Ao3 Categories

[foxinthestars]

The Tag Wranglers are hearing some motion on redesigning the Ao3 categories, and we're told they will be taking feedback from us and from the public at some point in the process, so I wanted to give everyone the heads-up. I know if I have plenty of warning to sort my thoughts I'm less likely to go "um, uh... okay..." when the moment comes.

A major concern has been how Anime & Manga is broken out from Cartoons & Comics & Graphic Novels, which defies technical media categories for the sake of Japan while other traditions --- eg Manhwa, Bande Desinee --- disappear into one side of the split or the other (and the "Western" stuff gets Ao3's fugliest category name), so be thinking about that.

Personally, I'd like to see them start with a public comment-taking period and have a feedback period once they have a concrete proposal, but I'm not in the work group, so I don't know the plan, I just know there is a work group.

Comments

[branchandroot]

Yeah, but that would make /sense/.

Hasn't Fanlore done this already? I thought they, after some slightly ham-fisted feedback, decided on division by media type and then sub-division by national or other significant type. Seems like the work group could ask what the right hand is doing and not have to reinvent the wheel /internally/.

[foxinthestars]

I admit, I barely go to Fanlore or know a thing about it... I am gratified at how opinionated the tag wranglers are being already without waiting for permission, and I did put in my two cents for something like what you describe --- and made sure to tell them I thought they should start with an open comment period (seriously, it would just look better and the org could use that).

A totally different thing that's come up and that they're discussing is generic metatags cluttering the "most popular" listings under the Media (not my own hobby horse, but what shows under movies here is pretty dang ridiculous, yeah); I thought it might be good to just put sub-media there instead of specific fandoms, so, say, as an anime/manga fan I wouldn't just see myself erased from that main page, but I also don't tend to get into megafandoms so the skin wouldn't be coming off my nose...

[branchandroot]

Oh wow. Yeah, that's pretty ridiculous.

It does look like what might fix that is to have a a "only show top hierarchies within the media-group" rule in the code for that page, so that all the variations on "avengers, whee!" is collapsed into one.

Of course, I hear that the code is already a howling ball of monkey-nuts, so that might be more than the archive structure can /take/, who knows.

[foxinthestars]

I saw that comment on your post. At moments like this I feel like I should learn to code if only so I can properly appreciate the trainwreck...

[quicksilver_ink]

Thanks for the heads-up.

Part of the trouble is that it is genuinely _useful_ to be able to seek out specifically manga fandoms vs American graphic novels fandoms vs others, but there's not necessarily a non-problematic way to make that possible.

I know there's a ton of overlap between anime and manga fandoms, but I wonder if maybe it wouldn't make more sense to have the splits be "Animation" and "Sequential Art", and then for each of these have sub-categories by country or tradition of origin. So under the sequential art category, the front-page links would not be to main fandoms, but to the categories of "Manga", "Manhwa", "USian Comic Books", etc. Genuinely international or cross-tradition works (collaborations, not 'gets translated and released in other countries') could be listed under all applicable countries. Similarly, series that are both manga and anime could appear in both categories.

I'm not sure how the database is set up, but there's already a lot of flexibility built into the system (multi-fandom stories appear under all fandoms), so I'd think this could be made to work. It's just that fandoms wouldn't belong to disjoint categories, but rather they'd have (possibly invisible) tags saying which categories they belonged to.

I'm not too well-versed in all the different traditions of animation and sequential art, so there could be some special cases that makes the whole thing unfeasible or maybe just Problematic (eg, might result in an "Other" ghetto.) Is there anything major that would go wrong with it?

[foxinthestars]

I wouldn't presume to know whether there's anything major that would go wrong, but I do know there isn't an unproblematic way to do this *period* (if you don't break out anime/manga, you're snubbing a huge fan-culture; if you do, you're privileging the USians who organize the fan-culture that way that strongly, etc etc), just shooting for best practical solution --- and within the constraints of the Ao3 code, which (as Branch mentioned) is rumored to be an intractable mess.