Comment on Fandom nonfiction: seeking feedback

  1. ghost_lingering Thu 14 Mar 2013 08:07PM UTC

    minus prepares to hit a meteor out of the park

    On, thinking more about this bit: "(2) Other aspects of work type will likely be optional/user-defined, possibly with autofill/some predetermined options that will not be exclusive. Again, our basic policy will be to defer to the creator’s categorizations."

    I ... have feelings about that? And they are not good. For me, personally, I think it would be a mistake to force a person to choose text/audio/video/images/etc from a set of predetermined answers, but then not have a standarized way to differentiate between different types of audio, different types of video, different types of text, etc. Vids are very very very different from fan documentaries, are very different from fan films; as such the needs of each project are different. I think it would be a mistake to shuffle all of those differences off to the tags.

    This is partially because I'm not a fan of how tags work on the AO3 currently; my issues with the tags are the lack of user consensus on what tagging is for. The fact that there is a lack of user consensus is not a problem that can be solved by the hard work of tag-wranglers alone. It means that important information about the work can get buried in amongst extraneous information ("incest" or "suicide" or "infidelity" gets drowned out by thirty different tumblr style tags), it means that information that is important to different sorts of fanworks would get devalued (attributing title and artist to the song use in an AMV; attributing different people and roles involved in the creation of a fan film), and it means that the different fannish standards that have developed in different fannish communities would get ignored.

    So. Not a fan.

    I think that it is essential that people can categorize a work as being "Other" -- both when choosing between video/text/audio/etc and also when choosing between different types of fannish mediums (podfic vs nonfiction essay vs vid) because there are fannish works that will get made that someone will want to post that won't fit into the given categories.

    However. Creating an archive that recognizes no divisions between fannish works beyond file type is a bad plan, one that will create more confusion in the long run and will frustrate and devalue more than it allows for meaningful expression.

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