To me, anthropomorphic and RPF are completely separate things that don't belong together. I think anthropomorphic should stay in "Other Media". It would never occur to me to look for "desk/chair" under "real people".
I also don't like "real life" as a potential category; it's way too broad and is wigging me out on some level. Also, I think it would open the door to more journaling-type things; why would people not feel free to post things about their jobs, kids, classes, pets, when there's a top-level category for real life? In fannish terms, "Real Life" has always meant the stuff that happens when you're not doing fandom.
I also think commercials should stay in "Other Media". Commercials can be animated, live-action, or both (e.g., all those commercials where an animated Mr. Clean visits an overworked live-action housewife to show her how to make things sparkle, or where animated M&Ms go to live-action parties). And I know that for Yuletide, at least, some people have nominated print advertisements (like catalogs). It's the nature of the advertisement that's the unifying feature in commercial-based fandom, not the particular medium through which the ad is presented.
The layout on the media page (... the second one, where it looks like you click "media" and get a page that's set up vaguely like the current "fandoms" page) isn't working for me. I get that it makes things look more organic, but the current setup means I can skim down a list to find what I want. The new setup means I have to read through a blob of text largely undifferentiated text (dark grey on light grey on offwhite) to find what I want. My instinct is always going to be to scan the left-hand side of anything to find what I'm looking for, and this layout forces me to not do that, and is disorienting. (The left-hand scan is pretty much universal, at least among English-reading folks (https://encrypted.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=eye%20tracking%20heat%20map&tbs=imgo:1/). It also runs "all" and "no submedia" into the same blob of subcategories, when they should be set off, IMO.
Having said that, it might be easier to read them if the headings were bigger (and preferably in color); right now it's a sea of muted gray boxes that all look the same to me. I agree with the person above who said the top-level categories should be links to the full category, and would add that if "no subcategories" was turned into "other", it would make more intuitive sense to me that the option there was to get the chunk of fandoms that don't fit into the listed subcategories. Otherwise "no subcategories" and "all" could technically mean the same thing.
I also have language/grammatical nitpicks, sorry:
Performing Arts
* Ballet & Dance * Theater & Musicals
-- Ballet is a type of dance, and musicals are a type of theater. Why are they being treated as equal subcats with their own parent subcats?
"Real Person Fiction" should be "Real People", both to match the other categories and to make room for fanworks that aren't written fiction. (Scrabble and Monopoly are games; Supernatural and Stargate Atlantis are TV shows; Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki are real people, not real person fictions.) The standard shorthand may be RPF, but no one uses the full term the way you have it here - people don't make real person fiction vids, draw real person fiction art, or write real person fiction fic.
Also within Real People, "Political and Historical" should be "Politics and History" to match the other subcats -- everything else is a noun, not an adjective.
While I'd prefer commercials to be categorized under TV, I'm not heavily invested in that preference. I think of commercials as a live-action TV thing, so I want to click on the "TV" category and see commercial fandoms alongside the show fandoms. But I won't be disappointed if commercials stay "Other Media."
Thanks for your feedback on the categories! I've noted it down for our discussion.
At this time, we have decided not to avoid redundancy in names if we think it will make it more immediately obvious what the category or subcategory contains.
As a note, the figures are mock-ups intended to guide the discussion; we’ll take your feedback into account when the final design is coded.
Comment on Call for Feedback on Category Change Proposal
Arduinna Wed 18 Sep 2013 08:53PM UTC
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Elf (Elf_Herself) Wed 18 Sep 2013 10:05PM UTC
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hele (Category_Change_Workgroup) Thu 19 Sep 2013 04:46PM UTC
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