Talk:Furry

My two cents

I put some very rudimentary info on the page that someone can move or tweak. I know it's more about the CFO club, but the furry info was interesting. Mrs. Potato Head 14:28, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

See also the Talk:Furry Fandom page for a discussion about unresolved organizational issues.--RatCreature 09:27, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Furry demographic surveys

TimeFan, I would suggest being a little more specific on the furry demographic surveys. You should probably put the time frame that the surveys were conducted (2015?) and released, as well as where and how many people were surveyed, otherwise the demographics could possibly be deceiving. A survey conduced by advertising on reddit will have different results than one advertised on twitter and tumblr, for example, so it's a good thing to note when referencing surveys. And if the section gets to long you'd be better off making a new page for it (unless there already is one), as you can make pages for surveys.

Meta and communities should not be squished into one "external links" section. Meta and communities are separate things. Meta is for further reading and self refriential work and community categories are for the actual links to community sites. For future reference.

Also a note, I'm not quite sure I agree with the total removal and then subtle denial of anything pertaining to canon media, because media is absolutely a factor in the furry fandom. There are furries whose entire thing is just The Lion King, or How to Train Your Dragon (scalies), or Watership Down. When I was a child I even became a furry because of Meerkat Manor and remained that way for years as a furry with a Meerkat Manor fursona... So I would just suggest re-thinking the sections about how the furry fandom is completely separate from media fandom. Good work on the history sections and controversies, though (personal I wouldn't have removed the bit about zoophila since that's always been a pretty big argument with anti-furries).

Be careful when removing very large chunks of data and content from pages. Unless the information is totally incorrect, incoherent, outdated, or absolutely irrelevant you probably shouldn't be throwing it all into the garbage can. If it looks messy it's appreciated to re-organize and clean things up, but deleting large paragraphs of other people's contributions if they were still relevant and useful is a little... bull-dozery. We should be cleaning up and adding our two cents while removing bad or irrelevant information, not deleting multiple Fanlore contributors' work and inserting our own re-phrased work. Just something to consider as you continue contributing! :) Patchlamb (talk) 01:24, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

The largest things I removed were 1.) the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization (because it is more anime than furry), but that has its own page with the same content, and 2.) a paragraph claiming that all fictional animals are furries, which is not correct, and 3.) official art of Mickey Mouse+others, which doesn't seem fannish enough (why not fan art of them instead?). The few other things seemed also incorrect or irrelevant. I can add more details to the demographics.

Regarding differences from media fandom, that is something furries typically pride themselves on and make a big deal of, to the point people often argue it should be called a community or subculture rather than a fandom because it is so different. Obviously animation and books are a big influence and there's overlap- but the fandoms themselves are different. Lion King fancharacters are different than general lion ocs- one is a fanwork with a canon and copyright issues while the other is not. Furries dont have ships or AUs like media fans. Furries can make a living selling art while Disney fanworks would get cease and desists, etc. Furries have done a lot of talking on these differences so I could add their words about that, too. TimeFan (talk) 04:53, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Quotation Removal?

I noticed that a number of quotes on this page had been cut down significantly - the reason cited by Patchlamb in their edit summary is that these were redundant quotes, but looking at the revision history, I don't see why? They seem generally informative, and no other quotes on the page appear to cover the same ground. --enchantedsleeper (talk) 20:45, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

The longer quotes I cut down were good quotes, however copying and pasting large chunks from books (or other sources) just seems like it inflates the page when only a few snips would suffice. Summarizing, paraphrasing, or just taking out pieces of the quote (indicated by the ... like in an essay) make the page look neater without completely taking the sources away. For the first, shorter quotes on "fandom vs. community" I removed either 2 or 3 because each quote was essentially the same argument ("furry isn't fandom"), making having so many redundant. The chunk from "How Furries Became a Fandom" was shortened because the information above it was "Clare McBride traces major influences on the fandom from Looney Tunes to Disney's Robin Hood, from Animalympics to the Renaissance Age of Animation in the 1980s, up to the release of Zootopia," and having fluff about "Even in geek culture at large, furries remain a niche among niches—and often a convenient punching bag for geeks of all other stripes to say, “Well, at least I’m not like those weirdos" is irrelevant to the statement that needed citation- which was supposed to be about how furries began with early cartoon media. So I took out the parts that weren't actually about how furries began with early cartoon media. I shortened the long quote from the "comment" section because generally I don't associated "comments" with large bodies of text. So I removed parts of that quote that were fluff and left the point of the comment: which was that furries are not the same as ancient civilizations and how they existed before "furry" was a thing. Everything else was nice, but it only really served to make the comment section needlessly longer. However, I left the large quotes in the history section because I felt those were important to understanding the context of the content, such as having "SKUNK F**CKERS REHABILITATION" written out.

