I'm disappointed in this decision. I appreciate the purpose that AO3 serves currently and spend possibly more time than is healthy on this site enjoying both fanfic and fanart. Trying to make this archive a platform for meta when so many other platforms already provide that service seems like you are attempting to be something you are not. I urge you to reconsider.
Assuming you are going forward with this, I can only hope that the ability to filter out meta (assuming people manage to tag their posts appropriately) will be painless, if not permanent. Maybe something as easy as it is now to filter to 'only completed works'. But again, that makes the assumption that people will tag their meta posts properly. And that is something that I have little confidence in.
Another solution that may work would be to keep fanfic/fanart completely separate from meta, for example different upload function so that the two are never confused, the entries never mixed in search results.
AO3 has become the extremely popular, particularly in the last year. Those of us who rely on your current format and functionality to easily find the works we are looking for will be very disappointed to see something like this make our searches, feeds and subscriptions cluttered with meta posts.
Well, media filtering that does not rely on all the different people tagging their works consistently and submission formats for works other than fic (and also their being hosted on the servers) are things that I am desperately waiting for anyway but it's just not a priority in development. Allowing meta doesn't introduce problems that don't already exist.
It does, because even if a work is tagged appropriately, there's no simple way to *exclude* an additional tag. The advanced search function doesn't come with the filtering options that other searches do; there's no way to remove "meta" and still sort fics by word count and complete only.
And there's a policy difference between mandatory tags (warnings & ratings) and additional tags... right now, there is no requirement to include additional tags of any kind; the abuse committee won't add "oral sex" or "homophobia" to a fanwork just because some people want to find, and others want to avoid, those topics. The "meta" tag needs to be of a different type than tags like "kink meme fill" or "pegging."
Sorry about that. I do think meta brings in problems that other fanworks haven't, if only because there's no consensus on a definition so the tags are going to be all over the place until there's a policy, at which point there'll be problems with "do we retag or warn the authors for the pieces that no longer fit the policy?" These problems could exist with fanart, but since there's no direct hosting, it hasn't come up, or hasn't been noticeable.
I agree that meta hosting brings in no technical issues that didn't already exist; we've needed a "fanwork type" feature for a long time.
I'm strongly in favor of AO3 hosting meta and I'm not looking forward to the wankstorms as the committees sort out policies and tech to do so well.
On the other side of that argument, people who are looking forward to meta being introduced to the site would be very disappointed to see meta become difficult to access via searches, feeds and subscriptions. There are always going to be people displeased with various decisions that are made, but for this particular issue I have confidence that AO3 and OTW will do their best to satisfy both people who want to read meta and people who don't.
As far as having no confidence that meta will be tagged appropriately--that can be said about any tag available on the archive.
Creating a permanent opt-out option and compulsory tag for meta (for which a radio button option of Fic/Meta/Podfic/Vid/etc./Other, like the Work Rating buttons, would ensure that at least most works are tagged) does not make it difficult to find for those who want to read it. Having it categorized separately would only make it easier for those who wish to read meta on a fanwork archive to track down meta instead of fic and multimedia links.
This seems eminently sensible. Identifying whether the record in question is podfic, fic, art, meta or whatever in a mandatory selection box would streamline things a lot, now that we've moved beyond simply hosting stories.
The question of how much meta's inclusion would impact the archive as a whole has definitely been an issue of concern for those working on the AO3. The only thing that we can currently be certain of is that the addition of further text works is unlikely to have as big an impact on the archive as it would if we were prepared to host multimedia at this time. And there are definitely plans for doing that in the future, so the archive will continue to evolve in terms of its hosting. While we will undoubtedly see more meta hosted on the AO3 as a result of this decision though, there's no way to know how much more there will be or how quickly it will grow.
But just as art, podfic and video can already be found on the AO3, so is meta. The difference, of course, is that the AO3's current infrastructure already supports the direct hosting of meta in text form, so meta's continuation on the archive has been more of a policy issue than a technical one. Even so, the ability to filter content in or out of searches is going to become an even more important aspect of searching on the AO3 and one which the meta decision will be helping us develop. The committees who will have to put this into place are already beginning to discuss what will be needed, though a technical solution is likely to take much longer than the policy parts.
Thank you for your feedback and we hope that the AO3 will continue to be a place you enjoy spending time at.
I haven't found other platforms that provide meta archives. I haven't found *any* other than the LJ comm hp_essays and a couple of other similar single-fandom forum/communities. When I wrote 6000 words of multifandom meta for kink_bingo, I discovered that there was no community on DW that was open to it; I wound up asking someone to start a new comm because I didn't want to post explicit content publicly in my journal. I would *love* to read meta on multiple topics from multiple authors--there is no archive for such works.
Thousands of meta essays were lost with the Geocities takedown. Thousands have been lost to abandoned sites, disappearing when the host no longer cares about that fandom niche and stops paying for the domain hosting. Thousands are scattered in forums and individual blogs, where the authors would love to have a permanent, central place to archive it.
So I can see a solid reason for AO3 hosting meta. However, I can also very much see a need to keep it *separate* from fic. My (IMHO awesome) 6k-word kink_bingo essay touches on about twenty fandoms; it'd be ridiculous for it to show up in searches for those fandoms. (I haven't posted it to AO3 because of exactly that reason; the current tagging system doesn't support meta.) AO3 desperately needs a "fanwork type" checklist of buttons... this is art, this is fic, this a vid, this is meta, this is filk, this is a gaming supplement, etc. People need to be able to avoid the ones they're not looking for. "Additional tags" is not enough... fics are tagged "art" if the characters plan an art heist; they're tagged "meta" if they break the fourth wall.
Comment on OTW Board Approves Meta Hosting on the AO3
marguerite_26 Fri 15 Feb 2013 08:53PM UTC
Last Edited Fri 15 Feb 2013 09:01PM UTC
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