criteria, with many more waiting to be created.
  
  • It might make sense to have a top-level "Fan Translation" category under "Fan Activities" that could be medium-, language-, and community-neutral.
    
  • A "Fan Translators" subcat could be put here.
  
  
• Per a discussion on the Anime talk page, I asked on the Anime & Manga Fandom talk page why there were several anime series listed as subcategories on that page but no subcategories for non-series pages. Sparc and I discussed, and I moved the fandoms over to the Anime and/or Manga categories (depending on canon). Only then did we see the note at the bottom of the Anime & Manga Fandom page about moving series subcats to there. No one else has commented to help us understand the situation, so Sparc suggested I bring it here. My concerns:
  
  • There are thousands of animanga fandoms. Currently, 97 anime have their own pages and 33 have subcats, while manga are at 86/28, with overlap. I predict that as AO3 becomes more popular with anime & manga fans moving from ffnet, more will discover Fanlore, and those numbers will shoot up.
    
  • If we do want those fandom subcats on the Anime & Manga Fandom page, I suggest they be put in a subcategory of their own to keep them from burying the material that has no other animanga home, like websites, glossary terms, conventions, etc.
    
  • The Anime & Manga Fandom page should probably include links to the categories Doujin Fandom, Anime Music Video Fandom, Anime, and Manga. They don't have to be subcats - links at the top would be fine, I think?
    
  • There should probably be additional subcategories created. If anyone wants to come sift through the links and offer opinions, that'd be awesome.

An unrelated question: I'm trying to make an internal link to /a/, in case anyone gets brave enough to tackle 4chan-related info. However, I can't get the wiki to show the //. Any wiki gurus out there know the trick?

Thanks, guys!

Comments

[lannamichaels]

An unrelated question: I'm trying to make an internal link to /a/, in case anyone gets brave enough to tackle 4chan-related info. However, I can't get the wiki to show the //. Any wiki gurus out there know the trick?

Haven't looked into doing this on fanlore, but I had a similar problem with a wiki template when I needed to use the [] characters in the URL. The workaround that worked was using the ASCII code in the template (it would probably work in the plain URL as well, but I was templating), so it converted like:

{{ template | id = ##### }}

would create the url http://www.example.com/stuff[####]

without the user having to handle the illegal character themselves.


EDIT: oops, misremembered the illegal characters. ;) This is the template, if it helps. :) SUCH a kluge template...

[briar_pipe]

Thank you! I'm not editing a template in this case, so I might not need to get too complicated, but it's definitely good to have those options around for the gardeners and staff.

Is Fanlore on ASCII, though? I thought it was on UTF-8, since non-English character sets show up pretty well. Does that matter? I honestly don't tend to do anything beyond HTML escape characters, so these may be n00b questions. Sorry!

[lannamichaels]

Try using the HTML ASCII code in the URL instead of the character. The slash is /

[briar_pipe]

It worked! Thank you!

[facetofcathy]

Just FYI, if you ever need to do this again, there's tools that do the encoding for you.

This encoder and decoder in one works nicely.

[briar_pipe]

Thanks!

[(Anonymous)]

I just wanted to say that I love all the work you've been doing and thank you for being so proactive ♥

And the Fan Translators/Fan Translation categories sound like a good idea to me!

--sparc

[briar_pipe]

Thanks, Sparc! I appreciate your help this past week. <3

(Brilliant addition to the Fan Entitlement page, btw. I'd forgotten all about "I won't update until I get 50 reviews!!!" and its ilk. ^o^)

[aethel]

Fan Translators: the problem with this phrasing is that we don't categorize individual fan pages according to their fan activity. We could use Fan Translation Groups if we wanted a generic category for this. I am definitely in favor of having a translation fan activity category as well, though to match our other activity subcategories, it should be Translation or Translating.

Anime & Manga Fandom subcategories: Last year we had an elaborate discussion with charts, and the conclusion was that "overview" fandom pages would be categorized under canon format categories and fandom categories would go under the superfandom category. But we didn't apply this rule to Media Fandom because it would have been insane. So we could change the rule to have fandom categories just under the format categories. That would be a simpler rule.

[briar_pipe]

Fan Translation Groups: Works for me! That was my other thought if the individual one didn't work.

Activity: Yes, Translating or Translation would be fine with me, whatever fits the system.

A & M Fandom: Oooh, charts! <3 I think if we do follow the original standard, an extra layer of subcats would need to be created to keep the page useable. I'm good either way, so long as the page isn't so overwhelmed no one can find anything. But we do definitely need links to those four related "overview"/"canon type" fandoms at the top somewhere.

Whee, ideas! Thank you!

[aethel]

I created the Translation category.

So far we've tried to avoid creating categories whose sole purpose is to organize categories.

Related discussions I dug up:
http://fanlore.dreamwidth.org/44134.html?thread=440678#cmt440678
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Category_talk:Books_%26_Literature

Writing in "See also category xyz" is pretty easy. I can look at that later if someone else doesn't want to do it.

[briar_pipe]

Thank you! I moved over the pages I found, though there may be more. I left a note on Yue's userpage to check in about the changes. I'll poke her on chat if she doesn't reply eventually. ^_^

It took me a while to get through the second discussion you linked, but I think I'm beginning to see the issue. We want pages to be easily findable, but the line between overinclusion and underinclusion is very fine. Overinclude, and every high level page is awash in subcategories such that users can't see the trees for the forest. Underinclude, and users become frustrated or think that certain subcats simply don't exist.

