The Situation
Tale discovery sucks. Plain and simple. At present, we have nearly 4000 tales, and our only means of finding entirely new tales consists of using the Random Tale button, or finding tales by author/creation date. None of these fundamentally address how most people want to find content, which tends to be through similar genres, narrative structures, or even page length. Tales being unread has been a meme since I first joined the site nearly seven years ago, and continues today.
Concurrently, this is an issue that is getting worse. The longer we put it off, the more tales will be added to the wiki that will only increase our work down the line. While we could continue with our current structure, I believe that it's a disservice to the many tale-oriented authors on our site that their works are essentially impossible to find if people don't remember them.
Past Action and Discussion
The impetus for this post was a recent discussion in SSSC about the continued difficulty for readers to be able to find new tales on the site, in addition to a series of discussions in #site19 along the same lines. Lazar Lyusternik and
pxdnbluesoul in particular have been big voices for pushing initiatives that increase tale visibility, starting with this post by bluesoul and continuing with this post by Lazar. While I encourage you to read these posts for the best clarity, I've done my best to synthesize the content of both proposals (since they are by and large the same) below:
Tale Collections
Collections are lists of other works on the site (in this case, tales). You can consider them to be an expansion of the User-Curated Lists, which, to my knowledge, have somewhat fallen by the wayside in prominence.
- Collections can be user generated, staff led, collaborative, or more
- This is more or less the only point where Lazar and bluesoul's proposals differ: whether or not staff should lead the effort or make it more user-oriented
- Collections can be personal favorites, genre-based, or centered around a theme (i.e, Foundation mistakes, queer characters)
- Collections are open to anyone to create
- Standard deletion rules apply
- No negative collections (i.e, "Collection of tales that suck")
- No redundant collections
Both proposals also discuss the idea of creating a staff team that handles this project, though Lazar pushes for it upfront, whereas bluesoul leaves it up for creation at a later date.
Some other past proposals have involved the use of genre tags. For a variety of reasons, the least of which is the Technical Team's repeated assessment that they are both cumbersome and not useful, this proposal will not be discussed more. Additionally, this discussion included SCPs as part of the collection. Due to the amount of work this would require (outlined below) as well as the fact that SCPs are significantly higher profile and easier to find, I am not discussing this at present. Should people want to add them to this discussion, I'll be happy to comment more about them.
An Updated Proposal
I think bluesoul and Lazar's ideas are both, at their core, good ideas. However, I'd like to formalize their suggestions into a more streamlined proposal and also offer my own thoughts on some of the finer points of these discussions while opening the conversation up for more opinions. As such, consider this an updated proposal to re-open the conversation on the topic of tale collections. As a note, the following subproposals are not meant to be standalone-my intention is that we try to adopt all of these.
Subproposal 1: Genre and Theme Collections
This is more or less borrowed verbatim from Lazar and bluesoul's points. The concept here is that we have two major classes of collections based around genre (Think "Horror," "Drama," "Comedy, etc), and theme (Think "Exploration," "Dialogue-focused," "Existential,") where every tale can fall into at least one of the categories.
Genre and Theme Collections are pretty much exactly how most readers find new works to read in, say, a library or a book store, so this makes sense for our own organization. I think the wonderful thing about this idea is that we can create sub-collections within a larger collection. For example, an all-purpose "Horror" collection encompasses a great deal of tales, but could be refined into sub-collections for "Existential Horror," "Body Horror," "Gruesome Horror," etc. This enables readers to find more specifically a tale in the flavor that they're seeking to read, or perhaps just browse a genre at will.
Thematic collections also serve their own purpose for readers perhaps looking to read a style of tale. This could be "Featuring Senior Staff," "Dialogue-Heavy," "Queer Characters," or more. I think sub-collections are less useful here, but my own perspective is, of course, limited. Overall, I think both collections will start off being something that staff designate, but could potentially be opened up to user suggestions if some trend in the site zeitgeist takes off.
Subproposal 2: User-Curated Collections
Both prior proposals raised the idea of creating user-curated collections, with no restrictions on their creation aside from typical voting procedures. While I think this is acceptable, I also think that this is a subject that perhaps bears more discussion. My primary concerns with this idea are as follows:
- Low quality collections. Low quality coldposts and other soon-to-be deleted content frequently floods the recently created pages list. Adding the potential for more pages that clog that list and require deletions is more work for us and obscures actual quality content.
- Too many collections. What worries me more than quickly deleted collections is actually that they won't be deleted and we'll simply have too many of them. I can't imagine many users mass downvoting a user-curated collection for simply not having the articles they want, which leads me to worry that we'll soon have an abundance of collections with (1) low amounts of content and (2) largely redundant content. This defeats the entire purpose of collections to begin with; an abundance of unread collections is no better than our current system.
