melannen | Something is rotten in the state of Fanlore

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fandom:ao3

Something is rotten in the state of Fanlore

Okay, I wanted to get back to the nice fluffy recs posts and procrastinating on my YT letter, but then I got into reading the current mess with Fanlore’s proposed photo policy (it is good they have realized they need one! It needs to be not that one!) and that inspired me to go do some real poking around in Fanlore for the first time in awhile.

Something is rotten in the state of Fanlore. By which I mean there seems to be an accelerating trend of making “Wiki articles” about “meta” that consist of copy-pasting the entire meta post verbatim into the wiki, with minimal if any commentary. (Some of them are the whole posts. Some of them are only 2/3rds or so, which is still far, far too much, especially when you haven’t added any interpretation or commentary at all. And you have also reposted entire comment threads verbatim.)

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you should not be doing that! If you wouldn’t repost a fanfic without permission, don’t repost a meta post!!!

I don’t even really know where to go with this because, while it’s obviously a copyright violation and obviously a massive violation of ethics, Fanlore does not actually seem to have any policy regarding appropriate amounts of quotation, or any recourse to stop people from doing it, and in fact it seems to just be an accepted part of Fanlore editor culture at the moment that the way you do a page about a meta post is to just copy-paste the vast majority of the unedited text and comments in the wiki? It's how the template is set up? So I feel like it would either have to be a massive effort to change editor culture or something coming down from the top (like, idk, Legal giving them a talking-to about copyright which they clearly badly need in *several* directions.)

But if you have ever made a fanmeta post that got even a marginal amount of popularity (it doesn’t have to be that much, I’ve seen them for tumblr posts with only a few hundred notes) look up your name and see if any of it has been reposted. Or just look at any random selection of pages in the meta essays category and get angry(er) with me.

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Wow. Um. One of my posts is there. And I am totally an unimportant fan! Wth! I even decided not to submit for a zine when asked.

Yep. I mean, I think it's actually a good thing that Fanlore doesn't have a notability requirement, because that hasn't gone real well for Wikipedia.

But it should have some kind of guiding ethos for, is this thing actually important enough to justify making an offsite copy that takes it out of the author's control just for the historical record. (90% of things on Fanlore: no.)

I just sent a note requesting they take down the full text--I'm okay with quotes and links. But yeah, the full post? No. We'll see if that does anything. Like you said, there appears to be no mechanism for copyright claims.

It's a wiki so if all else fails you can just go in and take it out yourself, but I would prefer if we could stop it from happening in the first place! Someone at Fanlore really should know better, "don't repost" isn't a complicated ethical question.

from someone who was briefly on the fanlore staff: they are supposed to honor take-down requests or make modifications to fit the request. i dunno what they're turn-arounds are like now, so dunno how long you'll wait for a reply.

but like mel mentioned - you can do the edits yourself to control what's there.

The problem with doing it yourself is - well, first, that it doesn't do anything to convince people not to just keep putting stuff back up. And second that the full text will still be there in the page history, which is slightly less of a privacy issue but still a huge copyright one. I would assume with an actual take-down request they clear it from history somehow? They must at least do that with doxxing reports, I hope.

Identity protection related things are handled separately but there are also "Fanlore gardeners" with additional rights. So you could also add a note with a request for attention by gardeners in the article? There's a template for that with a note why it needs fixing
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Gardeners

Unfortunately one of the people who seems to do a huge amount of the reposting is a gardener, so I'm not sure how helpful that would be.

Edited 2021-10-19 20:00 (UTC)

that one i can't answer - the committee was a bit of a mess when i was there and i didn't stay long.

but correct - the copying of full-text is an issue and it shouldn't be happening. and i'm not sure where this idea of scraping/pasting to fanlore came from. b/c i know we had some discussions about trimming overly-long quotes and adding more summary.

