The Organization for Transformative Works is creating a wiki.

[icarus]

Apparently the Organization for Transformative Works is creating a wiki.

Cool. I didn't know that. A fandom wiki's a good idea.

I believe that the context of our stories helps frame and explain some of our works. I believe in the concept of a fan wiki. But the old wiki (I'm not linking to it; the owner is open about trying to make a buck off of it at our expense) is a mass of stubs and wank reports. Based on it you'd think there's no fanfic in the fanfiction world. It's riddled with errors. According to it, the widely vilified FanLib was greeted warmly by large portions of fandom, for example. It's largely written by one person, a FanLib supporter, surprise, surprise (and no wonder given she's now following in FanLib's footsteps), with all the problems that entails. She used a bot to scrape information from ff.net profiles to fill it with garbage.

On top of the poor quality, it turns out the owner thinks it's perfectly okay to post people's real names in connection with their fandom pseudonyms.

No shit, really. The owner of the site put a post on metafandom about her site, then added someone's real name to their wiki page. (Oh, great, how about an address? Pin number too?) When that real life info was deleted, the owner of the wiki put it right back in. She's been around long enough to know that people in fandom have been harrassed and threatened when their real names have been connected to their writing pseudonyms. It is dangerous and a violation of a fundamental principle of fandom that we all respect. As an added bonus, she's offering to provide lists of fanfic communities to advertisers. I love this pitch video, though I could only watch it once.

Laura Hale is a truly clueless kid. I do appreciate seeing how young she is. Her inexperience radiates in her pitch. I can now chalk up her years of blunders in fandom -- her mistreatment of important contacts among fans, the unsupported bias she's added to her wiki pages, her use of her wiki to pursue personal grudges, her lack of managerial skill with admins who've tried to work for her on the wiki -- to sheer naivete. Percival-like, Laura cuts a swathe of destruction in her wake and has not reached the point of maturity where she can recognize, own, and correct her own mistakes. I predict that she will soldier on with arrogant self-centeredness until she finally makes an error serious enough that she's forced to look in the mirror. To see that, maybe, just maybe, her actions have something to do with the reactions of those around her. I also predict that it'll be a while.

Laura Hale has inspired me to send a donation to the Organization for Transformative Works (otw_news). We need to have a real fanfic wiki written by mature adults who actually care about fandom. And, you know, a fandom wiki that contains a little bit about fanfiction. Just a thought.

Comments

[thalia]

What you said.

One thing, though: otw isn't the OTW--they're at otw_news, or http://transformativeworks.org/.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you. *fixity-fix*

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

Sigh... the saddest, most evil thing is, she KNOWS it's not okay to out a fan. SHE KNOWS IT. She's doing it to be provocative and to start a wank. Wank means people pinging her site, which makes it look like a popular site, way more popular than it actually is. I think that's the thing that pisses me off the most about this: that there are people who behave badly,who do bad things knowing they are bad things, in order to make money off of other people.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

It turns she's no kid either. I mean, compared to me, yes, but 28 is definitely old enough to know better -- even without the ethics issues. And there are plenty of younger people more mature than this. She simply found an excuse to post the RL name of someone she didn't like.

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

The outing of unwilling fans is unforgivable in my opinion. I mean, sure many of us, in certain circles of fandom, know who that fan is in RL, but we also know that she's asked, more than once, not to link her fannish name and her RL identity and people have been good about that. And even if Laura Hale hadn't know about that request, one e-mail should have gotten her to take it down and maybe even apologize. And here is where her youth doesn't cut it for me as an explanation. Because even assuming Laura Hale hadn't gotten the memo about not outing fellow fans, and she seems to have been around for a few years so I doubt that, common decency should have gotten her to take that stuff down.

As for making money off fandom, well we had that discussion when Fan.Lib first showed up, and btw, have you seen that they are closing their doors come August 4th? (http://www.fanlib.com)

And not only will the OTW wiki be maintained by mature adults, it will be more than one person, so the chances of keeping a single individual from dragging the whole thing down to the level of grudge matches and wank are hugely better.

[aphephobia.livejournal.com]

Gah.

Don't get me started on the Canis Canem Edit wiki. Full of speculative bitching about characters they think it's okay to dogpile on (Eunice and Lola, pretty much) yet omitting the canon gay references. :( I vented awhile ago about that one. Pisses me right off.

[slwatson.livejournal.com]

The sad part is, Laura's only a couple months younger than me, I believe. 28ish. I think by then, she no longer gets to qualify as clueless kid; I think she's crossed the line into batshit crazy or outright screwup.

Hi! ;-) By the way.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Boy. My effort to give her the benefit of the doubt is just totally failing.

Hi there! :D

[slwatson.livejournal.com]

Take it from someone who did give her that, she's run out of good will to abuse.

So, how 'bout them Dodgers? ::grins::