You can of course add back the longer parts of the quotes if you really think it needs to be there, but personally if I were writing an essay on furries I'd never copy and paste such long paragraphs, I'd pick and choose small, relevant quotes and otherwise paraphrase. I know Fanlore isn't technically an essay, but it makes it look neater and gets the point across. I feel that if someone wanted to read half a page of the book being quoted then they're better off just reading the book. Sorry for the lengthy reply but I wanted to make sure my thought process was clear Patchlamb (talk) 21:58, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

I think you removed some valuable perspectives, and you also added a fair amount of misinformation. Fursonas are not always or even usually meant to represent themselves- they are alter egos used for role-playing and costuming purposes, not self-inserts. Plus with the cut-down quote, it says that Claire McBride said the "long before the internet..." quote, but she is not the one who said that. That is something others said that she is referencing. You also removed the part distinguishing furry fandom from media fandom, which is one of its most distinguishing traits. I think some of these changes should be undone for accuracy's sake. TimeFan (talk) 22:55, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Disagreements

Since editors cannot agree on whether or not a furry or fursona can be based on media (and since it seems not all editors see the What is a Furry? Survey survey as any sort of proof for leaning one way or the other) perhaps it is best that the topic of whether or not a furry can be based out of media remain neutral in reference to the disagreement. So instead of definitively stating again that they can or can't be based out of media I went ahead and watered it down to furries not agreeing on the subject, so no toes are stepped on. Perhaps best to let the readers/furries decide for themselves instead of a handful of editors with their own opinions.

Edit: To make the page more neutral, should the definition at the top of the page provided by Furnation remain? It has very definitive language about media being involved in the furry fandom, but I don't think I should remove it myself. Before I made the page more neutral it had decisive language stating that a furry can't be the same as something based on media, but I realize now, even before my edit, the page said that and had that quote at the top at the same time, leading to a discrepancy. But if we make the page more neutral and simply state that furries disagree, I'm divided on whether the quote should remain? Either it would be neutral everywhere (like I began trying to do to resolve the disagreement between editors), or it should say yes, furries can be based out of media everywhere (to agree with the quotation placed at the top). I'm not sure how we should proceed to remove the discrepancy being that uses seemed rather adamant about keeping the quotations last time.Patchlamb (talk) 20:17, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for giving no time for another editor to reply, I'm afraid I've been on a FL kick due to the virus causing work at my job to slow down to a... considerable crawl. What else for me to do but FL?

I've realized, despite the disagreement between editors on whether a furry can be based within media, that most, if not all, of the online definitions for a furry include media, as well as the pages for feral, wikifur's What is a Furry page, wikipedia's furry page (especially in the history section where it even mentions Watership Down), and merriam-webster's furry and fursona page, this furry website, a discussion about it here and here, then of course there was the survey where the majority of the 162 respondents also said they were. Even though I came back here to make the page more neutral on the subject... I am conflicted considering how many good sources consider media-based characters to be furries, I'm rather worried that to make the page so neutral due to previous editor disagreement on the subject, it might actually be misinformation at this point. At the very least, the page should probably be edited in to include what these sources say, and in the case of their being a source that claims furries can't be media based those should be added in as well. So instead of making it neutral or sounding wishy-washy by just saying users disagree, the two arguments can actually be presented side by side, with sources for both.

