Updates From the World of Journalism + a Clarification

[bookshop]

Hi, LJ / DW!

I am so very remiss in letting you guys know where I've been and what I've been writing, but I do have a couple of quick updates for you:

AfterElton has asked me to be one of their 5 new "slash experts" for their brand-new column on slash fandom, The Shipping News! I'm so excited, omg! And I have to thank the Daily Dot for letting

Comments

[podklb]

Paraka's original version of the entry links the fanfic as "based on" in the right sidebar, without identifying it as a fic.

I legitimately do not understand how include is accurate. I am not trying to be difficult, and it's not really a big deal and it's in the past and all, but. It's true that the sidebar did not say "based on the fanfic called" but rather "based on," but it seems self-evident that the thing linked to is a fic, if one knows what podfic means. What else would it be based on?

Since there was no inclusion of the fanfiction in the general text of the entry beforehandRight, but why is the general text of the entry the only thing that's being considered, and not the sidebar

[eleveninches]

Sorry, I'm not trying to be rude, but I've read this comment about 5 times and it literally makes no sense to me. On the Talk page on Fanlore, Paraka does take issue with the changes re: putting the fic and podfic on the same page:

I really disagree with the changes to this page Agentstarbucks made. This is an entry about a *podfic* and the slight changes made, make this into an entry about a *fic*, never mind that the rest of the entry is about the podfic and the podficcer. No offence to Agentstarbucks, whom I'm sure was just trying to clarify, but this is also my main objection to removing the (podfic) disambiguation from the page title; people confuse this entry as being about the fic. While podfic and the fic it's based on are, of course, related, they're still *separate* fanworks that should have separate entries on fanlore. --parakaReading the Talk page, that was the only time Paraka commented, and then someone else (MeeDee) came in and was like, Oh, what she's actually upset about is podfics should have their own page. But

[podklb]

It's not rude! It's a kind of complicated thing to explain.

Okay, let me see...

When she said "I really disagree with the changes to this page Agentstarbucks made" the thing she disagreed with was NOT (as Aja's article claimed) that the fic was now being included or emphasized.

When she said "This is an entry about a *podfic* and the slight changes made make this into an entry about a *fic*" she meant that the change actually took the name of the podfic and said, essentially, "This Never Happened is not a podfic, it is a fic." But This Never Happened is also a podfic, and the podfic by that name was what the page was about. So by making that change, the editor said the entry was about something that it was not about, just because the editor seemed to not feel comfortable with the name of the podfic being used to refer to the podfic (as its own entity) and not to the fic.

When she said "this is also my main objection to removing the (podfic) disambiguation from the page title; people confuse this entry as being about the fic" that'

[aphelant]

IDK if this will help at all, but I think a more accurate paraphrase would have been:

"Paraka took issue when another fan on Fanlore edited an entry she had made on a podfic to emphasize the fic instead, only noting that a podfic had also been created."

[podklb]

Or maybe, like, "Edited the entry to say it was about a fic, only noting afterwards that a podfic had also been created, although all of the rest of the content of the entry was clearly about the podfic."

[eleveninches]

That does help clarify the above comment, but doesn't Aja's paraphrase include this? I just looked, and she wrote:

Paraka took issue when another fan on Fanlore attempted to edit an entry she had made on a podfic to include the fanfiction that it was based on, combining both the podfic and the original story under the same URL. The discussion on the wiki talk page centered around naming conventions on the wiki, and how best to disambiguate between a fic and a podfic of the same story.

That to me is the same thing as what you said, just without the specifics of what had been changed on the wiki page. I mean, sure, it's vague, but it's not wrong.

I have no stake in this, I'm just confused by the reactions I saw from people on Twitter.

[podklb]

Well, the second sentence is fully accurate, but the first sentence isn't. I don't know how to say it other than repeating that if the entry had been edited to include the fanfic, or to include content about the fanfic, that would be a completely different scenario than an edit that basically assumed that calling This Never Happened a podfic at all must be a mistake, and was changed solely to alter the description of what This Never Happened was to a fanfic (of which a podfic had been made). The problem wasn't the inclusion of the fanfic, it was the exclusion of the podfic as a possible fanwork with that title.

ETA: The thing that makes it complicated is you can't say the entry was edited to exclude the podfic, because it still kept the podfic's commentary and reviews in and still mentioned that a podfic had been made. The only thing that was stripped was the podfic's right to its own name.

[aphelant]

"The problem wasn't the inclusion of the fanfic, it was the exclusion of the podfic as a possible fanwork with that title."

This. The way the entry was changed was thoughtless and didn't add any content, just took away the podfic's right to have its own Fanlore entry.

[aphelant]

I'm not very eloquent, but I will give this a go.

The way Aja's paraphrase sounds to me is that Paraka was miffed at having the fic added to the podfic entry. Actually, Paraka was miffed that the entry was changed to emphasize the fic without actually adding any content about it.

Basically, the podfic was sidelined in its own entry, and in a way that came across as invalidating podfic as a fanwork on its own (since all fanworks are able to have their own pages and there is no notability requirement on Fanlore, so why is someone changing an entry about a podfic to emphasize the fic instead?). This is what generated the discussions about Fanlore policies and what can we do to prevent this mistake (which it was! it was not malicious.) from happening again etc and so on. If the addition of the fic to the entry had generated actual content in the entry as well, that would have been very very different.

[anatsuno]

Okay, here goes. Basically the Fanlore rule is, if two works have the same name, the first page created about one of the works gets the name as a title (& URL), without any indication that could allow people to know which of the two works it is. So we can't make a page for podfic X and call it X (podfic), it has to be called X

[eleveninches]

Right, I get why you guys are upset with Fanlore.

It's like if a mother and a daughter had the exact same name and both got famous for different things, and I created an entry for the daughter where no entry for the mother exists

So someone included the mother in the daughter's entry, which is exactly what Aja's article said, without all the details. She wrote: The discussion on the wiki talk page centered around naming conventions on the wiki, and how best to disambiguate between a fic and a podfic of the same story.

[anatsuno]

Right, but the inclusion is not what Paraka (or the rest of us) objected to, and that's what the text of the article conveys.*

The inclusion could have been done in many other ways that *did not* strip the podfic of its right to the same title, and the rights-stripping is what triggered the discussion. The nature-changing of the page is the problem, not the inclusion of the fic.

I never said and haven't even seen anyone say that Aja took her facts from the anon meme or anything like that - never thought she did, either - but she wrote something (that sentence) that conveys an inaccurate/incomplete fact in a way that is *key* to representing the actual issue. In my opinion. The part you quoted is entirely correct, obviously, it's accurate reporting - at no point did I mean or say that the whole article is a lie or anything like that. Just that key part, because, well, it's key.

* A friend of a friend who knows nothing about this whole kerfuffle read the article**, and what he took away from it (in part) was "arrogant podficcers

[eleveninches]

I think we have to agree to disagree here!

[paraka]

There are a couple reasons we don't agree with the wording of that first sentence.

It doesn't reflect my actual issues with the situation (and true, I didn't leave any further comments on the Talk Page, but that's because the conversation had been moved to the Fanlore Dreamwidth comm) or my actual actions (since *I* had included info on the fic when I first created the entry).

It also leaves the impression that podficcers want to cut authors out of the equation, like we want to pretend our creations were made completely on their own without input from others. And it's that implication that started the FFA thread and here Aja is, confirming it. It was never an implication I, or the other podficcers involved with this discussion, intended to give and it was certainly never our motivation.