gwyn: (sadness)
[personal profile] gwyn
Well, this has been...a day. I woke up this morning to an email from the person doing the new meta fandom newsletter--which I sort of had read about, but not really paid attention to but thought it was very cool that someone was doing--asking if I had a linking policy, because they'd posted about a fanlore post of one my old LJ entries and a couple commenters had mentioned that it might be good to check with me about it.

I've never formulated any kind of policy because I'm a no-name fan and to be honest, I don't really pay attention to these sorts of things, not to mention that I hardly ever lock my posts, and I wasn't even sure what the post in question was. (And I want to make it very clear before I get into this longer thing that I have no issue with the meta fandom newsletter person, I appreciate her thoughtfulness and willingness to work with me.) But I went to the metafandom journal, and found the post, and started reading through the comments, and got kind of upset. I didn't even know what post this was talking about, because she'd kindly taken the link down while waiting to hear from me, but I started to grok from some of the kind of mocking comments that it was a personal rant about entitled kids these days.

From 2006. That someone on fanlore called mrs. potato head put up last fucking year, with absolutely no context or background. And never once asked me about, even though I'm still active in fandom and they could easily have written to me on LJ or in PMs. And the thing is, I was very upfront that I was writing a personal rant (I still haven't gone back to look at the post, I simply don't have time), but the fanlore person basically used so many excerpts and pejorative content descriptions that I don't need to, it seems like most of the post is there, along with a bunch of comments, many of which I think the commenters would be as upset as I was to find them there. I wrote that post in the assumption that it was my personal journal that I was making a personal rant about fandom in, and I wrote it less than a year after my fucking TWIN SISTER DIED, and after the death of a fandom friend whose absence I was keenly feeling at the Escapade con.

I was a really different person in 2006 from what I am in 2018 and 2019. I've changed a lot in 13 years, and fandom has changed, and really, the Internet has changed. Back then, LJ was the primary game in town, and the way we interacted with it was different from how we interact with tumblr. I've been profoundly affected by my sister's death, my friends' deaths, knowing the people I know now. It never would have occurred to me that someone would be combing through my LJ, which I don't even use anymore because of the whole Russia thing, looking for posts I made about fandom and culling them to post in completely contextless history posts, opening me up to attack or ridicule when someone else finds them and links to them.

And I'll restate--I have nothing against the idea of keeping fannish histories about meta posts, or linking to them in a kind of historical way. I think documenting fannish history is vital, and it's one reason I was active on fanlore when it first started (I have lots of reasons for not staying active, but this is sort of one of them). And I'm really glad they thought I had something of interest to link to! One of the comments was from [personal profile] kore, pointing out how uncomfortable she'd be if a personal vent she'd made 13 years ago in her own space after the death of a friend was linked to without making sure it was okay. I really appreciated that, because the me 13 years ago was such a different person, and that was a time when we weren't really locking things a lot, or at least, in my sector, we weren't. And again, there was no context for this fanlore post, nothing that explains why it's there.

But the thing is, not every single piece of fandom meta has historical value. (I hear the archivists yelling NO! Samuel Pepys! All those old APA zines and newsletters and stuff! How would we know what the daily life of fans were like otherwise or what the hot topics were! I hear that, but again, sometimes we're not writing these things wanting them to survive in a time capsule. Sometimes it's personal venting, sometimes it's us trying to work stuff out, and we don't want them to survive.) I wasn't given a choice by the fanlore person. They never asked me, hey, I'm going to comb (stalk) through your LJ that you don't even use anymore and take so many excerpts from this ancient rant of yours that I might as well publish the whole thing, and I'm going to open you up for ridicule in the future, and also the people who left comments who might be horrified by language they used casually back then they'd never ever use today, and I'm going to do this 12 years after the fact for no particular reason, 'kay? All they had to do was PM me, so I could have ruminated on that, and looked at the post, and then maybe said, hm, you know, not okay, I didn't remember a single thing about that post and it was from a bad time. And I could have gone back and locked it.

I'm upset that the fanlore person picked this crap to post 12 years after the fact--like, WTF?--and now I have to, at a time when I'm absolutely swamped, deal with all of this and don't really have the spoons or the time. It took me a long time to unravel this morning. And I could have said, hey, you know, I have a number of nicely aged, oaky, pleasant vintage rants about fandom that don't have that unpleasant terroir of grief and misery and unhappiness. Shit, I have a vertitable SMORGASBORD of ancient ranty meta posts that people could ridicule me over, do you prefer a booth or a table?

