ratcreature | disgruntled ratcreature is disgruntled

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disgruntled ratcreature is disgruntled

You may or may not have noticed (depending on whether you followed the

fanlore comm and previous discussions and posts by other contributors), that I've been somewhat discontent with how the Fanlore wiki is handled, and the recent thing was kind of the last straw. My idea of the wiki as a group project, and the OTW's idea of the wiki are a bit further apart than I thought, and my issues with the official side are now at a point that it's been sabotaging my enjoyment of anything related to that wiki, and that's no frame of mind to contribute somewhere. This post is however only tangentially related to that.

The thing is, because I have decided to take break from editing Fanlore at least until I feel more mellow towards the mess, I didn't want to be listed in the contributor category while intentionally inactive. However that contributor category is tied to the user template that formats your user profile info, so I had to delete that, which happened to be the only thing on my user page, as I never added any text beyond a link to my website/journals and a list of fandoms. So essentially I blanked my user page.

That in turn resulted in someone making a regular article page for my pseud instead, which nobody bothered with before. That's fine too of course, I guess the idea was that there ought to be some kind of info about me in the wiki, because I appear on quite a lot of editing history or something, though it's a bit ironic that it took me leaving in a disgruntled huff from the ranks of the contributors for someone else to consider me notable enough for a regular page. I guess that profile raising is why people fandom flounce? *snort*

Anyway.

The source of my current disgruntlement is that then someone uploaded some of my fanart (and one original art piece) as eyecandy for that page. I say "eyecandy" because the page doesn't talk about any particular piece of art right now, or even links the art to other articles in its creation context (the challenges some of the pieces were made for, even though they have articles, or even just dates or anything) but just seems to be there so that something is on the page.

That may have been meant nicely, actually I fully assume it was, however in the two years that I had been editing the wiki I had intentionally never uploaded any of my own art (with the exception of some drawings for wiki templates that I made specifically for the wiki), even if my art would have fit to illustrate an article I made. And it wasn't because I'm too shy or modest to self-promote. I linked to plenty of my meta and quoted myself for example.

I also never uploaded any online art from other artists (with the exception of two challenge banners that were posted to promote challenges and intended be reposted as ads). I have an issue with online art being just uploaded to Fanlore, because I think it diverts traffic and potential comments away from the artists' chosen posting venue if people just look at the art in fanlore, especially if it posted in a decent resolution. I have said so on several Talk pages and expressed that concern (like almost a year ago here and here and here, probably in other discussions too) when there was discussion of image policies. So my objection to seeing my art reposted on Fanlore is not due to my recent break from editing, except by timing.

Anyway, I thought, no problem, I'll just mail the wiki that the uploaded art gets deleted, and just linked for discussion purposes. After all it's all online, not locked or anything, so unlike with the zine cover versions, nobody needs a copy on Fanlore to be able to see what the article is talking about. And most of the other online art I've seen reposted to Fanlore has been actually posted there with permission, or sometimes it's from vanished sites or the like, when there are screencaps like the geocities rescue project. So I did that last Thursday and thought there would be no problem. Yeah, not so much.

In the answering mail I got today I was told that they weren't "able" to delete my art (kind of weasel word like, as if there was some outside force or circumstance making them; of course the wiki admins are able to delete my art, they apparently just don't want to). I was offered instead that the uploaded art could be made smaller. See, right now some of the smaller pieces are the original size, some of the larger degraded to a reduced size but still sizes like for example 584 × 819 pixel. Obviously that is a size that could be easily be mistaken by viewers to be the screen resolution size at which someone posted (even though I posted at 900 × 1263 pixel and the true high resolution scan form which I show details in the post and that I can share on request if someone wants to print themselves a copy for example is 3492 × 4900 pixel, so you can imagine how sucky the copy archived on fanlore looks).

Also they graciously offer that they link to the original art post as source directly, when right now only my general fanart blog is given as source, so any visitor would have to search for the art if they want to see how it was supposed to look, which of course almost nobody will bother with, thinking they are seeing what I posted.

