Help talk:People pages
As for the people who are also subject to RPF, I'd suggest putting the info about their RPF treatment as character in the subpage from the RPF fandom, and their impact on fandom as actual living person in the main toplevel page (instead of redirecting those like with fictional characters) and then crosslink the two. --RatCreature 19:58, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
- That seems reasonable. Are there any examples in the wiki yet?--æthel 04:26, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
Choosing Templates
This seems like a reasonable place to raise a question that came up when I created the Seanan McGuire page recently. My problem was picking a template: in the case of a Fan who is also a Person in another context, neither template alone is wholly sufficient, but using both templates is cluttered and redundant. (See also Lois McMaster Bujold in this context, and there are probably others.) The question: might we need (a) a separate template designed for those with both fannish and non-fannish credentials/activities, (b) a secondary template designed to allow for adding professional or other credentials to a Fan profile page (and/or to add Fan credentials to a Person profile), (c) some other solution I haven't thought of? --djonn 08:20, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- I haven't seen an example like that before! In some cases, I think there are privacy issues that would prevent the need for combining info on the page. In other cases, original fiction may fall under the fannish umbrella, like Manna's Administration series (strangely, not in the wiki yet!) I think I've seen academic pages where the person's fannishness was mentioned, but the fan template wasn't necessary. So I'm a little concerned that creating a combined fan/person template would encourage editors to add information that either isn't relevant to Fanlore or violates Fanlore:Identity Protection. How often would professional credentials need to be added to fan pages? Which fields did you want to have, but were missing?--æthel 14:32, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- In Seanan's case, I picked the Person profile because it includes "medium" and "works" (both significant to the individual); also, the Person template helpfully distinguishes between "official" and "fan" pages. But "Person" doesn't provide a "fandoms" field (which I really wanted). Bujold's case is similar; the Person template is a better fit because she's known now largely by her works (i.e. the Vorkosigan books), but not having a "fandoms" field means one can't label her as a Star Trek fan (arguably of equal importance for Fanlore's purposes). The Mercedes Lackey page also (correctly, I think) uses the Person template, but in her case, I can think of good reasons the Fan template's "communities" field should be included there (because of both her past and present online activity). I agree that identity protection is likely to be an issue in some cases, and that may be a good reason not to create a top-level combined template. But I also think that there are enough people who fit under multiple umbrellas to warrant a look at how to better adapt or add to the templates in order to recognize that. --djonn 16:16, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- I think it's very important we respect the identity of fans who do not want to have their fannish information linked to their professional information. It's already pretty easy to give too much information. I can take this back to the committee for review at our next meeting (in 2 weeks), but I'm not inclined to have a template that will make it easier to out someone. Especially when you can add a section to their article to talk about their fannish activities. --Meri 16:41, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- I am absolutely not disagreeing on the ID protection issue -- which is why I've been brainstorming toward options beyond adding a new top-level template. Maybe the existing templates can be modified, maybe a secondary template or templates can be created, maybe a combination of both. (We are, after all, still in beta....) And I don't think the ID protection issues -- as important as they are -- should prevent Fanlore from documenting and supporting fan communities that haven't traditionally had confidentiality issues (filk, for example). --djonn 16:57, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- You know, it is kind of a hack, but if it is just a few special cases there is nothing preventing you to add another field just in one article within the info box, for the missing thing you want there. You just have to be mindful of the table template code to not break formatting, eg. if you want a fandoms field that looks like the rest of the lines in the Person profile box, you can just put in something like <tr><td><b>Fandoms:</b> </td><td>Star Trek, Star Wars, X-Files</td></tr> and have added another row to the table in the box without there being a template field.--RatCreature 17:33, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- I actually didn't realize you could do that without sys admin privileges. But yeah, even though we like consistency, I think one line to add fandom would be fine. Again, I'll take this to the committee to talk about. Maybe our technical person can figure something out. --Meri 15:55, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
- As I should have said farther upstream: thanks very much for bringing this to the committee's attention. I'll look forward to learning the results of their discussion, which I hope will be as open-ended as possible. The more I look at the two templates, the more I think that there may be less a question of creating a new hybrid template and more one of how to make the two existing templates better complements to one another. --djonn 16:50, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
- Interesting, and I'll take a look at that when I get a chance (which may be a few days, as a non-wiki project has just landed in my lap). OTOH, as I look around the wiki I think that "just a few cases" may not accurately characterize the situation. There are probably more old-line Star Trek fen who should be so tagged among Person entries (Jean Lorrah, for one), and there are or will eventually be a lot of filk folk for whom a "works" field on the Fan template may make sense (Leslie Fish, Julia Ecklar, Frank Hayes, and Jordin Kare come to mind, among others). --djonn 16:50, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
Wiki Committee answer
It was decided to keep the person and fan templates separate and not create a third template that combines the two. Any given page should only have one infobox, and a combined fan/person template might encourage editors to add irrelevant or inappropriate information. The fact that a fan has also created professional works may not be relevant to this wiki unless said professional works gain a fandom of their own. Even then, privacy issues may be at stake. The solution is to pick the template that fits best and manually add any relevant categories. For example, if the page gets the person template, but includes some discussion of the person's fan activities (e.g. Lois McMaster Bujold, Joanna Russ), the Fan category can be added.