But I didn't get that chance. I knew nothing about the fanlore post till today, and I don't have time to search out how many other posts this person might have culled from my goddamn LJ that I don't use anymore and they never bothered to ask me about. And now they're forcing me to a) spend the time coming up with some kind of links policy (which, I'm old skool, I've always believed that public posts are public and people can do what they want up till now) and b) trying to decide how to handle locking in a journal I don't even use--do I lock down the whole thing, which means people can't access the public posts like vids and fic or do I have to invest the ridic amount of time to read through nearly two decades of postings to find the individual ones I'd never have wanted to be made historical documents in freaking 2019?

I'm not thrilled at being forced by someone else's lack of thoughtfulness to do something, but now I have to. And I have to see what other things fanlore might have there that'll surprise or piss me off. Not everything is a historical document, not everything we've done as fans was created with the intention of surviving more than a dozen years to be discussed like it's something new and noteworthy. Sometimes, we're happy to let things die in the past--that's okay. There's lots still that could live on. I don't really want that thing to be my legacy, or lots of other things--there's plenty of better stuff for a legacy. I could have even pointed that out, if they'd bothered to ask, and I might even dig some of it up and see if the meta newsletter person would be interested, since I sort of caused them a lot of bother today.

The changes I've gone through in 13 years, a lot of them have come from wounds and scars and loss, but you know, that's life. Hopefully, I'll be here in another 13 years, and I have no idea what fandom will look like then, but I really hope that we don't have to fear the stuff we say now coming back to haunt us or that we can't control our own spaces. I love fandom, I love its history, but I hope we don't forget in our efforts to document that history that individual people are the ones behind it.

Date: 2019-01-27 11:47 am (UTC)
ratcreature: Like a spork between the eyes. (spork)
From: [personal profile] ratcreature
I have so many issues with Fanlore's policies. Frankly I'm still nursing my grudge from when they just uploaded my art to their wiki and thought I ought to be thankful for that, and it was just impossible to work with their structures. At that point I was a frequent contributor, but I just couldn't anymore with their policy of "preservation" where they basically copy stuff wholesale and say it's "fair use".

Date: 2019-01-27 05:42 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
Yeah, Fanlore's copying without permission and no contact reminds me a lot of the "reblog v repost" discussion that was happening earlier. I don't mind if someone posts excerpts of public stuff I've written along with a link back. I DO mind if they post a lot of stuff wholesale and I don't know about it and there's no context.

Date: 2019-01-28 03:19 am (UTC)
ratcreature: grumpy (grumpy)
From: [personal profile] ratcreature
No, not really. And as a normal user you won't be able to really delete things, the text will remain in the editing history unless people with more rights actually delete things. You can't delete images either, you need special permission for that.

I eventually got them to delete artwork that wasn't even fandom art, and cropped previews in place of full art but in my experience once something is on the wiki you won't get it off unless it doxxed you with the RL name or such. Though, that was years ago and with a different OTW wiki committee, so maybe things improved since. From later conversations I gathered not everyone was thrilled with how things played out in that affair.

I mean, I was in public kerfuffle over the fanlore image policy at the time (before any of my art was uploaded). I had actually blanked my contributor page, which was the only way not to be listed as a contributor anymore (I felt I could not continue volunteering with the policy and the editing practices), and the reaction to that was, that a regular wiki fan page was created for my pseud, when nobody had bothered before, and that page actually didn't talk about the art they had grabbed either, just had the gallery there as eyecady, even for over a year at that point I had argued in public on wiki discussion pages and in the DW fanlore comm that I was against the way fanlore just grabbed fanart, and had never uploaded any of my art even if it topically fit pages I edited. (my post on this from that time)

So even though I'm fairly sure the editor who uploaded didn't mean it in a malicious way, it felt like a public power display "so you say you are against our policies? we are going to take your art regardless." And not even escalating it like crazy up to the committee and public kerfuffling (still the only time I've been prominently featured in fandomwank threads afaik), getting my posts Frozen on the fanlore DW comm, etc. amounted to much of anything. Basically if you run into the OTW's "but preservation! fair use! fannish history!" hard lines you are fucked. (Sorry for ranting, I'm still a bit sore about this all this time later.)

Date: 2019-01-27 12:23 pm (UTC)
princessofgeeks: (Default)
From: [personal profile] princessofgeeks
Thank you for this. I'm sorry you were so blindsided!

Date: 2019-01-27 01:31 pm (UTC)
batwrangler: Just for me. (Default)
From: [personal profile] batwrangler
Hugs.

Would it be less spoon-intensive to simply lock-down LJ now and go back later to reopen vid posts, etc?