Well, further size reduction and direct links are better than nothing, but not exactly what I expected when I asked the wiki not to archive my online art. I don't particularly like the idea that small degraded copies of my fanart are archived elsewhere, but I like it even less that people won't visit my page to see them because the Fanlore archived version is a click less away from the article and it's easier to just stay there coming from there, and I won't get any traffic or comments or anything.

A near universal convention in fandom as I know it is that you do not distribute someone's fanworks in public venues against the fan's wishes while they are still distributing the fanwork themselves and hope to attract traffic and comments to their own place. Etiquette differs sometimes if a fanwork is not easily available, like fans email a pulled story, copy or scan an out of print zine, and share or circulate those more or less privately. But there is no need at all to archive copies of my art on fanlore. My art is all online, unlocked, and can be seen by anyone who can access a fanlore article via a simple link. I understand the urge to have pretty pictures on the wiki and to make it most convenient, and to chronicle fanworks. And it's not like I don't love to see art that I can't get to otherwise on Fanlore, and see what an article is talking about, but referencing online art with a link all readers can click is not much less usable than posting a thumbnail readers also need to click to see it decently on the wiki, only in the latter case I won't get won't get traffic or have a chance at potential comments.

So yeah.

Disgruntled. >:(

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What do they mean they aren't able to remove the art they uploaded without permission? That's crap. That's the kind of bull Laura Hale pulls, and I sure didn't expect it from the folks at Fanlore. I don't blame you for being disgruntled. *hugs*

Edited 2010-08-23 14:12 (UTC)

(Speaking for myself here, not for the committee)

I think the idea is that it's fair use to cite fanworks which are publicly-posted. The way to cite a fanwriter's work is to grab an excerpt of text; the way to cite a fanartist's work is to show an image or a portion of an image.

So, for instance, I just created an entry on one of my favorite old stories of

sanj's, and I quoted a chunk of that story in the entry. Because her story is publicly posted, it's fair use for me to grab a few paragraphs and include them in the page I created. With fic, it's easy to grab an excerpt, the same way I would do if I were posting a review on my journal. With fanart, the way to illustrate a point about someone's work is to show one or more of their images. If I were creating an entry on a fanartist, it would make sense to include a bit of that person's work to illustrate my point(s) about what their work is like and why it's unique or interesting or noteworthy.

There is no way the equivalent would be accepted with fic. This would be like two thirds of a story reposted with the middle chunk missing, but chosen so that nobody could tell it had been there.

I admit that it will be better once they are resized to a hopefully much much smaller size so that nobody can confuse it anymore with the real thing, but even then, you see the whole thing, just in a crappy quality.

*nods* the equivalent of quoting an excerpt of a fic would be something like a preview picture, I think... a small part that gives you an idea about the art without showing all of it.

Yeah. It won't be as much like archiving or competition for clicks once the art is made smaller and it can't be confused any more, but I'm not so thrilled with having tiny previews either. Maybe that's an odd quirk, but I just don't like small thumbnails of the whole image myself. That's why I always crop for the thumbnails in my posts in the outside cut teaser to just the focal point. And it's not that I can't see the analog to small covers uploaded with book reviews, but I really thought that fanlore would be so "fan-friendly" as to take preferences of fans into account as long as they aren't meant to suppress or vanish viewpoints (like say covering only one side of a kerfuffle because fan asks them too or something) or hinder the whole purpose. And my art is just a click away, not locked or anything, so it's easy for anyone reading about my art to see it, if it is linked in the text or a footnote.

I don't think that's really equivalent, for reasons others above me have mentioned.

Also, I would have thought that on a *fannish* site, "we will not archive people's work without their permission," which is a nigh-universal fannish norm, should trump "this is legally permissible." After all, it's ordinarily not against the law to out people's offline identities, either, but they don't permit it on Fanlore (unless the fan has already outed herself). Yes, this is more restrictive in the case of images than it is of stories or vids, but, well, that's just the nature of the medium.

