SGA Guide excitement
In the last few days, my (Newer) SGA Fic Readers Guide has sparked discussion in a few places about the prevalence of McShep-focused resources in the fandom. (My guide does include a lot of links to McShep-focused resources, but it also includes many to non-McShep ones. However, if you're a reader who prefers to avoid the McShep pairing, I can see that it would not be the most useful guide for you.)
The upshot, which is wonderful and exciting, is that there's a project underway to create a whole slew of Guides to SGA Fanworks (which I suspect will also be less heavily fic-focused than mine, as a hardcore reader, is) that focus on a range of different genres -- gen, and many, many different pairings that aren't McShep, and character-focused intro pages and more.
This is great news, as one of the things that spurred me to compile my guide was that there did not seem to be a recent, regularly updated resource that listed more than a relatively small subset of goodies in one place.
Certainly the newbie guide and crack-van overview and ship manifesto and essential fics that don't include fandom-dominating pairings posts I found were all several years old. So I for one, am very excited about being able to go find and enjoy (and point others towards!) a whole bunch of interesting new(-to-me) insights about pairings and characters and related fanworks I might not have been able to appreciate -- or find resources for without getting frustrated -- before.
The project, initiated by skieswideopen, which has a lot of momentum, is currently being actively discussed here. If you see this and have ideas for it, I encourage you to go contribute -- both to the discussion and to the project!
facetofcathy has proposed an alternative of compiling the suggested content on Fanlore. I am immensely fond of centralized resources, so I really like that idea.
Although it looks like, as currently envisioned, focusing on "More on Fanlore" is not the form the alternative SGA guides project will be taking, as a result of this, several experienced Fanlore editors besides
facetofcathy have chimed in to say that they'd welcome more pages and content being created on Fanlore and that new editors shouldn't be over-concerned about making it look pretty but that if they add content, people not as familiar with the content but who know how to clean up Fanlore pages can help tidy things.
I strongly endorse increasing the richness and inclusiveness and interconnectedness of the content on Fanlore -- in general -- but in this case especially of SGA pages.
Fanlore.org can seem a bit intimidating both to edit and in terms of the SGA-related information presented -- at least it did to me when I discovered it -- but the encouragement by Fanlore editors to come edit and add content (after reading the relevant content-creation guidelines, which I tend to be in favor of) will, I hope lower the threshold for more people to do so. (I was encouraged enough to add several fanwork links in SGA pages just yesterday!)
skieswideopen has mentioned encouraging contributors to the new LJ-based SGA guides (ETA: sga_guide) comm to crosspost much of the content of the pages they work on to Fanlore. I hope very much that that happens.
After all, having both a centralized journal-based set of guides and a greater quantity of inclusive information on Fanlore -- which is one of the, even if imperfect (as any resource is), great centralized resources that even complete newbies to fandom may stumble across just by googling -- can only be counted as a great win for SGA fandom and its ability to welcome newcomers with all kinds of interests. ♥
The upshot, which is wonderful and exciting, is that there's a project underway to create a whole slew of Guides to SGA Fanworks (which I suspect will also be less heavily fic-focused than mine, as a hardcore reader, is) that focus on a range of different genres -- gen, and many, many different pairings that aren't McShep, and character-focused intro pages and more.
This is great news, as one of the things that spurred me to compile my guide was that there did not seem to be a recent, regularly updated resource that listed more than a relatively small subset of goodies in one place.
Certainly the newbie guide and crack-van overview and ship manifesto and essential fics that don't include fandom-dominating pairings posts I found were all several years old. So I for one, am very excited about being able to go find and enjoy (and point others towards!) a whole bunch of interesting new(-to-me) insights about pairings and characters and related fanworks I might not have been able to appreciate -- or find resources for without getting frustrated -- before.
The project, initiated by skieswideopen, which has a lot of momentum, is currently being actively discussed here. If you see this and have ideas for it, I encourage you to go contribute -- both to the discussion and to the project!
facetofcathy has proposed an alternative of compiling the suggested content on Fanlore. I am immensely fond of centralized resources, so I really like that idea.
Although it looks like, as currently envisioned, focusing on "More on Fanlore" is not the form the alternative SGA guides project will be taking, as a result of this, several experienced Fanlore editors besides
facetofcathy have chimed in to say that they'd welcome more pages and content being created on Fanlore and that new editors shouldn't be over-concerned about making it look pretty but that if they add content, people not as familiar with the content but who know how to clean up Fanlore pages can help tidy things.
I strongly endorse increasing the richness and inclusiveness and interconnectedness of the content on Fanlore -- in general -- but in this case especially of SGA pages.
Fanlore.org can seem a bit intimidating both to edit and in terms of the SGA-related information presented -- at least it did to me when I discovered it -- but the encouragement by Fanlore editors to come edit and add content (after reading the relevant content-creation guidelines, which I tend to be in favor of) will, I hope lower the threshold for more people to do so. (I was encouraged enough to add several fanwork links in SGA pages just yesterday!)
skieswideopen has mentioned encouraging contributors to the new LJ-based SGA guides (ETA: sga_guide) comm to crosspost much of the content of the pages they work on to Fanlore. I hope very much that that happens.
After all, having both a centralized journal-based set of guides and a greater quantity of inclusive information on Fanlore -- which is one of the, even if imperfect (as any resource is), great centralized resources that even complete newbies to fandom may stumble across just by googling -- can only be counted as a great win for SGA fandom and its ability to welcome newcomers with all kinds of interests. ♥