AO3 Changes Poll

[unquietspirit]

Since taking over tag-wrangling of Real News RPF, Pundit RPF, and Pundit RPF (US) about a month ago, I've been speaking to sailorptah, my counterpart on the Fake News side of things, about making a few changes. We think we've worked out the broad outline of what we want to do, but of course we'd also like to seek input from the fandom.

Here's how things look now:



As you can see, Pundit RPF and Fake News are the two overarching fandoms, which intersect at the level of Fake News RPF. It may be helpful to keep in mind that both "Pundit RPF" and "Pundit RPF (US)" are used to include stories with all of the PRT (and others), although the current tag structure does not reflect that. Most users either tag with both or only use Pundit RPF, if they use them at all.

Here's what we're proposing:

1. Combine the "Pundit RPF" and "Pundit RPF (US)" fandom tags, as there is not currently a non-US pundit fandom on the Archive, so they are essentially the same thing and doing so wouldn't affect usability. Obviously, we need to do this in a way that will make them easy to separate if/when such a fandom exists. After consulting with other wranglers, we've determined the best way would be to make "Pundit RPF (US)" the canonical ("official") tag, and "Pundit RPF" a synonym of it. This means that "Pundit RPF (US)" would be the only one to appear in the tag autocomplete drop-down.
2. Change the name of what is currently called "Pundit RPF" to be more representative of what the fandom includes. We have both journalists and pundits, and many people focus their fannish activities on the journalists. (For brevity's sake in the tag name, we'd like to classify the Fake News RPF people as pundits here. They do, after all, offer opinions and analysis of the news. They just do it with jokes.) This problem will only continue to grow as the CNN-focused part of the fandom that I'm involved with on Tumblr starts posting works. We'd like a name that is as accurate as possible, while maintaining fandom traditions as much as we can. We also need to keep in mind that there is an existing "Print Journalism RPF" fandom on the Archive, so we need to differentiate from them.
3. Possibly change the name of "Real News RPF", as it may not make much sense to people who don't come into the fandom with the context of "as opposed to Fake News RPF".

Afterward, the structure would look like this (with name changes marked in brackets):

We've created a three-question poll to seek feedback over the next two weeks. If you have feedback that isn't directly related to one of the questions (or won't fit in the textboxes), please feel free to comment here or contact us privately. The poll and discussion will close at midnight EST (US) on Saturday, June 15th.

Hey, all! You still got plenty of time to take the poll, don't worry. I just wanted to address a couple of comments/concerns I've gotten, in case they start some debate. (Note: The survey is completely anonymous. I don't know who left these.)

On question #1: No: Too US-centric, seems unwelcoming to non-USians

I'm not sure what this means, really. I think it's trying to say it seems unwelcoming to non-US fans? In which case, I should point out that the "(US)" refers to where the news agencies are based, not the fans, the same as with any other fandom with a "(US)" disambiguation. Also, the "(US)" was originally added with the thought that it was less US-centric to have it rather than assume people knew, or assume works about news personalities based in other countries would belong to the same fandom.

On question #2: I don't have a specific suggestion, but I think it's important to somehow better include Fake News in the name, otherwise it'll seem like "TV News RPF" (or similar) is only for real news anchors, and "Punditry and TV News RPF" (or similar) extends that to include pundits in the classic sense, but not Fake News. Can't it be something like "TV News (Real & Fake)"?

I do take your point, and ideally, yes, I'd love to call it something like that, but keeping the "Pundit" part of the name is very important, for two reasons:

• Fandom tradition - "Pundit RPF" is what many people have called the fandom for a long time now, and I don't think it would be fair to change it entirely. Such a change might have been feasible years ago, but not now. We're trying to preserve as much of the tradition as possible while also reflecting how the fandom is growing.
• Ease of transition - We wanted to keep "Pundit" as the beginning of the fandom name so it would still be where people expect it to be on the main Fandoms pages of the Archive and would still pop up in the autocomplete when tagging things.

I considered "Punditry & TV News (Real & Fake) RPF (US)", but it seemed pretty cumbersome. However, if a majority of people like it, of course we'll go with that. :)

Standard disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not for the Archive or the OTW, and you're welcome to tag your works with anything you like.