I do personally know people who recently asked for their words to be taken down and were just told No and then nothing else made a dent. Which isn't that big a percentage of all the people quoted on Fanlore, except I think maybe a large number of those people don't know they're being quoted on Fanlore. Or that even posts they locked or deleted may still be reposted on Fanlore with a permanent screencap.

Okay, I just looked at that image policy and--WTF????

Yeah

It's interesting that they only posted it on Dreamwidth, nothing on their Twitter or Tumblr or chatroom or afaict Fanlore itself. Maybe someone was deliberately trying to sabotage it by posting to the place that would immediately get the maximum proportion of informed, articulate outrage.

I don't even know what to make of this comment. Who is this "we"? Because I give these issues a lot of thought in my daily life...

I mean, based on experience with my coworkers and RL friends, the DW community does seem to a bit of a self-selected outlier there. Unfortunately.

I think you're right that a lot of this comes down to people blurring the lines between what it means to archive content and what it means to publish content. Should these things be saved? Yes, absolutely. Should they therefore be posted to the public Internet? Noooooo.

None of my meta is on there (I extremely rarely post publicly), but I'm eying the amount of Maciej Cegłowski's talk about fandom and Pinboard that's quoted in full and wincing--and remembering that Maciej himself went to the effort of making an AO3 account just to get in touch with me and ask if it was okay for him to read my story aloud at the conference, then understood that this did not mean it was okay for him to repost the story and simply included [Here I read Story] when he posted the transcript. Fandom, we can do better than this.

Edited 2021-10-19 18:41 (UTC)

Maciej Ceglowski set up a service that lets you easily archive persistent offsite copies of internet posts in a way that *isn't* publishing them to the entire world...

I think you're right that a lot of this comes down to people blurring the lines between what it means to archive content and what it means to publish content.

That's a really excellent point. Some official digital archives, and archives of digitized hard copies and stuff, aren't even online, or you need an account to get to them. They don't need to be published on a public searchable wiki!

Speaking as an archivist, the profession has an incredibly strict code of professional ethics about what can be online, when. "Closed to research for 75 years" is a thing. So is "open to individual researchers who sign a use form." So is "behind a login-wall which has a terms-of-service." I've watched an archives director go toe-to-toe with a faculty member who wanted to make public an interview that my director deemed would endanger the person speaking in the interview. (We chose to preserve without making available online, but even that can endanger interview subjects.) I watched my archives director reject an undergraduate thesis from the collection because it contained material that should never have passed IRB. An archivist friend of mine kiboshed a plan to make publicly available an old 1980s mailing list archive of a sexually explicit nature.

In other words, anyone responsible for permanent archiving should be following a reasonable professional standard of ethics. This is from the Society of American Archivists' Code of Ethics:

As appropriate and mandated by law, archivists place access restrictions on collections to ensure that privacy and confidentiality are maintained, particularly for individuals and groups who have had no voice or role in collections’ creation, retention, or public use. Archivists should maintain transparency when placing these restrictions, documenting why and for how long they will be enacted. Archivists promote the respectful use of culturally sensitive materials in their care by encouraging researchers to consult with those represented by records, recognizing that privacy has both legal and cultural dimensions.

Wow, that's fascinating! Thank you so much for telling me, I obviously didn't have that depth of knowledge at all. (Basically I was remembering Tara Robertson's work on the digitization of the On Our Backs zine, especially her research in Susie Bright's archives about the contributor contracts, and how that contrasted with some regular not-archivist people I knew who were excited about it being all put online. -- But not much else!)

Who is this "we"? Because I give these issues a lot of thought in my daily life...
RIGHT?!

Even if we don't WANT to! For instance, I know there are very few photos of me online, but one of the colleges I went to is digitizing absolutely everything in its archives. Which includes a yearbook with a couple of pictures of me. It isn't that bad, they're very old pictures and I don't know if I have any legal rights anyway, since I knew the college photographer was taking them and I had a copy of the yearbook. But I was NOT expecting a hard copy yearbook from the 1990s to pop up on a routine self-googling. And I wouldn't be surprised if people who had posed for photos they knew would be in convention books or newspaper articles decades ago might feel the same way, only they might have actual problems with it.

