"Real People"
Jul. 8th, 2012 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootThe narrative of "real people" keeps coming back around in OTW-related discussions, along with its close cousins like "appreciation", and there are a few things that particularly strike me about this.
A) This is a blatant red herring, when it shows up in discussions of effectiveness. Of course the organization is composed of real people. I did not actually assume it was made up of an infinite number of monkeys, despite occasional code artifacts that suggest otherwise, nor of sockpuppets, despite occasional communication modes that suggest otherwise. But being a "real person" is not some kind of magical ward against criticism, especially if one is not managing to do the job one took on effectively. The organization's products and organs are not being criticized because detractors are somehow convinced they're speaking about a bunch of improbably advanced AIs. They are being criticized for presenting those products as adequate and operational when they are not (a recent, but alas far from isolated, example).
B) If one wishes to be treated like a real person, it helps to look like one. Let us take the news blogs, for example. On the OTW site, the author of each OTW news post appears. When mirrored to LJ or DW or Tumblr, however, the author's name is stripped and the post appears under a corporate and faceless identity like "otw_staff". Because that worked so well for LJ. The AO3 news blog does not show authors to begin with, even on the AO3 site. Within the body of those posts, the current chair-holders, leaders, or team members are almost never called by name, only by title, and nearly every self-reference is plural. AD&T is working closely with Systems. Strategic Planning welcomes feedback. We are making emergency updates.
When confronted with a nameless, faceless, corporate entity, especially one who often \o/ while Rome burns, people tend to treat it like a nameless, faceless, corporate entity rather than a person. Cause. Effect. Furthermore, if such facelessness and title-naming is still considered desirable in order to distance user/member wrath, it might be time to think about exactly what's causing so much angry response. Hint: it's not because they don't think there are real people who are working hard in there.
C) If one wishes to be treated like a real person, it helps to treat others like real people. Consider that Strategic Planning has felt it desirable to pay for a second, separate survey account with which to survey tag wranglers about their work, so that they could guarantee absolute confidentiality. That's a pretty stern measure to take, for a basic workplace or workflow survey, but it surely does seem that a number of wranglers don't feel free to speak in their own names. In fact, it looks a lot like the real-person feelings and needs of the wranglers in question are being ignored and mis-represented more by cheerleaders than by detractors of the organization. ETA:erinptah notes that one of these comments is hers and she is anonymous only to follow the rules of the comm; this may be true of others as well.
Consider further that the guiding principle of the organization seems to be some bizarre form of Need To Know operational security. Users of the archive must not be shown the actual navigation system. Volunteers must not be able to know the plans in progress that will affect their areas and members must not be able to view the wiki where volunteer activities are documented or even have limited parts of it shown them. There are names for attempts to "protect" people from information, and some more for concealing a group's activities from its own members. None of them are nice, and none of the actions they describe indicate any particular respect for the people in question.
TL;DR: The "real-ness" of people working within or supporting the organization seems only rarely to be a genuine concern of those using the phrase or its synonyms, and even more rarely a pertinent one.
PS, Circle-only comments, see above re the relative respect granted by organization cheerleaders.
PPS, Bonus snark, from the recent anon thread, because it's both alarmingly cogent and kind of a thing of beauty.
A) This is a blatant red herring, when it shows up in discussions of effectiveness. Of course the organization is composed of real people. I did not actually assume it was made up of an infinite number of monkeys, despite occasional code artifacts that suggest otherwise, nor of sockpuppets, despite occasional communication modes that suggest otherwise. But being a "real person" is not some kind of magical ward against criticism, especially if one is not managing to do the job one took on effectively. The organization's products and organs are not being criticized because detractors are somehow convinced they're speaking about a bunch of improbably advanced AIs. They are being criticized for presenting those products as adequate and operational when they are not (a recent, but alas far from isolated, example).
B) If one wishes to be treated like a real person, it helps to look like one. Let us take the news blogs, for example. On the OTW site, the author of each OTW news post appears. When mirrored to LJ or DW or Tumblr, however, the author's name is stripped and the post appears under a corporate and faceless identity like "otw_staff". Because that worked so well for LJ. The AO3 news blog does not show authors to begin with, even on the AO3 site. Within the body of those posts, the current chair-holders, leaders, or team members are almost never called by name, only by title, and nearly every self-reference is plural. AD&T is working closely with Systems. Strategic Planning welcomes feedback. We are making emergency updates.
When confronted with a nameless, faceless, corporate entity, especially one who often \o/ while Rome burns, people tend to treat it like a nameless, faceless, corporate entity rather than a person. Cause. Effect. Furthermore, if such facelessness and title-naming is still considered desirable in order to distance user/member wrath, it might be time to think about exactly what's causing so much angry response. Hint: it's not because they don't think there are real people who are working hard in there.
C) If one wishes to be treated like a real person, it helps to treat others like real people. Consider that Strategic Planning has felt it desirable to pay for a second, separate survey account with which to survey tag wranglers about their work, so that they could guarantee absolute confidentiality. That's a pretty stern measure to take, for a basic workplace or workflow survey, but it surely does seem that a number of wranglers don't feel free to speak in their own names. In fact, it looks a lot like the real-person feelings and needs of the wranglers in question are being ignored and mis-represented more by cheerleaders than by detractors of the organization. ETA:
erinptah notes that one of these comments is hers and she is anonymous only to follow the rules of the comm; this may be true of others as well.Consider further that the guiding principle of the organization seems to be some bizarre form of Need To Know operational security. Users of the archive must not be shown the actual navigation system. Volunteers must not be able to know the plans in progress that will affect their areas and members must not be able to view the wiki where volunteer activities are documented or even have limited parts of it shown them. There are names for attempts to "protect" people from information, and some more for concealing a group's activities from its own members. None of them are nice, and none of the actions they describe indicate any particular respect for the people in question.
