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

[ratcreature]

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.

[melannen]

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!

[ratcreature]

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.

[melannen]

"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.

[ratcreature]

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.