I'm sure all this has happened without ill intent, but the committee needs to reconsider this policy. (I suspect that this particular set of circumstances hadn't been carefully thought through before.) Don't you use little preview thumbnails of part of the image? Couldn't they use those, coupled with a direct link?

Yeah, that would be possible, though that would make this non-standard formatting and take hand-coding for the images and would be harder to edit. The way images are included in the wikipages in the wiki-markup makes an automatic link to the page of the image file uploaded to the wiki.

If the size is reduced further eventually like they offered at least potential for the confusion with the full version will be gone, so that's something, and maybe once the direct links are included with the images rather than just the blog URL some people will bother to click further. :/

Yup, with you here on fannish mores and on full image being the equivalent of full story, not one image being the equivalent of an excerpt...

And now that I've looked at the linked pages...I love the icons you create..they are clear and show important parts of your images...

Yeah, I like that better than just making everything so small that the whole picture is a thumbnail.

Maybe I am too finicky about how I'd like my art presented and on which sites and where not included directly, but still, it is common in fandom to take fans' wishes into account. I mean, I even understand this policy that was adopted by the wiki that more or less amounts to "upload first, worry about permissions later" for its practical side, but I really thought that once an artist objected to their art being uploaded that would be treated more like elsewhere in fandom. It's not like I made demands about what the wiki was supposed to say or not say about my art or anything like that. I'd just like to get the traffic myself when people are viewing the art, and don't think links would be that big an obstacle to the wiki's purpose, when everything is online anyway.

That's really no good.

My expectations about reposting people's art are pretty much yours--i.e. don't do it without permission--although one of the weird things about Transformers fandom is that people are--probably not all of them, but in general--completely accepting of posting other people's stuff anonymously on 4chan, usually without even any clear attribution.

But I really don't think that's the same (bizarre) community assumption that fanlore is making.

Yeah. To be fair, up to a point I can see the sense in the uploading policy, like with the fanzines covers, in many cases there is no way to contact the artists many decades later, often the covers are quite small, like what you might see on book sellers pages, and I do understand the impulse to chronicle fandom including the pictures. And there is no way the readers could see it without it being uploaded since originally it was offline (of course some might also see that as a point against, that artists couldn't have guessed their art would just be uploaded somewhere electronically when they mimeographed it in the 1960s). But I'd assume even with zine art, if the fan objected later on it would be taken down. And my art is accessible after all, there is no reason an article can't refer to it, and it would be just a click away. I just want to get the traffic on my own pages.And there is no way this kind of thing would fly with fic, IMO, like half a story reposted, or a story with a chunk in the middle missing or whatever the text equivalent to this mangling would be.

That may have been meant nicely, actually I fully assume it was

I'm pretty sure it was. From her comment on your talk page it's obvious that she did it to cheer you up. :( I thought she had your permission because all the drawn online art I've uploaded was with the artist's permission and Morgan seems to be the last person who would go against the wishes of the artist.

If I were you, I would ask morgandawn and MPH to remove the art. You are probably more likely to get a positive response from them (also, I wanted to ask if we could upload your default icon instead; that's what I would have chosen to begin with because your icon art is so unique and everyone would immediately recognize who the page is about).

I've sent Morgandawn a DW message the same afternoon I mailed the committee, mostly because I wanted to give a heads up at least, even if she couldn't delete, also to not give the impression that I had a problem with the other editors and would only communicate via official channels or anything, like in a bad breakup, just because I wasn't responding to the Talk page. She said the committee was the right place to address requests to change the content.

She said the committee was the right place to address requests to change the content.

*sigh*

Indeed.

I keep thinking that I just shouldn't have blanked my User Page, then probably nobody would have felt the impulse to create a regular one. It just never pays to indulge in drama gestures of any kind, even the not so very dramatic ones. *headdesk* Though I guess it might have cropped up sooner or later anyway.

