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

[seekingferret]

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.)

[melannen]

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.

[ratcreature]

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.