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)


 * I'd say that a large number of fanons are in good or average quality, even if it may not outnumber the fanon stubs or fanons that aren't in good quality. I know that my fanons are in good shape, and I will say the same about several other fanons of several other fanon writers.


 * I'd say that if a fanon stub isn't improved within a reasonable amount of time, it should be subjected to deletion. Or if the quality of the fanon is less than ideal (e.g. several broken info-boxes or a messy page layout). I would also like to ask whether it is relevant to keep fanon that is 1) abandoned (without necessarily lacking quality) and 2) fanon belonging to users with globally disabled accounts. --  C.Syde  ( talk &#124;  contribs ) 05:24, January 6, 2015 (UTC)


 * My opinion on that subject is this: if a fanon is abandoned but has decent quality, then we keep it. However, when I say decent quality, I mean not having serious flaws such as lack of a significant storyline, format issues (although if it is just format like infobox, fixing that may be an option), etc. MILK FOR THE UNYUUFEX, FLAT CHEST FOR THE CUTENESS THRONE, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL PROBES  (user talk:Mathetesalexandrou) 06:00, January 6, 2015 (UTC)


 * Back on the subject of fanon quality, my issue is indeed the fanons of the average quality. I personally think my fanon is probably a suitable borderline standard for a good fanon (but not exceptional), for it has everything that a good fanon needs such as a storyline that is developed in some depth, no significant grammatical and format issues, etc., yet lacks something compared to other great series such as A Nightmare on Oak Grove Road or The Good Ones, as evidently displayed by the fact that my fanon took quite some time before making it to the featured fanon list compared to the others on the list. My wish is to get some mechanism to nudge fanons with authors willing to work on them towards higher quality, hence my initial statement about a wish for a critiquing device. MILK FOR THE UNYUUFEX, FLAT CHEST FOR THE CUTENESS THRONE, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL PROBES  (user talk:Mathetesalexandrou) 06:00, January 6, 2015 (UTC)
 * I think I'll go ahead and state my thoughts since I've always been one of the main contributors to the maintenance of fanon. What I said above in the extract from the other thread still applies but I have been putting a bit of thought into it since then. No matter how I look at it, the way I see it is a sliding scale of user friendliness vs. site effectiveness, although there's probably a better way to explain this. At the moment, I sort of think that we are more towards user friendliness in that users are encouraged to create fanon, but the thing is that not everyone who does so actually does so to the high standards that I believe this wiki has. Obviously this is not something that I want to name names with but if you pick random pages in the fanon sims category you would probably find some examples of what I'm talking about. To this extent, there's a couple of things that I would like to do.
 * Firstly, increase the standards for fanon so that these pages with only one paragraph and the infobox would be recognised as a stub/candidate for deletion.
 * Secondly, go through and tag all the pages which would not meet these quality standards. This would probably be a very large undertaking and we'd need to form some sort of standard as to what would be classed as not good enough so as to avoid things like some users being more lenient than others (or just get one poor soul to do it all). Once the page is tagged, the owner would be left a message stating the tag has been left and that they are to improve the quality of their fanon article. I would suggest doing this by going by the fanon by user categories so we could check all of a user's fanon at once and leave them one big message on what to improve.
 * Thirdly, after a period of time has passed, fanon articles which have been tagged as stubs would be deleted. The owner would once again be given a message to inform them of the deletion. This ensures that they are aware, both of the deletion and the reasoning and would minimize any possible notion of overly harsh moderation and the like. The deletion message would be especially clear and would make a couple of things clear. These would be that the user is free to have their page undeleted by an administrator, as long as they improve it. It would then be placed in some sort of limbo awaiting changes. If changes are not made within a sufficient time period, it would be deleted again and the process would start over again. This means that the user would be able to request the undeletion a couple of times, which ensures that low quality content is not permanently deleted, as long as the user improves it. It also would keep the majority of low quality content out of the public eye, effectively improving the quality of the namespace. The deletion message would also make it clear that the user is free to request help from other users in order to ensure that their page meets the standards. In addition, users who make a fanon only to forget about it, or users who make a fanon and then leave would also be given an explanation in regards to what happened to it instead of just seeing it gone.
 * Since I'm nice I'll give a tl;dr of this wall of text: going through the entire namespace, checking what is of low quality, tagging it, informing the author, canning it if they don't improve it, informing them, restoring it if they work on it. I like this idea because it strikes a balance between fairness and quality content. What do you think?
 * A couple of other things in regards to new posts that if I was smart I would have edited in when I got an edit conflict: the initial purpose of enabling comments on fanon articles was for critique however this rarely ever happens. I'm fine with keeping abandoned fanon as long as it falls into what I posted in my post. If its only an introduction of a character it may as well be deleted but if its got a fair bit of content I see no issues in keeping it. I guess you could compare it to tv shows/books/anime/whatever that stop getting produced, as despite not being finished they're still worthwhile.
 * Perhaps we should have some big fanon cleanup project or something? I'm usually open. However, I'm of the understanding that the system you've propose largely coincides with our current system. I recall admins notifying users about stubby fanons, although I am of the perception that we have been lenient on nuking the fanons. MILK FOR THE UNYUUFEX, FLAT CHEST FOR THE CUTENESS THRONE, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL PROBES  (user talk:Mathetesalexandrou) 07:01, January 6, 2015 (UTC)
 * I was wondering whether we should keep the fanons belonging to users with globally disabled accounts. I would normally recommend dumping them, but some of these users were good faith editors who wrote fanon at an ideal level of quality, which may result in users wanting to continue reading them. So thus I probably wouldn't be open to removing them. --  C.Syde  ( talk &#124;  contribs ) 23:52, January 6, 2015 (UTC)
 * Fanon made by users with disabled accounts is fine so long as they left the wiki in good standing. If they received a permanent block the page is generally deleted however. What I posted about that system does seem a bit like what we currently have, so at the very least some sort of cleanup is necessary given we've let it get to this state.

Perhaps, if the user left the wiki in good standing, and the fanon is incomplete, we could simply archive them instead of labelling them as abandoned or deleted. This is a system that is used on a few other wikis I participate in, in which users who have not been around for a while have their articles archived so that should the creator return, they can resume writing. Just a thought. &#8213; The  Tim   Man  (Infinite Histories • Galactic Crucibles • The Sims Wiki • Hallows Maleficent • Why I'm here in the first place ) 22:13, February 13, 2015 (UTC)