Talk:Race and feminist SF

Here I think we could push quite a lot further. For instance noting and making a list of books that exoticize women of color according to well known annoying stereotypes (i.e. "Dragon lady" or "magical negro") and talking about why and how that is problematic.; or listing books with the "what these people need is a honky" problem; this in order to note racist patterns in SF -- WHILE I hope also making lists of writers who are women of color, books that interestingly complicate ideas about race (Think of Mindscape!), books with strong female protagonists and noting and praising what is good. I will make it my project this year to add women of color and books with strong female protagonists who are women of color to the wiki and to add relevant categories. for instance tonight I noticed we didn't even have a "women of color" category!--Liz Henry 00:29, 25 April 2007 (PDT)

For myself, and until just lately Ide Cyan and I have been the main ones hanging out here foro a while, I've been puzzling over problems with category system and other ways of organizing, and what is the most useful way to use the mediawiki category system and other types of organizing. I started some categorization guidelines and discussion questions at FSFwiki:Categorization and FSFwiki talk:Categorization/Defaults to figure out how & when to use things as keywords versus hierarchical schema; how to handle questions of what are "defaults" and assumed (like on this wiki the default maybe should be women, but then is it weird to not have categories for "women writers"?)

... I think I have ended up trying to largely only use categories with things that are useful with either (a) hierarchical organizing or (b) discrete tags (like "Earthsea"), and, after following a lot of discussions on wikipedia, figuring out that the category system works best when there are a fairly small number of categories. So if used as tags, keeping it a pretty discrete system of important keyword tags. These I have started putting at Category:Tags. (But even there have developed a bit of a subhierarchy, because set up "language tags" to tag things as written in whatever language.) The fact is, that the category system is not actually tags, so it can't generate weighted tag clouds or anything like that. It's sole built-in functionality is the creation of alphabetized lists and the ability to embed hierarchy. So, I think it's just limited in its usefulness.

For large swaths of interdisciplinary stuff I think I'm coming to the conclusion that the category system isn't the best thing to do. So I'm using lists instead and also infoboxes -- these I think end up being much much more flexible. So a list of "Women SF writers of color" I think will be much more useful than the various categories that are starting to pop up (see Category:Writers by ethnicity, Category:Writers by nationality, etc. ... I just copied of List of female SF writers of color from the fsf.org website; it's woefully out of date & unlinked but it's a start. (Was your idea of Category:Women of color supposed to just be real women? also characters? what? I'd say, make a list of what you envision. redundant and overlapping lists are easy to deal with over time as we figure out what the scope should be.)

The other thing I've realized is that it is a PAIN IN THE ASS to unreconstruct categories if we decide that we went down a wrong direction. I had thought "oh why bother with wikipedia's capitalization rules" but then over time realized that i should have taken advantage of the years of experience with mediawiki software that wikipedians have accumulated and just fucking followed their example on that matter. once i figured it out there were over >1000 instances of one type of category and many, many more -- i'm still fixing them. so going slow on categories is GOOD because they seem so easy & trivial that people just start using them. they're easy to do, but a PITA to undo. whereas lists can be moved, split up, redone, retitled, edited, etc., very easily. ... and by using lists & infoboxes to start with, we can then ultimately figure out which categories would be really essential and useful. it's not about deprecating the value of the information embedded in potential categories/tags, but about realizing the limitations of the category system and figuring out other ways to embed the vital information.

Hmm almost none of this was about race. i do agree we need much more on identity stuff. i've mostly been just moving individual writers over here one at a time from the fsf.org site and database. --LQ 07:23, 25 April 2007 (PDT)