Forum:Fanon quality discussion

In another forum thread, a discussion started regarding issues with fanon on the wiki. While normally I would try to summarize the points contained therein, in this case I think it is best to just copy over relevant discussion points without modification (except to exclude points irrelevant to this conversation). Here it is:

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...It's been quite some time since Featured Fanon and Fan Fiction became obsolete, and Fanon Battles generate nowhere near the activity that the regular battle does, despite a fairly healthy start. My opinion is that the problem, at least in case of the fanon-related things, simply involves the glut of fanon material of acceptable yet not outstanding quality. I'd personally would wish for a big fanon critiquing/revision project to spiff up fanons, especially of the more active fanon authors who could use other peoples' inputs (such as myself, who believe my fanons, at least at the beginning, is a pile of incoherent pile that needs a bit of patching up)... MILK FOR THE UNYUUFEX, FLAT CHEST FOR THE CUTENESS THRONE, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL PROBES (user talk:Mathetesalexandrou) 06:04, January 4, 2015 (UTC)
 * I think the fanon critique idea is a good one. Since it's your idea, maybe you should run with it and try to implement it? Or else try to get a discussion going towards implementing it, if you feel doing it unilaterally is too bold (I personally don't think that it would be too bold)...  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 02:38, January 5, 2015 (UTC)
 * Regarding fanon critique: during my painful couple of days a couple of months ago where I added defaultsort tags to something like 500 articles I did take note of the quality of fanon, as just about anyone would. I'll get to the point and just say that a large amount of the articles I noticed weren't up to what I would call a good standard, with some of them being a paragraph or so with an infobox. I'll refer to this particular standard as "average" from this point. I tagged the ones that are of low quality with formatting issues, no content and the like with cleanup, a few of which I went over last night. The issue is that these articles which I refer to, the ones that are of a somewhat acceptable standard, the one paragraph ones, are pretty common, and its very difficult to find lengthy fanon sim articles, with the majority of these being written by the same users time and time again. This difficulty in actually finding good content is an issue which I believe you could say is the main problem we have in regards to featured fan content. You could also throw in stuff like people not caring enough to make nominations or not even knowing but sadly that will probably always be a thing.


 * While there would be a couple of ways to fix these issues with fanon content in general I don't like any of the ones I've come up with. We could increase our standards but that would make it harder for new users to get into fanon, especially those who don't have editing skills and the like. We could go through the entire namespace and delete a bunch of pages of the average standard I mentioned to improve the quality overall, but this is probably even worse as I really don't want to do something dramatic that could upset the userbase. Additionally, the idea of editing other users fanon is something I don't know if I really like, even if its for the purpose of fixing minor errors like incorrect parameters. If you've actually read this far, thank you, but I'll give a summary anyway: tl;dr - the quality issues with the fanon namespace are getting more prevalent as time goes by and I honestly can't think of a solution. Additionally, I would support (and probably help out with) some sort of fanon assistance thing. I may make a thread about the general quality issues with fanon later, if I remember...

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I have to admit, I am not very engaged when it comes to issues in the fanon namespace. At its inception I made a brief foray into fanon writing but it never caught my interest, and at this point I do very little when it comes to working within the fanon namespace or in reading through fanon content. Generally the fanon content that I see added is, as has been said above, generally lacking in quality. There are obviously several notable exceptions to this observation, but it seems the bulk of fanon material on the wiki is of middling-to-poor quality. And as Wogan said, it's likely this will only continue to increase as time goes on. Generally speaking, it looks as though we have two options; we either embrace the poor quality of the namespace, or we try to improve the quality.

Embracing the fanon namespace we have now probably doesn't sound like a good option, especially to users who are more engaged in the Fanon namespace than I am. But I see it a different way. Fanon in some ways occupies the slot once held by player stories pages on this wiki. The namespace is a place for players to write about their experiences and to let loose their imaginations. To a fanon reader or to the users who patrol and maintain the namespace, most of the articles that are created there aren't very good, in that they are not interesting to outsiders and/or have formatting issues or simply lack content. But to the authors, the pages represent their creations, for better or worse. I'm not sure what the value is in that, but I think it's something to keep in mind. Ultimately by keeping the status quo, we allow those users an easy way to express themselves. In this way, the fanon namespace is like a canvas, and we supply the brushes and inks to the artists to paint whatever pictures they want, and while most of the pictures the artists paint are not masterpieces, it's still a labor of love for those artists and still ultimately a positive thing in general for the wiki.

On the other hand, there is something to be said about maintaining a level of quality on the fanon namespace. This is especially true if we treat the fanon namespace as a tool for attracting visitors and (ideally) editors to the wiki. We want to showcase good content and we generally want to minimize poor content, to ensure that those pages that do exist there are interesting for people to read and reflect well on the wiki. When the fanon namespace was created, this was I think the general idea. There were "guidelines" put into place and "standards" adopted to govern fanon quality, formatting, etc etc. But truly the fanon namespace now is bloated and becoming too large to readily moderate, especially when you consider all the low-quality, half-finished abandoned fanon that exists now. That means that any attempt now to enforce the guidelines is going to be accompanied by some difficult tasks, like deleting many pages and making many edits to improve the quality of everything that remains. A primary fear when the fanon namespace was still being discussed was how we'd ensure that the quality of the namespace wouldn't degrade to that of its predecessor. The last thing most of us present in the discussion wanted was what has ultimately now come to pass.

That's really all I have to say about that, right now. -  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 05:29, January 5, 2015 (UTC)