Comment on OTW Board response to concerns about the meta decision

  1. navaan Tue 26 Feb 2013 08:17AM UTC

    The Unwritten Tom Taylor and his winged cat Mingus

    Thank you for clarifying. I don't think issues of functionality should be about "fairness" though. I do think you conflate these issues please.

    "Meta", in the non-fiction sense you are refering to here, is an important part of fanish life and like many others here I'm not so much concerned with the decision to let meta be hosted on the archive as with the fact that we still don't have media-categories. And obviously there after five years of building the Ao3 as what was always supposed to be a multimedia archive we have still not timeline for when to expect these categories and no timeline for the implementation of hosting art/vids/podfic. Where before I would have wished for categories for these type of fanworks I now think we'll need an additonal non-fiction category. And, yes, that means we do need new code and fast.

    I still think it would have been helpful to have the policy for meta in place and a clear defintion of what will be allowed or not, before making the announcment. I'm still looking forward to hearing about when to expect said policy and actually reading it. Defining meta is hard enough most of the time and with your mentions about non-fictional meta vids and comics above I'm now intersted to see a policy that encompasses all this.

    I hope you are aware that fic authors have been using the meta tag for some time now to mean "meta fic" and the meta tag will probably lead to confusion while filtering. But that's nothing new either, is it?

    I still think it would have been advisable to make step a (building actual functionality), before rushing into making steps d and f.

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    1. ErinPtah Tue 26 Feb 2013 08:58AM UTC

      Mountain at night icon

      I'm not so much concerned with the decision to let meta be hosted on the archive as with the fact that we still don't have media-categories. And obviously there after five years of building the Ao3 as what was always supposed to be a multimedia archive we have still not timeline for when to expect these categories and no timeline for the implementation of hosting art/vids/podfic. Where before I would have wished for categories for these type of fanworks I now think we'll need an additonal non-fiction category. And, yes, that means we do need new code and fast.

      +1000

      Priority should be on getting this code. If it's not something the existing volunteer base can find time to focus on, then priority should be on getting more coders.

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    2. aurilly Wed 27 Feb 2013 08:15PM UTC

      Desmond typing

      I hope you are aware that fic authors have been using the meta tag for some time now to mean "meta fic" and the meta tag will probably lead to confusion while filtering.
      This is my only real concern. If this post had said there would be a "pick only one media type" list to designate what kind of work something is when posting (the way there is for ratings), I wouldn't care about either way about meta. But if the system is going to rely on tagging to designate works, the Archive will become unusable. I already sometimes get RPF results in my searches, because many people include the regular fandom tag in addition to the RPF fandom tag. I can see meta engendering exactly this kind of confusion/overtagging on a horrific, enjoyment-destroying scale. TV show fandoms will generate massive amounts of poorly tagged meta every single week, making fic impossible to find.

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