During the past few days, we’ve been working on trying to visualize our organizational patterns on Fan History in order to understand our own patterns, how we conceptualize fandom, to check for organizational consistency, create tools to help users understand our organizational patterns, to identify areas where we lack stub content. This is our second post in this series. This one is about Harry Potter.
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There are things about the top level category that drive me nuts. Namely, the category seems to have way too many categories for specific sites: LiveJournal, GreatestJournal, EZBoard, InvisionFree, JournalFen, Yahoo!Groups. I’m not certain how this can be fixed with out a major category restructure. The major hesitation about doing that is it would disturb our existing patterns, would make the tree a lot deeper and harder to navigate.
Once I start looking at the structure regarding communities in depth, it appears that we have started to move that content into its own separate structure. It just was never fully implemented. Or quite possibly, it was implemented and then people went in and changed it not realizing that we had attempted a restructure. This is a wiki and anything is possible.
Our character and pairing structure was taken apart at one point, with articles removed from them. There is the whole question of if we should restore that and put the articles back into the subcategories and restore that. Some like Draco/Hermione have a lot of content that could go in them including stories around the ship, etc. Having that structure existing just makes it easier to navigate and conceptualize in my opinion. If you specifically find that Snape/Harry LiveJournal community, than it helps to have that sorted if we don’t have an article list of Snape/Harry LiveJournal communities.
The Harry Potter fandom also seems to be structured around pairings, characters and houses. The community doesn’t necessarily have the emphasis on a coherent community identity. Thus, it seems logical to me to structure the fandom more around these articles and rebuild them that way as a history of the fandom would be much more accurate if told from that perspective.
There is also the issue of how to organize fan fiction. We have fan fiction archives, fan fiction, stories, slash, saffic… and all of these deal with fan fiction. Should those sub categories be moved into Category:Harry Potter fan fiction? And looking at that category now, it really looks like everything in it should be moved to Category:Harry Potter stories. Oye. If we combined communities and organized that way, it feels like it would be logical to combine this one too. Things just seem really scattered like this; would it make it easier for article contributors to link various parts of the history they tell if the category structure made those connections more obvious?
If you have any feedback on this tree, any questions about how it developed, we would love your feedback. Do the organic patterns we’ve developed make sense? Is this construction too artificial? Is it not logical? Does it make sense in relation to the fandom this structure represents? And if you’re really motivated, we’ve really like that feedback on the relevant talk pages for those categories.
