Slight Adjustment to Rules Regarding Original Works

[Mr. Bambu]

I am making this thread as a proxy for Antvasima, and the cause for it is discussed somewhat in this thread. To spare you the reading therein, I will begin by showing you the rule as it is now:

Do not add any original or fan-made characters to the wiki. If you wish to create any original/fan-made character profiles, feel free to do so in the FC/OC wiki. "Original" here refers to relatively obscure characters from self-contained stories created by members and their friends, whereas "fan-made" refers to ones appearing within fanfiction or works containing a sufficient amount of another piece of fiction's copyrighted material without official permission.

Cited from our Editing Rules, this guideline is intended to define the line between what belongs here as opposed to FC/OC, our sister wiki meant to handle fan-made content or original content of non-notable scope (such as stories or RPs created by our users). It is Antvasima's wish that this be amended to better cover the latter half of that- the rule, as it stands, offers some vague guidelines on what "original" means, since as it stands now, content not created by our users or individuals related to our users is not strictly covered.

I do not consider myself adept at technical writing, but I will offer a minor adjustment of a quality as I am able to conjure. Off the cuff, something like this may suffice:

Do not add any original or fan-made characters to the wiki. If you wish to create any original/fan-made character profiles, feel free to do so in the FC/OC wiki. "Original" here refers to relatively obscure characters or properties, created either by members or individuals abroad, and includes all original works not notable enough to meet our standards on the subject, whereas "fan-made" refers to ones appearing within fanfiction or works containing a sufficient amount of another piece of fiction's copyrighted material without official permission.

...This could obviously be worded better, and so I invite discussion if people want it.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

Looks good thus far.

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you very much for helping out.

I think that your draft text mostly seems good to apply, but would modify it to something like this instead:

"Do not add any original or fan-made characters to the wiki. If you wish to create any original/fan-made character profiles, feel free to do so in the FC/OC wiki. "Original" here refers to relatively obscure characters or properties that have not been published in an official capacity, and have rather just been posted in online fan sites, and includes all original works not notable enough to meet our standards on the subject, whereas "fan-made" refers to ones appearing within fanfiction or works containing a sufficient amount of another piece of fiction's copyrighted material without official permission."

Improvements to my wordings would obviously be very appreciated though.

 

[Antvasima]

@Celestial_Pegasus @Wokistan @Ultima_Reality @Elizhaa @Qawsedf234 @ByAsura @Sir_Ovens @Damage3245 @Starter_Pack @Abstractions @LordGriffin1000 @Colonel_Krukov @SamanPatou @GyroNutz @Firestorm808 @Everything12 @Maverick_Zero_X @Crabwhale @Agnaa @Just_a_Random_Butler @DarkGrath @Dereck03

Your help would be very appreciated here.

 

[Agnaa]

Things I see fit to comment on:

• Not sure why you're suggesting to change the rule in the first place. That deserves explanation. What about the current rule is seen as insufficient?
• I don't like the removal of "members and their friends". This isn't included there, but I find it gesturing at the rule-of-thumb I've vocalised before of "Works should not be added to the wiki if they were introduced to the member who added them by an acquaintance of theirs, or by someone who was similarly directly introduced in that way." I think this is important since it changes the skew of verses that hit our notability standards; rather than being able to find the bare minimum, then getting works laundered onto the site as soon as they pass them, it requires some level of organic discovery.
• I like the addition of our link to general standards on the subject, but as long as they remain incomplete in the way I described above, I'd find them insufficient.
• I have no clue what the new wording of "members or individuals abroad" is meant to mean. It reads like it's talking about users in other countries, but such a notion would be incoherent for an international community like this.
• I like the change from "characters" to "characters or properties".
• I strongly disagree with Ant's rewording requiring works to be published. That would immediately nuke the vast majority of internet-based series off of the wiki, and depending on what's meant by "publishing", could still leave things such as Suggsverse as allowed to be indexed, were it not explicitly ruled out in other ways.

 

[Mr. Bambu]

Not sure why you're suggesting to change the rule in the first place. That deserves explanation. What about the current rule is seen as insufficient?

As mentioned, the rule as it currently is defines "Original" poorly, you even mention one of the faults with it- including "members or their friends" rather than a more broad definition. If you have specific suggestions in this department, I'd like to hear them.

I have no clue what the new wording of "members or individuals abroad" is meant to mean. It reads like it's talking about users in other countries, but such a notion would be incoherent for an international community like this.