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Hmmm, is there a reason they don't crosspost? It seems odd they wouldn't at least link to the Dreamwidth post on the other social media where they're very active.

I loved that theory. I was actually wondering that a bit myself. I mean whoever is still on DW has NOT gone to Tumblr with its inability to lock or exclude posts from search engines and it's kinda loose understanding of citation via reposting...

Fanlore has adopted a very maximalist idea of what they think is "fair use" a long time ago. I stopped contributing over ten years ago, during the development of the fanart image policy and how the wiki committee handled that, where the final straw was a kerfuffle I had with them over my fanart being uploaded to the wiki (they even scraped some of my art that wasn't fanart though that at least got deleted), and I wasn't thrilled with the final fanart image posting policy they eventually adopted some months later (my brief post being disgruntled about that). I'm still not over my grudge, not least because the only reason my fanart is not as complete files in that wiki is because a sympathetic gardener just replaced them with preview thumbnails, not because anybody on the wiki committee had a problem with the wiki just storing copies of my art even though I had said I did not want it to.

The wiki also scraped my rec pages for comments on fanfic to distribute across various fanfic pages, but that's always just a short snippet, because my recs are never long so each is only a few sentences at most anyway, so while much of my recs ended up being copied, it's distributed over many fanfic pages.

Yeah, it's really creepy how random recs posts get scraped and spewed over fanlore. Everything aside it's just bad editing? One of my very old recs posts was turned into separate fanlore entries for every fic in the post that consisted of just a link to the fic and my rec. It's both creepy and pointless.

There's a lot of good content on fanlore, but a lot of really bad content.

...and it doesn't sound like what happened with your art even qualifies under that very expansive definition of fair use. Copy+pasting entire meta posts with no commentary certainly doesn't!

My best guess is that they just leaned into that scraping mindset, that I already disliked ten years ago when batches of zine covers from fanzine sellers just got uploaded. I think they hope somebody will eventually rework things into articles using scraped bits as scaffolding? But it's a kind of underwear gnome type of mechanism as for how that's supposed to materialize. And from the looks of it, the wiki committee and policy development is as opaque as ever.

"scraping stuff in hopes it will magically become a wiki" is a super bad idea, augh. Quantity is not quality!

Low-res images of book covers for entries about the books are pretty well-established as fair use in general going back to print catalogs (although scraping somebody else's scans of them is a bit less so) and I can see that extending to zines. But there's a lot of other fanwork too, some of which is way more high-res than needed. And also just scraping an entire gallery is *not* fair-use illustrating entries about the books.

Ten years ago there were a lot of pages where the only content for the zine was a gallery with every single fanart scanned, and little else. Maybe the titles and authors of the stories. But nobody talking about the art or using it to actually illustrate anything. It was really cool in the sense that you could browse all this fanart easily by fandom categories (you go to a fandom and then browse the media gallery for say all TOS slash zines or such) that wasn't available for browsing before, but I thought it totally contradicted the claim that Fanlore wasn't supposed to be an archive of all fannish stuff. Since then many zines did have more information added, but much of that are now additional text excerpts, like the foreword got copied.

I think it's a tricky balance because I have also seen a whole bunch of fanlore articles about meta essays that only have a dead link to the actual essay, and those articles tend to be really frustrating, so I appreciate the desire to quote enough of the essay to have the article still make sense when that inevitably happens... but yeah, that does not sound like a good balance.

Also I think there is a zine archiving culture that stems from every zine being this rare and really transient and precious thing where anything that keeps the zine alive and viewable is seen as virtuous, and it doesn't really work well with the expectation of bitrot that most people writing online have. (I was... super-relieved when Geocities and then YahooGroups died and killed my teenage rpg campaigns, and baffled by the frantic attempts to archive it.)

