Special Edition: TWM Content Poll

[thisweekmod]

Hello all! After the most recent kerfuffle, I thought I would take this opportunity to ask what folks felt would be the best practices for the newsletter regarding certain sites and types of links.

I have made a Content Poll-- it's not long, and if you don't like any of the options you can totally post a comment here instead. It asks about etiquette regarding Dreamwidth/LiveJournal communities, Fanlore pages, Fanlore-found links, and what to do when an Original Poster is not available for contact.

All these questions assume the post being linked is not locked or private, and that the entity doing the linking is a newsletter.

Edit: Some further context for why linking and linking permissions is so hotly debated in fandom (Fanlore).

My own answers are currently along the lines of: community posts are probably fine to link because they were posted widely to begin with; Fanlore pages made through explicit permission of OP is best, but for certain historical meta it's okay to link anyway; linking to Fanlore to provide further context is fine; no way to ask for permission means no link; if the OP has completely disappeared from fandom and/or online, it's fine to link their stuff.

But I want to know what you think! :)

The comments here are open, and I encourage you all to discuss your thoughts with me and with each other. We've had some really good discussions in the last few days, and I'm interested in seeing what you all think about these specific linking situations.

If you can think of anything else that might be missing from either the poll or the editorial guidelines, please let me know.

Thank you! ♥

Comments

fanlore issue

[cimorene]

I would have assumed that people linking to fanlore pages is something people who create them expect, but if someone has recently posted something that was linked without their knowledge from fanlore, they could wind up with unwanted traffic in the event of a controversy.

I'm not sure how likely that is to happen, though. I, too, would be inclined to leave the burden of permission on Fanlore there, but perhaps if writing a post that I anticipated being... hot? controversial? popular? or just... arousing... disagreement or something?... then I might exercise restraint and not quote directly from the parts of the Fanlore article that point directly to recent, specific posts?

Re: fanlore issue

[batwrangler]

Your example is exactly what did happen: Fanlore recently made a page without permission of a an old LJ post the that OP wouldn’t have left public today, but which, back in the day, WAS functionally private and was ranty on account of recent grief. Fanlore was tone-deaf to pick that post rather than the OPs actual fannish-content posts.

Re: fanlore issue

[cimorene]

I hope it's not what I described in my example, which is that the link in the newsletter resulted in a wave of argumentative comments on the old post in question. Did that happen? The impression I got, reading about it later, was that all the controversy was on the newsletter post itself and concerned whether linking to old posts was acceptable.

Re: fanlore issue

[copracat]

Yes, there's how you or I might choose to behave based on long and occasionally fraught experience, and separately how fanlore should be guiding its editors and setting rules for citations and what have you. I didn't read in depth the discussion that brought up the fanlore issue, and it seems the mod here responded quickly and appropriately to the OP's concerns, but if OP doesn't address it with fanlore or, in the event that doesn't get the response they want, take action in their own space to restrict access it's just going to keep happening to them, right?

Are we saying the same thing in different words?

Re: fanlore issue

[batwrangler]

I think we are in agreement. Fanlore seems to be of the opinion that the OP’s wishes/concerns are irrelevant. It’s the tension between holding people accountable for every single thing they ever said regardless of context and not letting people cover up patterns of actual bad behavior. This is what all fair-use vs copyright comes down to in the end. Who controls the conversation and who gets to write the history and what happens iin the face of diverse perspectives (good faith) and competing narratives (sometimes good faith, sometime not).

Also: The past was a different country. AOL Hometown, GeoCites, lots of user-owned sites where the user ran out of money for bandwidth usage or lost their ISPs... things were demonstrably NOT forever on the internet. And the cost to get on the internet was HIGH in terms of tech know-how and actual service fees....

Re: fanlore issue

[copracat]

Also: The past was a different country. AOL Hometown, GeoCites, lots of user-owned sites where the user ran out of money for bandwidth usage or lost their ISPs... things were demonstrably NOT forever on the internet.

Oh yes. I was but a lurker on Usenet but stopped going there when it got Google-grouped.

And the cost to get on the internet was HIGH in terms of tech know-how and actual service fees....

When I was a wee fan mailing lists were paid for and maintained by individual fans however, in what is probably the only contrary example to the disappearance of the early web, the Blake's 7 mailing list still has a publicly available searchable archive of the list posts. Going back to 1992!