Something is rotten in the state of Fanlore

[melannen]

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.

Comments

[melannen]

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.

[ambyr]

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.

[melannen]

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...

[kore]

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!

[jadelennox]

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.

[kore]

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!)