SWG Tumblr Satellite: Lingering Questions on What We Will Allow

[dawn_felagund]

Thank you to everyone who has participated in the discussions thus far about our Tumblr satellite. To recap, here are the posts so far:

• Setting Up an SWG "Satellite" Group on Tumblr


• SWG Tumblr Satellite: What to Allow on Our tumblr??

I want to begin by saying that, going forward, I will be presenting certain issues as settled when a strong majority of discussion participants have reached an agreement. However, if you have a concern with the decision as it stands, please bring it up. We can reopen discussion on that issue.

The last post asked what content we want to allow on our tumblr. The following issues were agreed upon by a majority of partipants:

• Posting stories will not be allowed. Posting Silmfic directly to the SWG tumblr will not be allowed. There were several issues raised that led to this consensus: 1) the inability to enforce SWG etiquette guidelines on reblogs (and so the introduction of incivility into SWG spaces, which is not cool) and 2) questions over whether the original author could edit/delete her/his own content.



• Likewise, discussions will not be hosted on our tumblr either for the same reason of being unable to enforce our group's rules on a site that allows reblogs and comments by non-members.



• Posting links to stories by someone who is not the author (fic recs, link roundups, etc.) will not be done. Link roundups, it was widely felt, duplicate what is already available in the newsletter. In addition, several people expressed discomfort with having links to their work posted on Tumblr. While the ability to link is the nature of the Internet, I also strongly feel that I do not want the SWG to enable anything that makes our members uncomfortable.



• Links to one's own stories will be allowed (SSPs). Where there is not consensus is whether those links can point to other tumblrs or if they must point to outside archives/groups/websites. The SWG guidelines do require work to be presented with at least minimal care: "While SWG is intended as a place for authors to get constructive feedback on their work, and works-in-progress are welcomed, authors should nonetheless observe minimal standards of professionalism when presenting their work. Work shared on our site should be proofread by the author, run through a spell-checker, and organized in manuscript format. (That is, stories should be separated clearly into sentences and paragraphs.) While everyone makes the occasional error and we do not require perfection, we do expect that these minimal standards be met." This is something to keep in mind as we make a final decision on the shape we'd like this to take.



• We will allow announcements from other groups about Tolkien-related events/challenges/etc.



• Posting artwork that is not yours will not be allowed. This is a copyright violation that is against both the rules and spirit of the SWG. (Whether posting your own artwork should be allowed remains to be decided--see below.)

The question of whether we should we accept "asks" for questions about the texts generated a lot of discussion and different opinions. Feelings on this range from, "Yes! This would be a cool resource!" to "No! We don't want to get in the business of being seen as trying to be arbiters of canon!" with everything in between, including ideas of how such questions might be used to open discussions on LJ or become a component of the newsletter or the Reference section on the site. I'll be breaking down the various proposals and concerns with each for discussion on a later post, although do feel free to keep discussing it in the meantime, if you want.

So the lingering questions from the last round of discussion that I'd like to figure out answers to in this round are:

• Will we accept submissions of visual art (traditional art, digital art, animations, videos, etc.) by the original artist?


• Will we accept links to stories posted anywhere, including Tumblr? Or must the story be posted on an archive outside of Tumblr? (The "minimal standards of professionalism" already required on the SWG will remain in place for our tumblr as well. A comment I wrote about SSPs on the last discussion post would hold true: "an SSP ... is intended to call attention to a piece that the author thinks is at a point where it publishable quality.")


• Will we post links to articles of interest to the Silm community? If yes, would these articles be only off-Tumblr, or would we allow links to interesting articles/posts on Tumblr as well?

We'll tackle asks next time and then I might actually be ready to start drafting some guidelines for people to gleefully tear apart! :D Thanks again to everyone who has participated so far!

Comments

[ladybrooke]

I like your metaphor! :D (I've spent most of the semester writing out ASA style citations, it feels like. And there's still a few more to go. I hope finding the citations went easily, at least.)

Well, it can't be dismissed as having no basis if people stop and think. There's still always that one person, but I'm used to 'that one person' from uni.

I could whine about how, after a semester of both my prof and me talking about my project at least once a week in class, my classmates still couldn't even come up with a guess at what a content analysis was. And then a few of them laughed while I was talking about mine...I have the feeling a few of them think it isn't 'real' research. :P People can be silly.