Talk:And Nux Was the One Receiving a Blood Transfusion

Instability of Tumblr 2018

With Tumblr deleting accounts, I'm getting flashbacks of the LJ purges. And I'm also starting to worry about Yahoo shutting it down for being more trouble than it's worth. I'm going to start putting the whole essay in the article instead selections to ensure its survival. If people think that's a bad idea, definitely feel free to revert to the quotes. I'm going to copy/paste this into the articles I've edited. -Jaetion (talk) 17:00, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Hey Jaetion - why not just use the Wayback Machine or archive.today to make archived copies of the pages? I definitely support your urge to archive, but we have ways to do that which will preserve the page better than copy-pasting the text onto Fanlore.

Having said that, I realise that it only works if the original URL is still live, though presumably you're getting the essay text from somewhere? --enchantedsleeper (talk) 17:27, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Sometimes trying to save tumblr essays with wayback or etc works a little weird because of all of the odd custom HTML choices — a difficult to read blog can become complete nonsense, although I usually still archive them anyway.

MPH had some things to say about this when I asked her for advice for my Meta page structure overview and ended up writing So let me tell you my thoughts on creating Fanlore pages for meta. where she says:

I really, really try to stay away from posting something in its entirety, as that’s not the scope of Fanlore, but sometimes the essay is:

a) so short, there isn’t a good way to summarize. See the metafic A Trekkie's Tale.

b) the essay is widely unavailable and I want there to be a record of it. Essays in print zines and on private mailing lists (the latter only with permission). See Why Should I Encourage People to Write Darkover Stories? and The Wave Theory of Slash Revisited. A side note: there are essays I HEARTILY WISH I could make pages for but they are on private mailing lists with no means of gaining permission and/or are long gone. Example: “Jane of Australia’s Fandom Flounce,” a thing of beauty but forever will likely remain simply a puff of smoke.

c) if summarizing or excerpting the essay doesn’t come close to doing it justice, that the beauty (or lack thereof) is directly related to the whole. See GARBAGE LIKE THAT HAS NO PLACE IN FANDOM.

d) when I’m pretty sure that, while the essay is available now, it will be lost at some point, even with extensive archived links. I should have made one for the original essay Interrogating the text from the wrong perspective as it has since been deleted. We will have to trust the person who cited it, calling it "a paragraph that never ends” that it is complete. Essays on Tumblr are also part of this challenge as they are especially ephemeral. See I See A Lot Of Posts Going Around (Suppressing Women's Sexuality) and Honestly I don’t even care why ao3 was created.

So, there is some precedent for copying entire meta posts, especially short ones/from tumblr, although I don't think I've seen any other discussion of the practice, which is definitely a discussion worth having. - Hoopla (talk) 17:53, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

One way to deal with weird formatting on tumblr is to add /mobile to the end of the URL and also run that version of the page through the Wayback machine if possible. Copy/pasting longer essays into Fanlore makes me nervous because of the copyright issues, and without the link back there's no proof we didn't change anything (not that we would, but still).--aethel (talk) 18:40, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Somehow I had a feeling that MPH would have an opinion on this... :) I'm uneasy about using Fanlore to archive meta essays for the same reason that she is - it isn't our scope; we do set out to preserve fandom, but not word-for-word. I also thought that the pages could get unwieldy if it's a longer meta essay. --enchantedsleeper (talk) 20:16, 25 November 2018 (UTC)