I've added a clean up tag to the page. It may be best to give another editor(s) time to review the contents and re-arrange/re-write it before I attempt to make any other changes. Anyways, those are at least my thoughts on the disagreement after discovering the helpful links above. If anyone wants to write a section somewhere using those links I'm all for it. Patchlamb (talk) 19:17, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Going Ahead with Editing

It's been a few months and looks like no one has wanted to edit the page yet or make any changes. I didn't want to be a bulldozer so I was leaving it up to someone else, but if no one else wants to expand upon the different definitions of what is or isn't a furry by now I may go ahead and do some editing here again after all. I'll just drop what I want to edit in general here below and if anyone has any objections or suggestions give me a shout. If no one has any other suggestions then I'll just go ahead and make the edits, apply a "PPOV" template, and if anyone doesn't like the edits they can of course reverse them or change them.

• I'm going to edit the "definition of furry" section to include many more references so I can put in a large scope of differing opinions on what constitutes a furry. This will leave the definition more open for readers and should solve previous editor disagreements by at least giving a lot of different furry voices a spot in the conversation.
• The "fandom" section only gives one example of a conversation, and that's a single discussion on Twitter. I'd like to edit the quotations from the Twitter post and instead include more sources than just that one post. This means I'd likely have to cut down on some of those quotations so I can edit in more sources and quotes from different places.
• I may make a sub section under "Furry Fandom" called "Is Furry a Fandom," because that's really what most of that section is about. However, I see there's also a "Discussion and controversy" section that may be more well suited to the specific arguments of whether it is or isn't a fandom.
• I may look further into the furry demographics so I can put down more detailed accounts of the exact studies that these demographics are coming from, such as the year they were held, where they were collected, and how many people were surveyed.
• I may move terminology under the "definition of furry" section.
• I may delete the sub section "Discussions Within Furry Fandom" because it seems redundant to the section it's under that's called "Discussion and Controversy."Patchlamb (talk) 21:52, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Fursona Section

Fursona has its own page on Fanlore, but it also has a few paragraphs of text on this page. I was thinking of moving the bulk of the info to the fursona page so the furry page can have this section shortened, or moved and covered under a different section (like fandom?). I was just thinking since it has its own page, maybe having a long fursona section here is redundant or distracts from the actual fursona page. Just wanted to see if there was any discussion to be had before I go and remove/re-arrange a big chunk. Also, I'll probably eventually make a page for alt.fan.furry and alt.lifestyle.furry since those both have significant history in the furry fandom. Any thoughts? Patchlamb (talk) 20:11, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

Web Citation Formatting

Hey Ellakbhesse, really appreciate the help with getting some of the websites archived! It can be a pretty daunting task for large pages, especially old ones where lots of links end up broken. I did want to leave a talk message about the formatting of the web citations though; I don't think we have any specific way that references and citations are required to look, but the web citation format is a bit long and bulky, which can make it a bit harder to read through the code. You might be able to change it from vertical to horizontal by removing some of the paragraph spacing, but I'm not sure if that would break the formatting.

Since there aren't any hard and fast rules about that sort of formatting I'm not saying you can't use it, just that it might be quicker and be easier to read if you want to type the reference information in by hand. Manually imputing it like that makes it much smaller in the code and still includes all the relevant info! If you decide you might want to type it like that, here's a template!

<ref>[LINKGOESHERE name of link], name/location of source. Accessed #/##/####. ([ARCHIVELINKHERE Archived #/##/###])</ref> 

And here's what it would look like in the body of the page's code:

<ref>[https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Alt.lifestyle.furry alt.lifestyle.furry - WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia], Tim Gadd. Accessed 2018-01-08. [http://archive.today/KzLAM Archived 2022-04-22]</ref>

Patchlamb (talk) 15:59, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

I also want to applaud Ellakbhesse for all the work on archiving. It's something that is great value to the wiki, and to fan history! I would, however, like to second Patchlamb's suggestion of formatting the cites in the example Patchlamb provided; it creates and retains the info in a way that is much easier to read and navigate. I think, too, that the "horizontal" way is less "intrusive" and that this lessens the chance that the link can be accidentally broken by future editors. --MPH (talk) 16:20, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you Patchlamb and MPH for your words. I'm sort of in an archival battle mostly removing ^{[Dead link]} and WebCite. I started randomly on a few pages and I'm going to do it as I go in some editions. As for the web cite with pagination I use it because I have vision problems and I can't locate myself correctly when it is not. But if the model indicated by you is the best I can try to adapt to it, but I don't know if I would work with this way of sending the code. My apologies so if by any chance the way I'm filing is wrong --Ellakbhesse (talk) 18:59, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

