Here is the original collections discussion.
I'd like to bring this proposal up again, wholesale, it its entirety, with few modifications (and bluesoul's approval).
Some clarifications:
What this proposal is:
- A solution to tale navigation, a problem that only gets worse as time goes on
- A sorting/categorization ability we currently don't have, even with tags
- A lot of effort, probably requiring a staff team. Simply rebadging wikiwalk is possible if they are amenable to that, but their dissolution and reformation on new lines is also workable.
- Provides places to parent pages to.
What this proposal is not:
- A way of getting outer fandom to stop obsessing over SCP-049 and Things Bright is Not Allowed to Do etc.1
- A replacement for tags
- A tag-based solution
- Per bluesoul, only like five additional, administrative tags, I promise
The alternatives:
- We do exactly nothing.
- This is obviously a valid choice, but tale navigation is a problem that only grows with time - especially as site content growth accelerates, SCPs that don't have wide fandom coverage are likely to be forgotten, not unlike tales in the current era.
- We do a genre, tag-based solution:
- Tech Team winces whenever it gets suggested, and without serious tag bloat, it becomes less and less useful. With tag rework potentially in the works, this is probably not the place we wish to work.
- We expand the current User-Curated Lists page
- It's an admirable effort, and a model to work off of, but ultimately doesn't go far enough. Bluesoul's proposal also offers relatively unmoderated collection development, and the effort I hope to occur will encompass much more than a single page. Also focuses primarily on SCPs, whereas tales have the most to gain.
How this differs from Bluesoul's earlier proposal, is in that I wish for recently freed (or soon-to-be-freed) staff resources to be used in new team - as a provisional name, let's called this the Curation Team (CT).
CT's tasking is to do the following:
- Categorize every article, eventually. This is a large up-front effort, but I think we can expect authorial support in this endeavor, as every list their article belongs to only increases their site exposure.
- Maintain any lists staff wishes to make semi-official or official. This can be done either through free user contribution + cleanup, similar to collaborative logs, or through direct curation, possibly in cooperation with CO.
In similar line with Forum Crit's tasking (which is admittedly a little less sane), I'd like to see CT's mandate be "every successful article on at least one list".
While this is at least as much of an endeavor as wikiwalk, I think the end result will be a relatively self-sustaining article categorization method that scales well without putting undue burden on tech team.
There are a few unanswered questions, generally regarding execution, but those should be discussed here. The answer in the past has been, 'we should only consider this when wikiwalk is over/nearing completion'. With the recent wikiwalk post, this feels like the best time to bring this up again to determine whether staff feels it should go ahead, either under bluesoul's paradigm and/or with direct staff curation.
