![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
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.
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.
no subject
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Gardeners
no subject