If there are fields you would like to add to or remove from individual templates, you are encouraged to discuss improvements on the template's talk page.--æthel 07:36, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
Scope
I think that added sentence "Also keep in mind that Fanlore is not a directory of all fans." is not needed. What does that even mean? In its plain meaning it is obvious, because there are too many fans, so it is impossible that Fanlore could catalog everyone, so what is meant is that this is sort of a backdoor way of saying "not everyone is important enough to deserve a wiki page" without addressing in any helpful way what criteria these are that you are to "keep in mind" because in other places the policy clearly is laid out that the wiki does not try to decide who is "notable" like wikipedia, beyond the fact that someone cares enough to want to add that fan. So this doesn't say anything helpful, IMO, and should be removed again.--RatCreature 20:13, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
- I removed it.--æthel 20:26, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
- I wouldn't be against being somehow clearer about the people scope, but it should be helpful. I mean, the discussion on Category talk:People showed the problem to pin that down right away when the first pages were created. Personally I have made few people pages, but the rule of thumb I've sometimes used to decide whether a page for someone was a good idea at the time was that I'll only make the page if I can come up with a way to integrate it with already existing articles, so that the fan profile wouldn't become a new orphan page.--RatCreature 20:37, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
- ETA: Clearly that approach is not suitable as a general "rule" or anything, but I find it a good measure to decide whether someone is "relevant" to the wiki to imagine from where else in the wiki a profile would be linked.--RatCreature 20:41, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
- Okay, I added a different paragraph, but I don't know if it's more helpful or not. I haven't noticed whether editors have had trouble deciding on whether people pages should be added or not; the main issue I've seen is confusion over the difference between people pages and user pages.--æthel 00:54, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
- What I've had trouble with (per above in "Choosing Templates") is that parts of the structure (notably templates) seem to be designed on the assumption that people only belong in one classification, whereas other parts (notably categories) are designed to reflect the reality that a good many people belong in more than one classification. For example, Camille Bacon-Smith is in fact a novelist as well as an academic (having published a couple of paranormal novels with DAW some 20 years ahead of their time). --djonn 07:00, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Why aren't fans added to other categories?
I looked around but couldn't find a reason why fans aren't added to their fandom(s) category. To me it makes sense to include them. Can anyone explain that rule? Thanks! -Jaetion (talk)
- In part because it's difficult to define what counts as "in a fandom". Also, over time many fans will participate in lots of different fandoms, so the fandom categories would become overwhelmed by the same prolific multifannish people.--aethel (talk) 23:09, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
Email addresses and birthdates on fan pages
I've noticed a recent trend of putting email addresses (complete with mailto:) and birthdates on fan pages. Both these seem to me like potential privacy concerns and generally not relevant for Fanlore. Displaying email addresses like this is also inviting spam. I can see cases where a fan's email address may be helpful for disambiguation or reference, but I think as a courtesy we should try to avoid or obscure them. For birthdates, I also don't think they're necessarily accurate if the source is something like a LiveJournal profile, since many people give fake/random birthdays when signing up for these kind of sites. I propose removing both from current fan pages and adding something to this help page discouraging inclusion of unneeded personal information. --sparc 01:29, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
- I agree. I also think that the email addresses, especially if added by the fan themselves, is often a self-promotional thing. --MPH (talk) 02:06, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
- Yes, let's not have exact birthdates on fan pages even if they put it in their own social media profile. It might make sense for deceased fans or public figures if that information is already public.--aethel (talk) 15:56, 10 October 2021 (UTC)