Date: 2019-01-27 01:33 pm (UTC)
emyrys: (misc calvin and hobbes hugs)
From: [personal profile] emyrys
{{{hugs}}}

Date: 2019-01-27 03:02 pm (UTC)
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] aurumcalendula
*hugs*

Date: 2019-01-27 03:27 pm (UTC)
sylvaine: Dark-haired person with black eyes & white pupils. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sylvaine
Here via network - I'm sorry this has caused such upset, augh.

My workaround for knowing when anything I've made has been linked/article-d on fanlore has been creating my own fan person page plus pages for all my pseuds that redirect to my main fannish persona. It feels a little arrogant, to be sure, but because you get an email any time someone links to a page you created, and editors tend to name people with the fanlore-internal linking, this gives you some control over what is happening with your stuff where.

Date: 2019-01-29 01:39 am (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
OK, from what I can tell, you can delete your own User page which is automatically created when you make an account on Fanlore. The FAQ says

you can write pretty much whatever you want there, in whichever "tone" or technique (caveat: you are not supposed to treat the User page like a personal blog-on-the-wiki or a fic-archive). You can write in first person or use the royal we if you prefer. You can link directly offsite to everything you do that's relevant to fandom; write out your fandom history (this is encouraged); state your personal opinions on the existence of fandom wank, the term BNF and the lack of smarm in the SG:A fandom. YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN EDIT IT (besides admins, because admins need to be able to remove ad hominem attacks, fangirl outing info or other horrors in case there's a need to)

So you could delete that, which is https://fanlore.org/wiki/User:Gwyneth

But. That's not the fanlore wiki page about you:

The other page is a page like any other People page, and will be categorized as such, as well as in the relevant subcategory (Fans, Academia, etc.. Preferably, you will not be the creator of the page about you (you're not the best person to decide if you're noteworthy for fandom at large), though that in itself is not a problem - it is not forbidden. The copy on that page needs to respect the PPOV; it can be edited by anyone; it's not supposed to please you particularly and describe you the way you'd rather be described. If you did notable things in fandom that are unsavory, well, there remains every chance they get listed there. Say there's a page about me, then stuff I, anatsuno, might have preferred not be there can appear, like "anatsuno founded DL_A and was kind of mean to MsAllegro for a long time" or "anatsuno is a member of the omg Cabal" or the like. You have control on whether your real name figures on the page about you or not (outings are forbidden, and anyone can write to the Fanlore admins to ask outing info be removed from the wiki if some vandal put it there), but basically that's all.

And that would be https://fanlore.org/wiki/Gwyneth_Rhys (without the "User" in the URL)

So you can't delete that, and it doesn't sound like they're willing to delete stuff at the user's request (which has also been a big problem for Wikipedia)

What if I want to remove content from the wiki?
The Fanlore Committee will consider good reasons for page deletion, but under normal circumstances, the solution is to post your concerns to the article's talk page and/or edit the page for Plural POV.
If it is an Identity Protection issue, the page can be edited to remove the identifying information, and a gardener or committee member will hide the edit history.


https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Frequently_Asked_Questions_(FAQ)#What_if_I_want_to_remove_content_from_the_wiki.3F

Date: 2019-01-30 10:08 am (UTC)
sylvaine: Dark-haired person with black eyes & white pupils. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sylvaine
Oh, sorry for the confusion - I'm not the mod over there, just an interested 3rd party!

There are definitely huge problems with Fanlore, and unfortunately given OTW's general habits I don't see that changing any time soon. Which BLOWS.

I don't want to wall-o-text in your comments about this, so I'll just say that I wrote a post that goes more in-depth into how to do the thing I was suggesting and what it can and can't do. Like [personal profile] kore said, it won't sadly delete any info entirely, but at least "hide" it a bit by not being visible on the main article page anymore.

Date: 2019-01-29 01:26 am (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
I know that solution works for some people, but several fannish pseuds I had in the past are not connected to anything of mine now, and I would really not like it if they were. (I know AO3 does the "connect all your pseuds across one account" thing too....)

Doesn't the wiki basically preserve what was deleted though via the Talk page? It's doesn't sound like you can get something completely wiped off Fanlore.

Date: 2019-01-30 10:04 am (UTC)
sylvaine: Dark-haired person with black eyes & white pupils. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sylvaine
Yeah, this is unfortunately true it doesn't wipe it, but it does make it less accessible at least.

As for fannish pseuds, as I detailed in my post, you don't *have* to connect them. And if you're really worried about it, you could create a secondary, throwaway account to create those pages with.