I think I mostly fixed it. Take a look.

Thank you! I still would like it better if the old versions of the full images were deleted rather than still archived in the version history, but the page just showing a teaser bit is okay for me. I hope that'll work for the committee as well. And I see that the non-fanart dinosaur picture has been deleted by someone.

The page looks nice; I don't see why they'd have a problem with it!

but I like it even less that people won't visit my page to see them because the Fanlore archived version is a click less away from the article and it's easier to just stay there coming from there, and I won't get any traffic or comments or anything.

I... hmm... I guess I begin to see why this is a problem, but it's just so outside of my experience (as an editor of wikis and not so much a viewer of fan art, as is probably obvious). I really only click through to pictures on wikis if I'm trying to read the fine print on a map or chart or something--half the time, Wikipedia pictures aren't much bigger in the original version than in the thumbnail in the article itself. The only times I've looked at images on fanlore rather than at articles is when I'm trying to figure out who uploaded them. If I were approaching some fan art from the perspective of critique or pure appreciation, I think I'd just follow whatever links were in the article.

The timing does make this kind of a dick move, but I also get where this policy is coming from: you make an effort to keep your work accessible, but will it be accessible in six months or a year or five years? (It sounds like the answer is 'yes', but it wouldn't be for lots of people, even if they claimed it would.) Asking to have no art archived seems like it's getting back to that problem of people having too much control over their Fanlore pages that you were getting at in one of your posts.

Well, I always click on the large versions of fanlore art. Actually one of my favorite pages is the new images gallery, so I click on the images first and maybe look at the articles it's linked from if I like the picture. So clearly people use wikis differently.

I even understand why fanlore has the policy to grab first and sort out detailed permissions later, what with maybe contact info not being current with all the zines etc. But clearly most currently avaiable online art has reachable creators, and there is direct competition.

And even if it was "fair use" to just upload a huge version (and some of my art uploaded to fanlore intially was 1000px wide so that is not any kind of "small preview" on a typical screen) without permission just because you want to talk about it on a wiki (and I honestly doubt that), in fandom it is generally not okay to distribute fanworks without permission for permanent preservation, not even to "save" them from the creator deleting them four months down the line.

Obviously plenty of fans save copies privately, and if something vanishes share it privately or even semi-privately (like is fic search posts asking for copies etc), and I have no issues with that. If someone somewhere wants to preserve my fanart on their hard disk or in their private archive or in a collection they are welcome to have a copy. But I want the public traffic to my art.

Fanlore doesn't grab whole stories just to chronicle them. I do not want to control what the wiki says about me, or about my art, or micromanage the page. I don't want to control how the page looks. I just don't want my art displayed in full on the wiki as competition to my own site.

Aaand this is why I had all my old Besterette stuff pulled off the net. So nooone would helpfully 'archive' it for me, against my wishes.

The thing is, I'm not even opposed to making my art available permanently and as widely as possible. Should I be slain by a falling toilet seat tomorrow and my site vanished, it would be still all indexed on archive.org and could be recovered from there, because I allow bots to index my site. I just want to get the clicks and traffic (which I can see both on dA and on my site, which are the places I put copies) and maybe even comments while I'm still around. :(

Ah. Personally, I'd have let my stuff stay up until natural attrition took it down, dying websites, et cetera. There does seem to be a trend in Fandom now, that if something's posted publically once, it's supposed to stay up forever...and I've seen a couple of references of people moving other peoples' abandoned fic to the AOOO, if I was reading it correctly. And that just sets off my control issues.

So I'm only posting locked to communities now, and I'm seriously thinking about deleting everything, after it's been up a couple of months.

Uh oh. I hope not. People aren't supposed to be doing that. One thing that they are allowed to do is move archives they're in charge of. If someone had permission to archive other people's work and now they're moving their archive to be hosted on AO3, we don't make them go back and get permission from everyone again. (Though, of course, if the original authors show up and want their work removed, that's fine too.)

