I understand that this is a joke, really I do. A joke with fangs, is all.
But I'm going to go off on something of a tangent anyway, and say that speaking as a person who knows nothing whatsoever about coding or how archiving works or anything, I think fandom needs a consultation with a law librarian. Lawyers working in common-law systems deal with materials and sources that accrete in much the same way as giant shared-world story systems, and that are interconnected in endless varieties of ways, and there are entire armies of organizers and archivists constantly going all over the material as it's added in a desperate effort to mark possible interconnections and to just plain keep up.
Armies of them. People hired to write synopses of courts' opinions, so that there'll be something to tell readers what a case might be about before they've read fifty pages of background about a contract gone horribly wrong. People hired to keep track of every opinion that cites a previous opinion, and to put them all in a running list somewhere. People making lists of the reasons for those citations, so that you have some hope of knowing whether a later case cited Hudnut for its thoughts on yaoi oppression or whether it cited Hudnut for its thoughts about severability, before you've had to pull the thing and read it and find out for yourself that it isn't about the point you're interested in.
Sound familiar? I can't imagine a single archivist trying to replicate this kind of reference structure, nor can I imagine a set of writers actually demanding it. Even in a small way, once you start thinking about people's time it's insanely expensive. Why not just demand a villa on Capri while you're at it?
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Date: 20 Jun 2010 03:56 pm (UTC)But I'm going to go off on something of a tangent anyway, and say that speaking as a person who knows nothing whatsoever about coding or how archiving works or anything, I think fandom needs a consultation with a law librarian. Lawyers working in common-law systems deal with materials and sources that accrete in much the same way as giant shared-world story systems, and that are interconnected in endless varieties of ways, and there are entire armies of organizers and archivists constantly going all over the material as it's added in a desperate effort to mark possible interconnections and to just plain keep up.
Armies of them. People hired to write synopses of courts' opinions, so that there'll be something to tell readers what a case might be about before they've read fifty pages of background about a contract gone horribly wrong. People hired to keep track of every opinion that cites a previous opinion, and to put them all in a running list somewhere. People making lists of the reasons for those citations, so that you have some hope of knowing whether a later case cited Hudnut for its thoughts on
yaoioppression or whether it cited Hudnut for its thoughts about severability, before you've had to pull the thing and read it and find out for yourself that it isn't about the point you're interested in.Sound familiar? I can't imagine a single archivist trying to replicate this kind of reference structure, nor can I imagine a set of writers actually demanding it. Even in a small way, once you start thinking about people's time it's insanely expensive. Why not just demand a villa on Capri while you're at it?