I've been meaning to experiment with this, but Wikipedia has functionality in web citations where they can be retrieved via a shortcode, e.g. {{sfn|Lambie|2018a}}. I honestly prefer using the web cite template, as manually formatting is tedious. It also creates consistency between articles. If I can get that shortcode working, and move citations to the end of the article, I'd say web cite will be the better option. Pinky G Rocket (talk) 17:55, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Pinky I've been wanting to talk to you about coding since you seem to be an expert at it. I saw that on Wikipedia there was a bot to check for dead links, an Internet Bot I think. Do you know? If so could it work here and help fix broken links and references? And congratulations on your work with the shortcode --Ellakbhesse (talk) 18:59, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Can you send me a link to what you're talking about? Pinky G Rocket (talk) 19:26, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Sure Pinky, here it is InternetArchiveBot --Ellakbhesse (talk) 20:18, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Followup: I got a version of shortcode implemented on The Thing (1982) page so that {{cite web}} can work without intruding on the rest of the article. Patchlamb and MPH, would the solution I used there work elsewhere? Pinky G Rocket (talk) 19:26, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

That's interesting, it shortens up the Web Cite really well! Though I noticed the The Thing's references are all in italics- is that something caused by the shortcode? And in using that, would the shortcode/web cite need be used on every reference, or would it blend in with regular <ref> </ref> codes? As in if you used a mix of manual typing in reference content along side Web Site short codes, would they look any different on the page? Patchlamb (talk) 20:47, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

The references being all in italics is an error going on with the Web Cite code. I'm not versed in Lua, but I'm sure taking a peek at the current code for the template would give insight on how to fix it.

I'm not sure what you're asking with the latter question, so I'm going to break down how it works to be more clear. The web cite templates are all on the bottom of the page, under "Works cited". Each web cite template has this parameter:

|ref=idtag

This give the reference a unique ID. This ID can also be implemented without the use of web cite by doing the following:

<span id="idtag">Work cited information</span>

This is present on the page, as I cite a book about John Carpenter.

In the <ref> tags, a link to the work cited is created by using internal link markup:

<ref>[[#idtag|author, YYYY]]</ref>

The hashtag tells the wiki we are linking to somewhere within the current page. Here's an example of it all put together:

Other creators have cited the film as an influence on their work.<ref>[[#refThurman2017|Thurman, 2017]]</ref>

== References ==

=== Citations ===

{{reflist}}

=== Works cited ===

{{Cite web |ref=refThurman2017 |title=John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ Turns 35 Today! |last=Thurman |first=Trace |date=25 June 2017 |url=https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3443147/john-carpenters-thing-turns-35/ |publisher=Bloody Disgusting |access-date=4 April 2022 |archive-date=2 Feb 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220227221251/https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3443147/john-carpenters-thing-turns-35/}}

Pinky G Rocket (talk) 21:55, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

So italics aside, which I don't think is a huge dealbreaker and can likely be addressed by some tinkering with the Cite Web template, this seems like a neat setup - my main concern is that it would require a lot of learning for newcomers to adopt if it were to be the default system for citations on Fanlore. You mentioned that this is in place in Wikipedia; does Wikipedia have system that creates the citation formatting for people if they input the right fields into a form? Or do they still have to create the shortcode etc. manually? Because otherwise I'm imagining that we would need to do a lot of work reformatting citations after the fact (like you did when I added a new citation to the The Thing page), or ask new editors to master this system, which would be quite a big ask. But if this is something that could be e.g. part of the toolbar when we have the Visual Editor extension and just requires people to plop the relevant information into a form and hit a button, then I wouldn't have an issue with us rolling it out more widely. Any system that we have just needs to be as low-touch as we can make it so that we don't put people who are less au fait with wiki markup off creating citations. --enchantedsleeper (talk) 16:46, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Site Furry News

I found this site: [www.furrynewsnetwork.com Furry News Network], News by Furry Fans, For Furry Fans with some articles wrote by Flayrah (famously quoted on other furries blogs and sites) -- Ellakbhesse (talk) 13:17, 2 June 2022 (UTC)