People not related to our site- a better word than "abroad" could be used, sure.

I strongly disagree with Ant's rewording requiring works to be published. That would immediately nuke the vast majority of internet-based series off of the wiki, and depending on what's meant by "publishing", could still leave things such as Suggsverse as allowed to be indexed, were it not explicitly ruled out in other ways.

Fair enough, I guess. We would disallow Suggsverse for other reasons, as you say, but publishing is a broad concept and a lot of our more tenuous cases that I think most people (the vast majority, even) would accept might find themselves being rejected by technicality.

 

[Agnaa]

I'd change it to smth like

"Original" here refers to all original works not notable enough to meet our standards on the subject

And add to those standards this point

• The story should be notable enough to be independently discovered; it shouldn't be added to the wiki by its creator, a friend of the creator who learned about it by word of mouth, and other similar cases.

 

[Psychomaster35]

For web series, would it be possible for you to add a minimum amount of views/subscribers required for it to be notable enough to add to the wiki?

Same thing for written texts requiring a minimum word count to be added on the wiki assuming the work is original and not fanfic-centric.

 

[Elizhaa]

I am fine with Agnaa's suggestions for the rule, honestly.

 

[Agnaa]

For web series, would it be possible for you to add a minimum amount of views/subscribers required for it to be notable enough to add to the wiki?

We've discussed this and found it impractical. Especially since different places count such things differently.

Same thing for written texts requiring a minimum word count to be added on the wiki assuming the work is original and not fanfic-centric.

A minimum word count sounds like a terrible way to determine that sort of thing.

 

[Mr. Bambu]

I'd change it to smth like

And add to those standards this point

I'm fine with this as well, btw- the only notable difference is rephrasing it so the word "abroad" isn't used since it was vague, which as mentioned I was fine with before.

Figure I ought to state that explicitly, and doing so serves as a bump too.

 

[IdiosyncraticLawyer]

I'd change it to smth like

"Original" here refers to all original works not notable enough to meet our standards on the subject

And add to those standards this point

• The story should be notable enough to be independently discovered; it shouldn't be added to the wiki by its creator, a friend of the creator who learned about it by word of mouth, and other similar cases.

@DarkDragonMedeus @Celestial_Pegasus @Andytrenom @Wokistan @Qawsedf234 @ByAsura @Sir_Ovens @Damage3245 @Starter_Pack @Abstractions @LordGriffin1000 @Colonel_Krukov @SamanPatou @GyroNutz @Firestorm808 @Everything12 @Maverick_Zero_X @Crabwhale @Just_a_Random_Butler @DarkGrath @Dereck03 Is this change to our notability standards acceptable?

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

Agnaa's suggestion looks good.

 

[Colonel_Krukov]

Looks good to me too

 

[IdiosyncraticLawyer]

I am fine with Agnaa's suggestions for the rule, honestly.

I'm fine with this as well, btw- the only notable difference is rephrasing it so the word "abroad" isn't used since it was vague, which as mentioned I was fine with before.

Figure I ought to state that explicitly, and doing so serves as a bump too.

Agnaa's suggestion looks good.

Looks good to me too

@Antvasima Is this enough staff approval for me to apply this?

 

[Antvasima]

I think that there seems to be a misunderstanding here. The intention here is to disallow obscure works that have only been posted in, for example, some online archive site where anybody can publish stories and that have very few visitors, as that is on the other side of the line regarding if a verse counts as something belonging in the FC/OC wiki rather than our main site.

Help with properly wording that intention would be very appreciated.

 

[Agnaa]

That's already addressed with this part of our notability standards

It is impractical to set hard defined viewer number limits, however, in general, preference shall be given to officially published works or at least very popular privately published standalone original works that are not fanfiction.

It doesn't mention anything about the website it's published on, as sometimes those fanfiction websites can have works which are popular enough, and non-derivative enough, to get a wider release, such as was the case with Fifty Shades of Grey.

 

[Antvasima]

Yes, but those are rare exceptions, and I want to make our rules clearer regarding this point, as I quite frequently encounter misunderstandings in this area.

 

[Antvasima]

I think that there seems to be a misunderstanding here. The intention here is to disallow obscure works that have only been posted in, for example, some online archive site where anybody can publish stories and that have very few visitors, as that is on the other side of the line regarding if a verse counts as something belonging in the FC/OC wiki rather than our main site.