Date: 2019-01-27 03:44 pm (UTC)
anelith: (Default)
From: [personal profile] anelith
Sorry this is happening to you! It strikes me as bizarre that someone has the time to go back and dissect posts made in 2006. Isn't there enough going on right now?

Date: 2019-01-27 05:00 pm (UTC)
muccamukk: An orange life ring floating in the sea. (Misc: Lifering)
From: [personal profile] muccamukk
I hope we don't forget in our efforts to document that history that individual people are the ones behind.

I forgot that yesterday, and I'm sorry. I should have been supporting Kore before I was.

Date: 2019-01-27 05:18 pm (UTC)
blueswan: (Default)
From: [personal profile] blueswan
I don't understand why anyone would find it useful to dig up a post from 2006. That's just strange and sucky. I'm sorry it has happened. *HUGS*

Date: 2019-01-27 05:29 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
I'm really sorry all this landed on your head, especially at a time of stress and overwork. And I'm REALLY side-eying Fanlore and the people who keep saying 'it's like a fannish Wikipedia' or whatever.

Date: 2019-01-29 01:14 am (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
Yeah, one thing that's bugging me is, I don't know anything about this person? I literally don't know who they are. There are no links off Fanlore to a blog or any kind of site and the only contact info is through Fanlore and it's not that I think they have to reveal their IRL identity or anything, just that if they're going to be doing the majority of the work on Fanlore and they can't really be held accountable, or have outside checks....that doesn't strike me as great.

Date: 2019-01-29 07:13 am (UTC)
ratcreature: Like a spork between the eyes. (spork)
From: [personal profile] ratcreature
It's super intransparent. To find out who currently is on the committee you have to go to the OTW page, but there you see RL names not pseuds so sometimes you won't know whether you talked to them if they don't connect the two: http://www.transformativeworks.org/committees/#fanlore

Then there are "Gardeners" i.e. editors with more rights, and there is a page on the wiki listing those: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Gardeners

Date: 2019-01-29 03:38 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
you have to go to the OTW page, but there you see RL names not pseuds

Oh, that's lovely. The one thing they DON'T want on Fanlore is connecting IRL names and fannish pseuds!

Date: 2019-01-29 04:34 pm (UTC)
ratcreature: RL? What RL? RatCreature is a net addict.  (what rl?)
From: [personal profile] ratcreature
Yes. Way back when I volunteered I don't think I ever interacted with someone from the (then) committee, at least not knowingly, not before getting into arguments about image policy and the processes the OTW decided on those, when I had a run in on the DW fanlore comm. And then it was basically a word from God type of interaction, not a community type of project level between equals. No idea whether gardeners had more contact, though.

A gardener once asked me whether I wanted to volunteer for that role, because for a while I had been editing quite a lot, but I had no interest in that, because I just don't volunteer in organizations that are that hierarchical, so on that level the OTW was never going to be a good fit for me. (When I've done serious volunteering on an organization level it has been all in groups with a discussion and consensus model, with the hierarchy only being theoretical to comply with legal requirements for
non-profit finances or such, while it was understood that the goal was to be participatory and democratic not merely majoritarian.) Anyway I had volunteered because I found wiki editing a very soothing activity at the time, but had no interest volunteering beyond that, and then I ran into how exactly it manifests when you run into an org that doesn't seek consensus with you, and found that frankly not even their lip service to consideration of fans held up when there was conflict in goals, and then I couldn't stomach even limited volunteering.

I mean, I still use OTW projects like AO3, because they are really useful, but then I use Google too, and there is tbh still way more overlap in ethics between me and the OTW than between me and Google, but not so much that I want to spend my time in their org.

Date: 2019-01-27 06:35 pm (UTC)
cesperanza: (Default)
From: [personal profile] cesperanza
You might not think I agree with you but I totally do! History isn't saving everything: history is about making choices and telling a story, and I do believe in a) context and b) the right to be forgotten even. We are in a moment of terrible blurring of lines--I was posting about commercial/social the other day, but public/private is another and I would say speech/publication. Right now I don't think I am "writing something for publication," I am "commenting on my friend's post to talk to her!" And those things are different, but the internet blurs those distinctions. One of the reasons I like archives so much is that it's clear that archives are for WRITING, for PRESERVING--but like, I was so weirded out when tumblr went down that people were like, trying to "preserve" it--I've always regarded my own social media as ephemera. We're in massive state of blurred lines, my friend!