As such, I think it merits at least some discussion on whether or not we want to put forward limits to who can create user-curated collections. There are a few possibilities, ranked from most to least restrictive:
- Staff only. The most restrictive option. Only staff can create collections, and we more or less limit user-curated collections to the user-curated lists.
- Author-page eligible users. We leverage our existing restrictions on creating author pages to create a limit. If someone can produce 3 quality pages, then they deserve a collection of their own.
- Greenlight-eligible users. We already utilize the greenlight system for screening the vast majority of drafts that make it onto the site; one would imagine that we value the opinions of those who read the most drafts and often see the most content, period.
- Anyone. The original choice. If it lives, it lives.
I am partial to some combination of 2/3 because of my concerns above. Any other solutions in this area would be greatly appreciated.
Subproposal 3: Collections Team
Name pending. Regardless of what we do, the end-goal of this is to eventually get all of the tales on the site into at least one collection so that they aren't totally lost in the aether as they currently stand. This is understandably a gargantuan effort, on the same scale that Wikiwalk was. I don't think it's possible to do this without some kind of staff team, and I personally think that shunting this onto any existing team is unfair to the (already quite busy) members of said team. While I think the responsibilities of this fall somewhere in between CO and MAST, meaning that perhaps a sub-team is warranted, some kind of independent team for this project is sorely needed.
Since Lazar and bluesoul were the original proponents of this idea, I defer the leadership choice to either/both of them, but I am also volunteering myself should either be unwilling/unable or if they'd like a vice-captain. Of course, anyone else that the moderators/admins find to be the best is also an option. More importantly, my proposal here is concerned with the general membership of said team.
While we will no doubt have robust representation from amongst the ranks of OS and above, this is a task that remains unbelievably large. However, I think we can borrow some of the ideas from the user-curated lists (namely, the desire to reduce workload on active staff members) and the current structure of the Forum Crit Team with its Flights: appointing a large number of JS (or some other sub-designation) to assist us with curation. The exact numbers will be up to the determination of the Collections Team Captain, but I envision this as being at least 20 members in total.
- Why recruit so many people? Because as mentioned above, this is a massive task. Categorizing all existing 3800 tales (not including any new additions) across 20 members is still 190 tales per person. Optimistically, assuming that someone is able to do 10 a week, this will still take half a year. Realistically, with a number closer to five a week on average (if that), it'll still take almost an entire year to complete.
- How can we screen this many people? This point is valid, but I believe unnecessary as a concern. As opposed to Wikiwalk, Licensing, or Forum Crit, all of which employ(ed) large numbers of volunteers, this task doesn't require much "checkable" work. Evaluating drafts requires an eye for critique that needs to be trained, licensing issues require education on CC By SA 3.0, and Wikiwalk required an encyclopedic knowledge of other articles and the judgment to understand which links did/didn't make sense. All this requires is simple reading comprehension and the ability to recognize narrative elements. As with wikiwalk, I suggest that authors reserve the right to remove their work from collections at their discretion. For 90% of cases, I imagine that this won't be an issue, and any small problems with misplacement of tales in certain collections likely boils down to taste, or is easily correctable.
- What are the screening requirements? This will be up to the eventual Captain, but I imagine that some form of interview is a good idea, as well as having a "training" set of tales that have been pre-selected by OS members as falling under specific collections to evaluate whether or not the recruits can place tales into categories that make sense. Again, I stress that this isn't a hard test by any means, and differences due to taste are totally acceptable-better to have a few misplaced tales than let them not be seen at all.
The specifics of the team can be debated further; consider this just my thoughts on what a team could potentially look like. If MAST and CO want to take over this (or even Technical Team), then they are welcome to do so.
Subproposal 4: Collections Box
TSATPWTCOTTTADC drafted some excellent ideas for potential collections footers that can be found here. I'm most partial to the first option, as I think it's mostly unobtrusive, and does exactly what we want in showing people potential links to other works that are similar to the one that they just read. Further thoughts about this would no doubt have to be discussed with the Technical Team, but I think this is a stellar idea. I have no other thoughts about this.
I am opening this discussion up for anyone with O5 access. Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.
EDIT: To clarify on a point that was made to me in PMs, this proposal is not about the fundamental attention being dedicated towards tales relative to SCPs. I don't think we'll ever see tales hit the same level of readership as SCPs, and I'm not sure that they should. This proposal is specifically about the fact that tales are impossible to find. At present, if everyone who read a tale forgets about it a few years later, it is quite possible that the only place that it is linked to on the entire site is the alphabetical/author tale lists, meaning that it is effectively never going to be read. SCPs at the very least have the benefit of numerical browsing, wikiwalk cross-links, and tags that assist with their discovery, whereas tales are rarely linked to from other pages/works. Any discussion on the relative attention that tales receive is, in my opinion, out of scope.
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