Help with properly wording that intention would be very appreciated.

@Mr._Bambu @DarkDragonMedeus @Colonel_Krukov @Elizhaa @IdiosyncraticLawyer @Psychomaster35

 

[Agnaa]

Then taking it a step further, I don't think the site it's published on should matter at all; I think we should look at the popularity, profitability, and engagement of it.

Unsong and Parahumans (Verse) are completely unpublished, but very popular, pieces of webfiction. The SCP Foundation is quite popular, but the vast majority of content from it isn't published in any official capacity. If there's stories on Archive of Our Own that aren't fanfiction, and are very popular, I think they should be allowed to be indexed.

So I'd ultimately see a rule calling out websites like that as being misleading.

 

[Antvasima]

I partially disagree and think that we should have a higher popularity threshold for unofficial fan creations than for officially published works, or we will eventually be overrun with low quality overpowered spam, and almost render the concept of the FC/OC wiki redundant.

 

[Agnaa]

I don't mind too much where the line's drawn, but I don't see the point in arbitrarily banning works from certain websites.

If we're okay with making profiles for a YouTube video with 150,000 views, we should be okay with making one for a SFW original story posted on AO3 with over 150,000 views and 1,500 comments.

(Although, I would actually be fine with weighing views/comments/likes/etc. differently across different platforms)

 

[Antvasima]

I don't think that we should draw the line as low as 150,000 YouTube views. Unpublished works should be very popular (at least have a few million views) in order to set a somewhat high bar for the quality of our content and avoid a tsunami of low quality spam, and as far as I am aware Archive Of Our Own is mostly focused on juvenile fetisch fiction, not coherent high-quality stories, even though there are likely plenty of exceptions, so we should maintain similar standards there as well.

 

[Agnaa]

If we are gonna draw more concrete lines over those requirements, this would move beyond just being a slight adjustment, and into a revision involving the potential deletion of many internet-based verses.

But a bar of a million views would go beyond the purview of original works on AO3, at least.

 

[Antvasima]

I think that a minimum of at least a million views for strictly online unofficial content would be a reasonable quality control buffer to avoid excessive spam of low quality unprofessional fan creations and otherwise risk to almost render the division of content between the VS Battles and FC/OC wikis redundant.

 

[Agnaa]

Well, if we're getting into that....

I think comments show a more concrete level of engagement that's easier to fake, and so our standards should be based on those when possible.

I also think that we should look at the author's general body of work, disallowing certain works that may be canon to allowed works due to simply happening to be less popular, seems unsatisfying; DarkMatter2525's animated series Power Corrupts has one video above a million views, with the lowest only receiving 141,000 views. Epithet Erased's main series was released on a streaming service, and every episode has over a million views, but it released some character songs relevant to indexing, none of which break a million views. Having some parts of this be canon but not others would be quite weird.

I also think it's worthwhile to look at provable sources of income associated with a work. Ben Saint's webcomics, one of which has a profile on the wiki, don't have view counters or comments due to being posted on his own website. But we can tell that he's pulled in $25,000 over three Kickstarter projects. Still, his videos announcing those on YouTube all barely got thousands of views. But all-in-all, I personally find money pulled in to be more important. Especially since many authors from large, traditional publishers make yearly earnings in that range.

Those are the main factors I'd like to see accounted for when we solidify our standards.

(I should probably acknowledge that the changes I'm suggesting would allow 2-3 profiles I've made to stay instead of moving to fc/oc, I don't care too much about that; I've done a lotta work for things that aren't allowed on vsbw, and will continue to work on those series in appropriate places regardless)

 

[Antvasima]

I think that it should be sufficient that one of the videos in a YouTube video series by the same author(s) has over a million views for all of the official content of the verse to qualify.

To search for income or number of comments for a work seems too hard or impractical to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate.

 

[Agnaa]

That sounds like a fine idea.

Maybe? But I'd be fine with putting the burden of that work on the people trying to defend adding the series, if they want it included that badly.

 

[Antvasima]

That sounds like a fine idea.

Thank you. I am trying to not be unreasonable. I just want us to have some form of quality control spam guard measure here.

Maybe? But I'd be fine with putting the burden of that work on the people trying to defend adding the series, if they want it included that badly.

