Category talk:Microblogs
Archived Discussion Moved From Talk:The Gleetionary
Tumblr is a fannish space, but it looks weird to have a "Tumblr Fandom" category since we don't have a similar naming scheme for other fannish communication platforms. We've got "Newsgroups" and "Websites" under fan communities, and I have been thinking we could have separate categories for Journaling Communities and Mailing Lists. We also have a "Social Networking" category, but it lists pages about the services and not individual accounts on the services. How about a hierarchy like this:
Fan Communities
- Category:Mailing Lists
- Category:Newsgroups
- Category:Social Networking
- Category:Microblogs - twitter, tumblr, any future replacement for tumblr, etc.
- Category:Journaling Communities
though I am not sure that people would end up making a lot of Fanlore pages for individual microblogs? --æþel 18:59, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
- I don't see much difference between mailing lists and journaling communities when it comes to social networking. Social networking doesn't seem like an intuitive fannish term and in this context sounds more like corporate speak. At least I wouldn't know what to do with it when adding categories to a page. Why not
- and see where it goes from there? --Doro 19:20, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
- Would Journaling Communities fit under Websites as well? I feel uncomfortable giving Tumblr its own category when it's a particular company/service and the other categories are generic. Is there a generic term for tumblr other than microblog? Is there a fannish presence on similar microblogging services? --æþel 19:52, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
- Another thing to consider about Journaling Communities is that they actually cover both journals/blogs and communities; and these don't actually operate in the same way, even when they're on the same platform. Personal journals (whether used as blogs, personal fanfic archives, etc.) tend to focus on the main post, with comments being the icing on the cake. For communities, the main post is often no more than the jumping-off point for discussion, with the comments being the real meat'n'potatoes. The former use is a lot like an archive that allows comments (e.g. AO3). The latter use is more like mailing lists, except for being threaded. --Greer Watson 00:38, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
- True, but we don't create Fanlore pages for personal journals--info about personal ljs are added to the page about the fan, which gets the Fan template and category. Plus, with the "Journaling Communities" nomenclature, I was trying to indicate that the category would include lj, dw, ij, and jf comms and not individual user accounts. However we go about this, it just seems weird to me that we have a special subcategory for 15 usenet pages, but the hundreds of lj comms are left in the undifferentiated parent category.--æþel 01:03, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
- Blargh, I am no good at categories. Basically, what I decided on when I mocked up the SiteTumblr template was to put them in the Category:Fan Communities which is not ideal -- some Tumblrs take submissions and are mostly unmoderated (a community), while others become popular by the hand of one or two people (more of a personal journal). The Gleetionary is the work of many, in this example. I like Aethel's idea of having a Category:Microblogging category for both Twitter and Tumblr -- there are Twitters that are fannishly famous (such as Feminist Hulk, which has fanworks made after it).
- As you can see, I'm better at the raving about things that need to be documented than the procedural thinking involved in actually organising things that do get documented. :| --Awils1 08:50, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
Hmm, so we left off a month ago with no consensus, though at this point I'm leaning toward Tumblr against my former suggestion of Microblogging since the latter has the same problem that Social Networking has. If people are agreed, I can create Category:Tumblr under Websites and Fan Communities?--æþel 18:30, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
- I know Microblogging appears to be a obscure term, but I'm envisioning future articles (which I would myself contribute to, since a lot of my area of fandom is big on Tumblr and Twitter). It seems weird to me, too, that Usenet has its own category but we don't have a distinction for DW and LJ. My own suggestion would be.
- Category:Fan Communities
- Category:Mailing Lists
- Category:Newsgroups
- Category:Microblogs - twitter, tumblr, any future replacement for tumblr, etc.
- Category:Journaling Communities
- which would be more work, but sustainable in the long term, with possible cross-referencing of individual sites through the hierarchy of:
- Category:Websites
- We could think about adding more types of website to the Category:Websites category, so the types of Tumblr (remember that Tumblr is a lot like Wordpress that you don't have to be hosted on their server to use their software) that exist (such as picspammy ones, ask-blogs, and fic blogs) get cross-categorised as well.--Awils1 08:49, 19 September 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, never saw this convo before, since I thought it was about Glee. I cannot see having a Tumblr category without also having a journalling cat. Otherwise you're explicitly saying LJ is the normal fandom default and anything else is an exception to it, so I prefer the most recent suggestion. Does there not need to be something for forum sites like Buffistas et al?
- We always seem to fail at remembering the forums :O . But yes, forums, would be a separate Fan Community, and could be cross-catted over on Websites if they were hosted as part of a broader website. --Awils1 15:06, 19 September 2011 (UTC)
- I have created the Microblogs and Journaling Communities cats. Now all we need to do is replace the communityprofile template with Template:JournalComm on every single page about journaling comms. D: No, seriously, all we have to do is replace "{{CommunityProfile" with "{{JournalComm". The other fields are all the same. We only need to check 450 pages!
- We always seem to fail at remembering the forums :O . But yes, forums, would be a separate Fan Community, and could be cross-catted over on Websites if they were hosted as part of a broader website. --Awils1 15:06, 19 September 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, never saw this convo before, since I thought it was about Glee. I cannot see having a Tumblr category without also having a journalling cat. Otherwise you're explicitly saying LJ is the normal fandom default and anything else is an exception to it, so I prefer the most recent suggestion. Does there not need to be something for forum sites like Buffistas et al?
- Also, it's a little embarrassing how much this talk page is not about Glee. Should we move it to the Microblog category page?--æþel 01:59, 27 September 2011 (UTC)
- I can take this on, as soon as I've finished the name edits I'm doing. Since I was the one who campaigned for it, after all :) --Awils1 03:14, 27 September 2011 (UTC)
Do we still need this category?
I was looking through our Fan Communities categories and I am questioning whether we need "Microblogs" as a separate category from "Social Networking". I think "Microblogging" as a term has honestly fallen out of use rather and the only things this category really plays host to is the Twitter and Tumblr subcategories. Meanwhile, Social Networking has no subcategories at present.
Essentially, it's a very arbitrary distinction and I don't think it's actually making things any easier to navigate. Pillowfort, which I would say is roughly on a par with Tumblr in terms of features, is classed as "Social Networking" while Mastodon wasn't in here either. That suggests to me that people don't really know how to use this category and probably wouldn't miss it if we removed it. --enchantedsleeper (talk) 09:23, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
- I agree this category seems a little superfluous when we also have a social networking category, although I guess it could be argued that tumblr's main purpose isn't to network socially, but it is often lumped in to the same category -- Kingstoken (talk) 13:51, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
- I'm not particularly attached to the category either. --Baycitybomber (talk) 06:46, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
- I think it'd be nice if we renamed "Social Networking" to "Social Media" and then moved the subcategories of this one to there. Microblogging as a term is, I think, still useful, since Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon, and Weibo are all quite popular for fandom users and a lot of meta about web 2.0 and fandom specifically references features of popular microblogging services. But that type of information can be captured in a normal page instead of as a subcategory. -- somefangirl (talk) 20:18, 26 August 2020 (UTC)