TL;DR: The "real-ness" of people working within or supporting the organization seems only rarely to be a genuine concern of those using the phrase or its synonyms, and even more rarely a pertinent one.
PS, Circle-only comments, see above re the relative respect granted by organization cheerleaders.
PPS, Bonus snark, from the recent anon thread, because it's both alarmingly cogent and kind of a thing of beauty.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 10:21 pm (UTC)Oh /god/. The terrifying part is how true it is.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-09 01:27 am (UTC)OT, in an uncharacteristic frenzy, I actually adopted 5 new fandoms the other day, and it was actually kind of fun, admittedly, but I shake my head because on three of the five the first thing I had to do was change the canonical name of the fandom; on one it was even requested by staff because Ao3 apparently can't recognize an O with a macron on it as an O and alphabetize it accordingly... -_-;;
At least the person who wrote that sweet Hyouka fic had all the ducks in a row and I just had to canonize everything...
no subject
Date: 2012-07-09 04:36 pm (UTC)I was meaning to ask something about the landing pages, though! Do fandom landing pages have, or have a link to, the set of character/relationships within that fandom?
no subject
Date: 2012-07-09 05:46 pm (UTC)Awhile back, though, they made the landing pages like this one harder to get to than they IMO have any business being; enough wranglers complained about the extra step of hitting the landing page by default and then having to click "filter works" when they were browsing as readers that now we also go to the list of works if we just click on the tag where it normally appears --- and AFAIK have no way to get to this landing page from there and have to go all the way around through the wrangling interface if we happen across something we want to wrangle. For someone like me who wrangles more than they browse the new way is a real PITA, and IIRC we've asked for something like an icon that we could click to get to this stuff that would show up by the tags everywhere they appear, but I don't know if there's been any word on it...
Something else that's come up in regard to giving users access to this stuff is that, from Yuletide or wrangler boredom or whatever, there are some tags on the archive that are prefilled but have no works yet (for example, in that screenshot, Speedy Gonzalez and Tasmanian Devil are canonical but have never been used), and before showing the tag tree to users we would have to either delete all of those manually or have code to hide them from users (which I again don't know if there's any word on) so we don't end with people going "Taz, cool! ::click:: Nothing! WTF!?" (Note I do not say this to defend the stuff being hidden but as another illustration of what a mess things are.)
And yeah, I just kind of don't care if I'm supposed to be saying this stuff. I don't hate the job as much as I sound like I do, but I don't personally value it much, either, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-09 06:04 pm (UTC)(Why the hell should you have to delete empty tags by hand? That's what god invented mysql queries for! It might be a big, ugly query that needs to run slow in the background for days, but there's no earthly reason to make humans do it instead.)
Actually, this would not be that hard to fix. Since character/relationship are already child-ed to fandoms, it should be quite possible to "canonize" all of those in one fell mysql query, and even catch most character/relationship meta-tags. Same with fandom names. The Additionals will be more complicated, but if it's done in two steps, one query to "flatten" all Additional field sub-tags into their ultimate parent; and then a second query to move/change meta indicator all Additionals over a certain threshhold number into, I don't know, Genre/Flavor field...
Which would leave us with Character, Relationship, Genre/Flavor, Additional, with the first three being selected from a canonical pool and only the last one being completely freeform (subject to the blacklist).
It could be done. This thing could be fixed, without any incredibly burdensome hand-work. There would be some mistakes, but if users are informed and know to check their work after and have a promise of this making them easier to find... it could work.
Plus putting "index" and "landing" links next to each wrangler's list of tags. Plus putting breadcrumbs at the top of every index page, showing where in the tree it is. It would not be hard! The basic structure is already there!
Oh god, I want to wring N's neck so very badly for keeping this from happening for so long.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-09 06:33 pm (UTC)And being a non-dev (who's maybe too used to the current state of sifting intricate conceptual connections and human errors), I admit I can't completely follow what you're saying, but it sounds interesting. Out of curiosity, how do you envision user input/control and the process of adding things to the canonical pools?
no subject
Date: 2012-07-09 06:44 pm (UTC)I'm working on a post in plain English, to say what I think should be done, right now! As I shake out the task-flow, I think a "request new canonical" form would have to be, like, the second step, right after publicly committing to the new course. Only logged in users can request. Such requests to be reviewed by the wranglers, and it should be a one-click approve if you can see that, yes, this character exists in that fandom, or yeah, actually, this term and synonyms of it seem to pop up a lot. A similar one-click reject option should pop up an email form to the requesting user, so the wrangler can say why, and a "blacklist?" option for use with malformed or malicious suggestions. Any already blacklisted suggestion does not go through but instead pops up a "this suggestion was previously blacklisted for X reason" message with a link to the Support page in case someone wants to argue about that.
If people want to get /fancy/ there could also be a threshhold function. So that, if an Additional tag has more than X many uses it's automatically shifted into the canonical pool. I'm not entirely sure that would be worth the trouble of coding it, but if someone likes the idea they could take a whack at it, and it might save some effort as the folksonomies of the Additionals develop.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-10 10:52 am (UTC)As far as this post goes (which I definitely agree with, especially on the corporate facelessness), I can't believe that
no subject
Date: 2012-07-10 05:13 pm (UTC)Yes, this, this, this. Making an app work is not (except among die-hard code fans) a fannish activity. It's, you know, work.