Fanlore talk:What Fanlore is not

I am going to work a bit on this as people are finding it confusing. Any specific things that anyone wants clarified? --rache 14:20, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Proper link to PPOV page is here: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Plural_Point_of_View --Kyuuketsukirui 21:33, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you! I am a poor proofreader, so help is appreciated. --rache 21:36, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

that "not an index" policy

I understand why we don't want to be an archive, but why this: "Fanlore will not act as an index of all of the fanworks that any individual fan may have created, though references to individual fanworks and pages for controversial and/or significant fanworks is always desired."

Why shouldn't fanlore be an index where you can look up the bibliography of a fan? That is useful information. Sure, it's redundant if a fan maintains a page or has an index in a journal post or something, but what if that vanishes, or was never there in the first place? On many of the zine published authors as a first step in the article creation we already link all the zines they published in, hoping for more substantative expansions later.--RatCreature 07:35, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I think that's a reaction to the FH wiki and their bots that create index pages for all FF.net authors. --Doro 09:23, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

But bot harvested automatic pages are not the same at all as properly compiled bibiliographies. To have a policy of "we don't auto-scrape to have a ton of pages" is not at all the same as to have a rule of "we don't ever function as an index but editors have to select and mention only some works not all".--RatCreature 09:29, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I agree, it's not the same thing and a "no index" policy seems too restrictive when what it acually means to say is "no auto-scraping content" (that is *if* that's the reason for the policy. Maybe there are other reasons?). Maybe it's also in part a result of the "no notability criteria" approach because if there are no notability criteria and compiling an index is allowed, then there could be index pages for every single fan (which is what FH tried to do?). Only that doesn't take into account that someone would still have to create the pages so it would have to be notable to at least one fan, which is not the same thing as a bot automatically creating pages. --Doro 09:52, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

To take this further, not all fans are created equal—or equally prolific. For a notable writer who did only three or four brilliant stories, you presumably would be creating a complete index, just on the notability requirement. Someone else might do 20/50/150 equally brilliant stories, and the person doing the page would have (or feel they have) some arbitrary top limit. If they filled it, would that constrain another contributor whose opinions are different? -- Greer Watson 11:26, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I take it to mean "don't create a page for every fanwork ever", rather than "no bibliographies". I think some editing is in order.--æthel 14:49, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Notability policy needs to be clearer

Referring to the conversations above, I agree that the notability policy should be clearer. Right now, I feel iffy about whether making a separate page for my most popular fic would be seen as some kind of self-promotion; hell, I'm iffy about even cataloguing my own works. Same goes for fandom terminology--where do we draw the line between someone trying to get their foot in to try and popularise a term, if it's just used by that person and/or a handful of their friends, and a more "genuine" fandom term? (For instance, I've had really good responses at convention panels whenever I've campaigned for the use of the term "ravishment (fantasy)" to describe the sort of non-con where the "victim" is enjoying it, and god knows that thorny old topic needs a good term to articulate what those of us who write such fics mean by the concept. But no matter how useful, it hasn't been picked up by the fandom by and large, so it'd feel ridiculous for me to just stomp in and start going on about it.) But my personal qualms aside (which feel frankly ridiculous with the self-promotion of obscureish works going on here in places), I do think there ought to be at least some kinds of rules of thumb, some kinds of light and tentative guidelines, if not strict rules. Of course, a plural and neutral point of view makes such things difficult to define, but I do think it also discourages editing. (If such rules of thumb exist, I don't know about them; I came to this particular article to try and find them.) --Snowgrouse (talk) 17:08, 8 May 2017 (UTC)