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hello everyone. i'm one of the ao3 tag wranglers for mdzs, and I have several things to say in response to recent discussion. all opinions are my own, i do not in any way represent the opinions of the OTW, my cowranglers, etc.
thread!
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thread!
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I'm going to be honest: this response is coming from a place of frustration, and I may be a bit short and disorganized, but I will try to be fair. I've been a wrangler for mdzs since sept'19. I am a native heritage chinese speaker (abc).
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since I'm responding directly to statements in specific threads, I'll be QRT'ing them as I go. here is the first:
https://twitter.com/tethysea/status/1281031167538421760
accusations that no native speakers were consulted regarding the diacrits are frankly quite insulting, since I was, in fact, consulted.
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https://twitter.com/tethysea/status/1281031167538421760
accusations that no native speakers were consulted regarding the diacrits are frankly quite insulting, since I was, in fact, consulted.
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not only that, the assumption that no chinese person would ever want the diacrits to be used because all chinese people are expected to agree with your perspective is also very belittling. our team is made up of over a dozen people, several of whom are chinese speakers
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we are NOT in agreement regarding the diacrits: some people want to keep them (including me), and some want them gone, for a variety of reasons! but all of us have agreed that redoing the canonicals for mdzs is neither a practical nor useful endeavor at this time.
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for some perspective: each canonical would have to be manually renamed. this sounds deceptively easy, but to give you some perspective, mdzs currently has 120 canonical character tags, 857 canonical freeforms and 1,051 canonical relationships, for a total of *2,028*.
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every SINGLE one of those would have to have the diacrits manually taken off by a human person. is this possible? sure! we have a big team, it works out to approx 120 tags per person divided evenly. but the wrangling agreement ONLY asks 2 hours of work every 2 weeks.
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it isn't fair to assign every person to do that because that was not what they agreed when they joined. moreover, there isn't a standardized agreement on the archive regarding how to romanize chinese-language canonicals (as many have noticed)
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there are ongoing discussions on the subject (i've been involved in several! bc i wrangle 36 chinese language fandoms :')) but nothing formal has been established. wranglers are working together to try and figure something out as we go, but it's not perfect.
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the concern now is that if we DO go through the work of taking off all the diacrits, what happens when the dropdown is fixed? what happens if discussions conclude that we SHOULD keep the marks? that means we have to go back and manually add them again. to 2028 tags.
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realistically, more, because as you might expect, mdzs fandom gets hundreds of tags per day. we have new canonicals sitting in our spreadsheet waiting to be made. and adding diacrits is FAR worse than taking them off. we agreed we didn't want to risk it.
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https://twitter.com/kyuu/status/1281237345975635972
to respond to this whole thread: this is not a case of "POC concerns being dismissed". again, the assumption that there are no chinese people or POC on the team who disagree with this opinion is belittling and dismissive in itself.
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to respond to this whole thread: this is not a case of "POC concerns being dismissed". again, the assumption that there are no chinese people or POC on the team who disagree with this opinion is belittling and dismissive in itself.
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chinese people were consulted on this question. I was fucking there. there is no strawman "single racist non-chinese wrangler" who insisted on implementing this standard. out of the wranglers, I am the person who is most vocally supportive of the marks.
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regarding the point that the marks are "mandarin essentialist": the fandoms in question are originally in mandarin. fandoms that are not in mandarin do not use hanyu pinyin for romanization. british fandoms use british spellings. american fandoms use american spellings.
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https://twitter.com/vera_invenire/status/1280261242515570689
as seems to have been established in the thread, individual fandoms have individual rules and wranglers are allowed some freedom when trying to figure our something that works. however, again, there is not one single person who is wholly responsible
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as seems to have been established in the thread, individual fandoms have individual rules and wranglers are allowed some freedom when trying to figure our something that works. however, again, there is not one single person who is wholly responsible
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this isn't to say that the complaints are unfounded: I know that the diacrits are annoying as fuck. i get it. i don't use them in half my fandoms as per agreements with my other cowranglers for many of the reasons that people have brought up throughout all of these threads
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these complaints are valid. many of the points that everyone has brought up are very salient! I agree with a lot of them, and should we eventually decide that the diacrits should go, I will acquiesce.
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what angers me the most about the discussions happening here is the condescension and righteousness. the otw is not perfect, of course not, but you don't get to accuse them of dismissing POC concerns and voices when you're doing exactly that in the same breath.
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you don't get to pretend that my opinion is only held by "non-chinese". you don't get to deny my existence as a chinese person because no true scotsman. this isn't a dichotomy: "racist non-chinese" or "chinese with my opinion" aren't the only two options.
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i have seen a lot of racist demands to get rid of the tone marks. many of the complaints will cite things like "this makes the cn fandoms inconsistent with the jp ones." "this is hard". as if two entirely different languages should be consistent to cater to their desires.
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as if this isn't a quintessential manifestation of anti-asian/anti-chinese racism in the US: all asians should be consistent with one another because it's more convenient for us. i demand that this system cater to me. this romanization system is too hard.
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chinese is weird, not like japanese, which i understand because i watch anime.
it infuriates me, I hope, for understandable reasons. 8] removing the tone marks, to me, feels like capitulation. i am not interested in making the lives of entitled non-chinese easier.
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it infuriates me, I hope, for understandable reasons. 8] removing the tone marks, to me, feels like capitulation. i am not interested in making the lives of entitled non-chinese easier.
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these complaints sting. I have been told constantly that my language is hard, confusing, scary, weird. that the country of my family is oppressive, that its people are ignorant, that no one is interested in its media, or its culture
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when i was a kid, all i fucking wanted was a chinese fandom with some english language fandom because I struggled with my own language and culture. but i understood that politically, china was not Good or Interesting to english-speakers.
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fuck i broke the draft limit ok, this is a mess, i'll keep going in a second.
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whoops it didn't link :') https://twitter.com/pumpkinpaix/status/1281451369447280641
