I am ENTITLED to hear your thoughts on this.

[tzikeh]

taraljc and I have decided that what the hell, we'll tilt at the windmills a bit. We're putting together a Centralized Fandom Primer website. Once it's up, we hope that people who run lists or have archives or build faqs or run cons or what-have-you will choose to point a link our way somewhere in their cyber-existence. Obviously, nobody *has* to link to it, and we're sure to get our fair share of "who are you to tell us blah blah!?" But between T and me, we have closing in on 50 years in fandom (geez), so we think we have a decent handle on where it's come from and where it's got to. BUT WE WANT EVERYONE'S HELP.

If you would be so kind, drop a comment here and let me know: What kind of things do you wish new folks had a handle on before they arrived in fandom? What do you wish someone had told you when you first got involved? If you could announce one thing to every fannish mailing list in existence, what would it be?

We don't want to preach. We don't want to direct. (Well, actually, I do want to direct, but that's a whole other thing.) All we want to do is lay it out in plain words - "Here's where fandom came from, here's how things generally are in fandom online; here's how we treat one another. You can choose to ignore this - that's your right. But it's easier to be part of a community when you live by the community's generally agreed-upon guidelines. Some of this is common sense. Some of it is common courtesy. You'd think it doesn't need to be said, but - well, fandom's a queer duck, and online life is a queer duck, and you put those two together and sometimes people do things they'd never do if they'd actually sat and thought about it for a minute."

Let me know, guys - and ask your friends.

ETA: There are some great ideas being posted here and I just wanted folks to know that we are reading them all - please don't think if I haven't responded directly that I didn't read / didn't care what you said. I just don't want to pad out the replies with "Thanks!" fifty times.

Comments

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

I don't know that we're ready for a message board yet - though the idea is an intruiging one. Mostly we just want to have a repository that anyone in fandom can point to for the *general* rules/assumptions of fandom.

::nodding::

I get that...and it's true that a message board would entail a great deal of work - perhaps more than anyone wants to do at the moment (although, um, don't you OWE IT to fandom? *g*). My only thought was that regardless of how 'general' any of us think we're being, a certain percentage of fandom is going to think we're wrong vis a vis our basic assumptions.

I'm sure this isn't news to you (or to anyone), of course; it's just something to continue to bear in mind as the project gets off the ground. Perhaps one solution is to provide alternative thoughts in some areas. For example, if this list were going to include something about the posting of fanfiction (which I'm using as an example because I'm guessing that this *isn't* the sort of thing you'll be focusing on), *my* corner of the fannish world would generally say "Don't post WIPs, get a beta, give canon/characterization more than a cursory thought" etc. However, the Harry Potter world would be saying "No WIP's? What? Are you crazy?" The culture there is different, yet it's not inherently wrong.

Oh (and I *swear* it wasn't thinking about Harry Potter fandom that brought this to mind *g*): links should be provided to what constitutes plagiarism, since it's clear (in fandom and in my students' essays *g*) that some people really don't understand that it's not just about stealing dialogue or even plots. Notes could be included about getting permission for use of original characters, fan-created alternate universes, and when/if those permissions *don't* have to be considered any more, because some of those issues can be thorny. For instance, Mag7 isn't one of my fandoms, but I know that the ATF universe is being used by tons of people when they write stories. Does someone (i.e., the first person to set Mag7's characters in the ATF universe) still have the right to say "get the hell out of my AU?" or has that universe entered the public domain at this point?

Okay. I'm shutting up now.

[kitsune13.livejournal.com]

I'll second that. I was going to suggest, too, a section about why fanfiction, fanvidding, etc. is NOT plagiarism. It's recursive fiction (or art), which is a perfectly legit genre -- Joyce's Ulysses, West Side Story, The Hours, etc., are all examples; in visual art, Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa with a Moustache is in the same mode.