Just wanted to say that I sympathize; I think Fanlore was a great idea, and every now and then I think I want to go back to editing. Then I remember all the things I got frustrated about that made me quit, and I go do something else instead.

I invested a lot of time and effort in it, and I really want it to do well still, even though I think the official handling sort of hamstrings the whole enterprise constantly. I actually hope that I'll feel a bit mellower down the line, or that maybe things will improve or something. Because I've always found the editing itself quite fun.

But I would really like people to come to my own site to see my art. It's not like I make it inconvenient. :/

Interesting. I think this must have something to do with the medium: of both art and of the fanlore wiki as opposed to An Archive Of Our Own.

As far as I'm aware (and I'm not an expert because I've always been a little bit dubious about OTW and held back from it) the OTW policy of fic archiving was that you could opt out. Is that still correct?

But that was from the POV of the archive, not the wiki. I suspect that because it's possible to use art illustratively in a way that fiction can't be, that the policy about permissions doesn't protect artists from what amounts to archiving without permission.

I think what I find depressing about OTW (and this is why I've held back from it) is that it can come across as hostile to critique. There seems to be an undercurrent of opinion that fandom should be grateful for all that's being done on the project and that anyone raising concerns is bashing OTW. I really really don't want to bash OTW - I have lots of friends who are involved in the project - but this attitude makes it difficult to get concrit addressed.

On a more practical note, fanlore ought to have permission or a creative commons license for all images used illustratively. Perhaps that's the line to take with them?

Their official policy is:
"Fanlore's position is that the reproduction of zine covers and other fannish artwork falls constitutes a fair use under U.S. copyright law." as is said here:
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Copyright
(the wonky sentence structure with the verb waffling in the middle is not my fault, I just c&p'ed it like it appears on the policy page right now.)

Only the images made for Fanlore specifically are supposed to be licensed under a CC license (as I did with graphics I made for the wiki). Though right now you couldn't tell from most images pages which image has what license, i.e. nowhere on the art that's been uploaded is made clear that it is not under a CC license, nothing like what wikipedia does for non-free images.

To be fair, once the size is made much smaller so that it can't be confused with the art like I posted it anymore it's not really "archiving" as such. I can even see their point that it is kind of like uploading small covers to go with your book review and the like. But considering that my art is just a click away for anyone to see while reading a wiki article, I'd have really thought that fanlore would be so "fan-friendly" as to take preferences of fans into account. I just don't like small thumbnails of the whole image myself (that's why I always crop for the thumbnails in my posts in the outside cut teaser), but I like not getting the nice jolt of views/traffic stats (even without comments) even less, so I don't want big images somewhere where I don't get such stats.

From a practical standpoint I know why the uploading policy makes sense, like with the fanzines covers, in many cases there is no way to contact the artists many decades later, often the covers are quite small, like what you might see on book sellers pages, and I do understand the impulse to chronicle fandom including the pictures. And there are I think currently over 14,000 images on fanlore, most of them fanart. For good and bad there is no way this many would or could have been uploaded if permission for each had been required.

But I had really thought that if the fan objected later on it would be taken down. And after all my art is just a click away, so not that much more inconvenient for articles to talk about.

Edited 2010-08-23 15:46 (UTC)

urg. Yuck.

This is the thing that really doesn't sit well with me of the OTW overall. On one hand, they come up with these great ideas, but in the execution of those ideas, it's like they go out of their way to be difficult (whether they're conscious of it or not) and if you try and point it out, you get fan-splained. It just seems like it's alienating more than it's helping.

They are certainly alienating me right now...

They seem so focused on representing/protecting Fandom, that they're ignoring/forgetting that the people they encounter every day are Fandom. Then they start in on explaining how it's for our own good, and yeah, that's more than a little patronizing and kind of counterproductive.

Shabby treatment. Makes me :-(

Yeah. Me too.

*MASSIVE HUGS*

Thanks. *hugs*

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disgruntled ratcreature is disgruntled

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