But it is much harder for us to evaluate where we should draw the line merely based on a number of comments, especially as even YouTube videos with 10,000 views can reach several thousand comments sometimes if they are controversial enough, although maybe we can use it as a complementary (extra) requirement for written stories?

 

[CloverDragon03]

Since YouTube videos were brought up, I'm inclined to think about the semi-recent push for CalebCity to be added to the wiki. If the general sentiment remains to not add it, we could potentially use that as a foundation for what kinds of requirements need to be met.

 

[Agnaa]

Since YouTube videos were brought up, I'm inclined to think about the semi-recent push for CalebCity to be added to the wiki. If the general sentiment remains to not add it, we could potentially use that as a foundation for what kinds of requirements need to be met.

That's unrelated to these standards. It doesn't fail due to our standards on notability, it fails due to our standards on stories/continuity.

 

[CloverDragon03]

That's unrelated to these standards. It doesn't fail due to our standards on notability, it fails due to our standards on stories/continuity.

Fair enough then

 

[JohnConquest1]

Got permission to comment here.

I wanted to say two things, not so much to make a hard line point, I guess, somewhat, but to just to get them out there.

I don't believe publishing should be used as much as a shining beacon. Different countries can have varying different subtle albeit important distinctions in their copyright laws.

On that note, I would strongly push for Red vs Blue being the shining example for essentially official fanfiction. Thats not a dig at it, just to make that clear, actually the opposite in fact. I know the Halo and RvB stories are unrelated but it's still machinima, and their usage of the Halo IP goes well beyond the scope of what Microsoft allows normal end users per it's Game Content Usage Rules.

 

[XSOULOFCINDERX]

Got permission to comment here.

I wanted to say two things, not so much to make a hard line point, I guess, somewhat, but to just to get them out there.

I don't believe publishing should be used as much as a shining beacon. Different countries can have varying different subtle albeit important distinctions in their copyright laws.

On that note, I would strongly push for Red vs Blue being the shining example for essentially official fanfiction. Thats not a dig at it, just to make that clear, actually the opposite in fact. I know the Halo and RvB stories are unrelated but it's still machinima, and their usage of the Halo IP goes well beyond the scope of what Microsoft allows normal end users per it's Game Content Usage Rules.

Considering how pretty much every Halo game since Halo 2 has referenced RvB, that doesn't surprise me.

 

[Mr. Bambu]

Red vs Blue isn't really comparable to most situations, though, given that 343 has specifically allowed it. It is also formally published. I'm not sure what about it you see as a good comparison if you're against publication as an outline.

 

[Agnaa]

Got permission to comment here.

I wanted to say two things, not so much to make a hard line point, I guess, somewhat, but to just to get them out there.

I don't believe publishing should be used as much as a shining beacon. Different countries can have varying different subtle albeit important distinctions in their copyright laws.

I don't understand the point you're making. Copyright has generally been fairly standardised through trade agreements, and has absolutely nothing to do with publishing in any country whose laws I'm aware of. Any creative work is automatically considered copyrighted in most countries, no matter whether it's published, or left on a sketchbook.

I think publishing is kinda difficult and arbitrary, particularly with trying to draw a line between "self-published" and "officially published", but I think we could draw that at "this institution only ever pays creators for the right to publish their work, rather than being paid by creators to give them the means to publish their work".

I'd also like to take this time to say that I'm not sure if official publishing should get rid of all of our other notability criteria; a short story anthology I worked on is planned to have a Spanish translation published in Argentina. I don't know whether this process will end up on the self-published or officially published side, but even if it lands on the latter, I don't think I should be able to introduce it.

 

[IdiosyncraticLawyer]

Bump.

 

[Antvasima]

I think that a minimum of at least a million views for strictly online unofficial content would be a reasonable quality control buffer to avoid excessive spam of low quality unprofessional fan creations and otherwise risk to almost render the division of content between the VS Battles and FC/OC wikis redundant.

I think that it should be sufficient that one of the videos in a YouTube video series by the same author(s) has over a million views for all of the official content of the verse to qualify.

To search for income or number of comments for a work seems too hard or impractical to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate.

Thank you. I am trying to not be unreasonable. I just want us to have some form of quality control spam guard measure here.

But it is much harder for us to evaluate where we should draw the line merely based on a number of comments, especially as even YouTube videos with 10,000 views can reach several thousand comments sometimes if they are controversial enough, although maybe we can use it as a complementary (extra) requirement for written stories?

I still have the same views here as when we left off previously.