Date: 2019-01-28 07:37 pm (UTC)
deborah: the Library of Congress cataloging numbers for children's literature, technology, and library science (Default)
From: [personal profile] deborah
In fact, this is also the professional opinion of archivists, who believe strongly in selection, as well as respecting the privacy and ownership rights of creators, and also basic safety.

And while professional archives can be aggressive about collecting materials within their collection policy, basic access restrictions in most archives often default to "death of the creator plus some number of decades" even for non-sensitive materials, just to protect the creator. When I worked in an academic archives we turned down people who tried to give us materials we thought would limit someone's safety (oral histories of people in a war zone; an interview with an individual in an unsafe setting who said "hey, could you expunge that bit, I shouldn't have said that" which the interviewer refused to expunge). We wouldn't even take them into our archives because we couldn't guarantee privacy. And, in fact, when Boston College had a collection of oral histories with IRA members seized by the justice department leading to the arrest of Gerry Adams, the Society for American Archivsts blamed BC, not the feds. (For collecting the oral histories in the first place, and for asserting in their agreements with interviewees that their interviews would be private, when there is no legal confessional wall for archives!)

While fannish curation of history is great, a real fannish archives will be running out of an institution with a strict code of ethics, not out of a crowd-sourced wiki. Which is not to say I don't love Fanlore. I adore Fanlore, in fact! But defending it with vague words about archives and Samuel Pepys is disingenuous, because it's not an archival collection, and if it were, it would subscribe to ethical rules. And those would, as Ces says, include context (as a basic minimum standard!), selection, and the right to restricted access.

(Gwyn, I hope you don't mind me turning up here as a stranger to say, hey, as a professional, I support you.)

(I have more complex feelings about the right to be forgotten; we once had to take down an issue of the student newspaper because it had printed rape allegations about a student in the 1990s which were now discoverable online because of OCR'd student newspapers, and the alumnus in question sued. And while usually I am on the side of people about whom information becomes easily discoverable in the age of full-text search, I feel differently when it is an article in a newspaper.)
Edited (clarifying) Date: 2019-01-28 07:39 pm (UTC)

Date: 2019-01-29 01:19 am (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
While fannish curation of history is great, a real fannish archives will be running out of an institution with a strict code of ethics, not out of a crowd-sourced wiki.

Your being an archivist reminds me of an archiving controversy I read about fairly recently, the On Our Backs zine and how it was very privately circulated at first and people in it signed limited releases, an then it was digitized and everyone could see it and IIRC they hadn't even asked for the releases first? And what was striking was, apparently nobody thought about any ramifications of putting this really sensitive material online, it was just "it's out of print and I want people to be able to see it, so it's going up on the internet with no identity protection whatsoever." (And then their defense was "the digitization rights have been fully cleared in accordance with current copyright law," which was....not a good look.)

Date: 2019-01-27 06:52 pm (UTC)
catwalksalone: happy grey cat surrounded by flowers (Default)
From: [personal profile] catwalksalone
What the actual fuck? I’m so sorry you’re going through this. *very many hugs for you*

Date: 2019-01-27 09:14 pm (UTC)
mackiemesser: Ollie (Default)
From: [personal profile] mackiemesser
That sucks pretty hard. I can think of all kinds of things I've said over the years when I didn't understand a concept fully, or didn't have the language to express myself correctly that would look pretty awful through today's lens, but was pretty normal over a decade ago. It's hard for some people to grasp how much fandom has shifted over the years and expecting old posts to be meeting current standards is a stretch.

(Not that this excuse some dumbass stuff I said; I'm happy to have learned better, you know?)

But, yeah, that was a rude, obnoxious thing for them to do, especially without context.

Date: 2019-01-30 01:08 am (UTC)
mackiemesser: Ollie (Default)
From: [personal profile] mackiemesser
It's a tough call, but I guess it really comes down to: is there anything on LJ that you want people to see enough to put up with the possibility of more stalky bullshit? Not that the onus should be on you, or that you should have to lock it down because someone else can't not be a dick, but which option has more value for you right now? The unfortunate thing is that unlocking it later will unlock everything. And it would be a super huge pain to unlock entries individually.

I don't know the answer. I did lock down all my old entries a couple years ago coz I just felt like I wanted to take a break from existing in fandom for a while. The only thing I wish is that locking would include all your comments on other users' journals, too.

Date: 2019-01-28 12:12 am (UTC)
mmouse15: *hug* written on pink background (Hugs)
From: [personal profile] mmouse15
Oh, gosh, I'm so sorry!

Date: 2019-01-28 06:38 pm (UTC)
grammarwoman: (Default)
From: [personal profile] grammarwoman
That really sucks - I'm sorry. *HUGS*

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