It is frustrating! But a good wiki article should have enough commentary to get you an idea of what was important about the essay without needing extensive quotes (or a live link.)

I've also seen fanlore posts that explicitly say they've reposted the whole thing to fanlore because OP deleted, and, um.

There's a lot of zine indexing on Fanlore, and some tricky privacy questions about it, but notably (other that occasional illustrations or *really* historically notable stuff) I don't think anybody is reposting full-text stuff from zines. Because they know better.

They do upload readable zine "sample pages" though, like this random example:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/File:Distasis1-6.jpg
Just browse the image galleries and there are many text pages included.

trend of making “Wiki articles” about “meta” that consist of copy-pasting the entire meta post verbatim into the wiki

What the hell?!

Okay, that is NOT ON. I repeat, WHAT THE FUCKING HELL.

Right???

Thanks for this.

I fell like "you're welcome" is wrong answer for spreading something like this. Better to know though I guess.

I'm specifically not saying that you should use the tw.org contact form to reach out to Board and/or Legal with your concerns. I will say that comments to the Support form would be routed directly to Fanlore, unless they are otherwise addressed.

I am going to wait and see what happens with the photo policy in the next week or so, and the comment about this I left on that post, and also what happens with unrelated query I just told somebody to send to Legal Advocacy. But escalating up OTW is definitely on the to-do list at this point. It's not really something I want an org I support to be actively condoning.

Wow, they reference one of my old AtS essays there. I had no idea. At least they just included a paragraph, and not the whole essay. I don’t think it’s publicly accessible anymore.

One paragraph in a longer article is probably justifiable! I think a lot of the Buffyverse stuff on fanlore is actually pretty well done, especially compared to a lot of the rest.

Someone reposted the whole Id Vortex post, but since I've deleted my LJ and that post now lives only on Dreamwidth and you have to know the date of the original LJ post to find it in the calendar, I'm not particularly fussed.

ETA: Not that I think "the original post was deleted" is in any way a good rubric in general, just, I keep forgetting that I should probably go and edit the links on that entry and now I don't have to.

Edited 2021-10-20 01:21 (UTC)

I'm glad it doesn't bother you! Honestly if it was just posts that really did have an ongoing impact on the discourse - like your Id Vortex, maybe my old one about how statistically speaking fans aren't straight women actually - it probably wouldn't register with me as a huge problem, but they're doing it with, like, two-week-older tumblr posts that have a total of 150 reblogs. And using Tumblr's ephemerality as the reason things need to be reposted.

Edited 2021-10-21 15:40 (UTC)

Thank you for this, I've been having lots of "so I'm not alone in being horrified" moments.

It says something when I find myself thinking "well, if it's really about documenting things, maybe they could at least try to follow fandom_wank's ethical quotation standards"

OUCH but true!

Wow, I'd been complaining about the impossibility of finding meta nowadays, but that is not on.

Indexing is one thing, I do like Fanlore as a way to find old posts, but reposting is entirely different. (Honestly, for a lot of those old posts, "this post was about *summary* and posted as part of *thing* and was removed by the writer/host on X date for Y reason" is more useful than a repost anyway!)

I had to stop looking at fanlore during the great article creation spree of a few years ago because of how much of what I wrote 17 years ago is excerpted in there. It was a long time ago, I stand by very little of it, and the original LJ that commented in those metafandom-linked threads is long deleted. And I have never been notable even in small ponds!

There was a trend for some people to go through every post linked by metafandom and excerpt every single comment, and it's extremely challenging to my general belief that if you say something on the internet you have to suck it up if it's forever.

Yep. Even if there's some good argument that the whole post is of sufficient historical value to quote in large parts, I can't think of one where reposting entire comment threads is justifiable!

And there's no context on so much of it - no "this was part of this ongoing conversation at the time", "this had these follow-on effects" - that would let a reader get some idea of what 17 years ago means! It's just "here is a post, here are the comments."

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Something is rotten in the state of Fanlore

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