Anyway, I think cross-linking between high-level cat pages will solve some of that problem, and Anime and Manga - as canon type categories - are expected to be chock full of anime and manga series anyway, whether as subcats or simply as pages. I assume something similar has been worked out for Media fandom, or the same situation would have appeared.

Thank you for the links, and for being so flexible on this discussion! It's quite a complicated one.

[aethel]

ahaha, if by flexible you mean the worst waffler in the history of breakfast foods. I find myself agreeing with everyone. But, seriously, the Anime & Manga category page looks nicer now. And if people tend to expect the categories to go under the media type, then it's easier just to let them instead of reverting changes all the time.

[espresso_addict]

I've been following your additions with interest, but I'm almost completely ignorant of anime, so this is a perspective from the outside.

In my corner of fandom, a fan translator would be someone who translated a work of fanfiction from one language into another, which feels a bit confusing in context. Though I suppose at the moment we are not adding any categories at all to individual fan pages (though that might have to change as the numbers grow) so individuals who do this activity go uncategorised, and I'm not aware of any groups of people that do this collaboratively, so it might make no difference whether or not this group is included. This applies both to the template and the related category. Caveated on that, creating a category under Fan Activities as you suggest sounds a great idea.

In general I don't believe dividing essentially similar fannish activities by genre of source material is a good idea, so I'd suggest that anime clubs should use the fan club template. If some fields aren't appropriate then could the template be altered to be more appropriate?

Your last question, I think I must be missing something? How does anime/manga differ from other types of source material in terms of its Fanlore organisation? Sorry, I'm clearly missing something here...

[briar_pipe]

Outside perspectives are good! (Thank you for cleaning up my messes, btw. I'm still reminding myself how to work a wiki. -_-;;)

Translators: In anime/manga fandom, the people who produce scanlations/fansubs are simply called 'translators', so you have a good point. But I think simply calling the template "Translators" or "Translation Groups" might open the door to editors thinking any group that translates canon is fair game, even if they're not fannish? There are lots of non-fannish professional or semi-professional groups/companies out there doing the same thing, legal or not, but they get paid and aren't doing it because they love the works and want them to be available. Or not solely for that reason.

Clubs: I think Anime Clubs should fit the Fan Clubs template just fine, but I wanted to open the door in case someone saw something I didn't.

Categories: There's a top-level Anime & Manga Fandom community category, then two top-level canon categories, Anime and Manga. All the individual anime fandom categories made for canons like Cowboy Bebop and One Piece were dumped in the Anime & Manga Fandom category, which is also the only home for all the non-canon information about that community: websites, terms, cons, clubs, etc. Since many more canons could get their own categories in a short time, it was like looking at an avalanche waiting to fall on the page....

[liviapenn]

Translators: In anime/manga fandom, the people who produce scanlations/fansubs are simply called 'translators', so you have a good point. But I think simply calling the template "Translators" or "Translation Groups" might open the door to editors thinking any group that translates canon is fair game, even if they're not fannish? There are lots of non-fannish professional or semi-professional groups/companies out there doing the same thing, legal or not, but they get paid and aren't doing it because they love the works and want them to be available. Or not solely for that reason.

That is an interesting gray area. It seems like most of the big activity categories do have "Fan" at the beginning-- "Fan Writer," "Fanartist." Others don't have the "fan" prefix, but mostly the ones that are strictly fannish terms anyway (pro music video editors don't call themselves "vidders," etc.) There are exceptions, like "Archivist" or "Moderator," and possibly "Zine Ed," so I guess it could go either way.

[briar_pipe]

I guess it's a matter of figuring out what editors are likely to do? I also think it's fine for the template to be used for groups who translate fanworks - in fact, given the quantity of doujin scanlations available, that's almost certainly going to happen.

You have a good point about the terms we use now, most of which seem to be differentiated by how likely they are to cause confusion. (A zine is a very specific type of work, and archivists or moderators outside of fandom aren't likely to attract fannish interest in a page.) I think the core questions are, "Is this term broad enough to encompass all the fannish practices we want it to encompass?" and "Is this term specific enough to exclude the non-fannish practices we want it to exclude?"

Answers may vary?

[liviapenn]

Also, in terms of excluding the non-fannish practices, I think there is a place on Fanlore for talking about these amateur translation groups that are more for-profit than labor-of-love, as long as the page is about the fannish context & history-- IDK anything about these groups, really, but I can imagine a page explaining about the evolution of fannish opinions about these groups, fannish controversies about translation choices, how a group affected the history of a fandom ("English language XYZ fandom was relatively small until ABC group translated the source, bringing many new fans in...") and stuff like that. So, from that perspective, it could go in the "translation" category just like fan-translated fanfic, doujin scanlations, and fans translating source works as a labor of love.

(I was trying to think of an example that wasn't a for-profit business, like Livejournal, and I went to the page on "Fifty Shades of Grey," -- which, now that I look about it, could be hugely expanded in terms of the *fannish* reaction, both within Twilight fandom & in wider "fandom," various criticisms & backlashes, etc.)

[briar_pipe]

Looking back at the Fan Club template, I now think it doesn't actually fit most anime clubs, sadly. I'll leave a discussion note over there and see if anyone has ideas for a better fit. Please jump in if you notice something!

[msilverstar]

oh tricky, because a page named /a/ is not the same as a page named a !

Wikipedia seems to do it with just two // in a row, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki// and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//A\ (it redirects somewhere else but that's not the point)

Anyway, make a page with the title as /a/ and if that doesn't work, ping me and I'll see if I can help

[briar_pipe]

I used the trick lannamichaels described, and I think it worked, though I haven't created the actual page yet. The test is on my user profile. I will definitely come check in with you if it doesn't actually create a page!