User blog:FrenchTouch/So, What Now?

Hello everyone, I'm FrenchTouch, and I wouldn't like to leave you guys without any information or without helping at the very least, because, I don't want you to think that I'm quitting anything, and also because I have the extreme intelligence to say I can take care of things just to relieve others when I really can't. For example, the main page of the wiki isn't kept up to date, the Featured Article Nominating and Voting page stays inactive for months and when it's active again, I pretty much know I'm not just nominating pages I'm basically choosing who's featured and who's not, or there's also the code of the wiki, which could be apprehended a little better or the Resources page, which is far from being anything any helpful&mdash;and I'm wary that claiming to be able to take care of all of this work to then disappear is uncalled for and that it hurts the wiki. Sadly, there's nothing I can do, alone, about it. I'm not asking for your help, but I don't want to leave you with no clue of what's going on, because I'm just one user, and you deserve better than not being told when there's something going on.

So, please, be patient, because that's gonna be a very long blog post, and you may not read it in one go, but without further ado, the first things I want to keep you informed of are the current problems with the wiki. I'm not trying to be any offensive or anything, but I came to the realization that I'm definitely not able to take care of all of this by myself, especially given my activity. Here they are.

Copyright
The most important issue of all is copyright. Let's be honest, we do not know all that there is to know about copyright, that's for sure, and we've all made some mistakes, too. But after a conversation with R&#333;nin, I saw that our neglection of copyright is now a lot of trouble, and with each file uploaded, or each page, it can go worse.

Comic Crossright
Comic Crossright seems like a great idea, protecting our work from potential extortion or plagiarism, except it's not. There's already a thing for that, it's called Creative Commons. Every wiki on Wikia ever is protected, by default, by the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Licensed 3.0, also known as CC-BY-SA 3.0, which means that the content of any page here can be shared in any way, may it be commercial, educational, or whatevertional, by any one, and that it can be transformed, build upon, or adapt to virtually anything. But the restrictions are that you have to be credited for it and that when it's shared, it has to keep the CC-BY-SA licensing.

If you take offense with your content being potentially shared and/or transformed, you have nothing to say, what's happening is completely legal. But, that doesn't mean you can't change the licensing of your work. If, on your page, you write explicitly the license you want to attribute to the page, then you can do practically whatever you want. Don't want to have your work transformed? CC-BY-ND! Don't want your work used commercially? CC-BY-NC! Don't want both of those? CC-BY-NC-ND! Here are the licenses proposed by Creative Commons.

But wait, what do you do if you want complete freedom over your work? The magic words: “All rights reserved.” It's as easy as that. Contrary to that is the parody I Don't Give A Fuck license, where, well, the author doesn't give a fuck, and whatever may ever be done with its work is considered legal.

“But, FrenchTouch, Comic Crossright is a way to protect more than that, such as characters' names, origins, and illustrations used!” Exactly. That's called “copyright appropriation,” and this is where Comic Crossright hurts the wiki. It's illegal. You want to protect the name of your character? You do not legally own these names. Let us go back in time to put this in perspective. We are in France, the year is 1999 and Mr. and Mrs. Renaud want to name their newborn daughter Mégane. Except that the Prosecutor of the Republic isn't really happy about that; at this time, the car manufacturer Renault (pronounced the same) called their latest car model Mégane. This led to one year of trial to determine of a baby who's just born can keep her name. Let's speed this up; May 4th, 2000. Mégane Renaud can keep her name, as the “prejudicial character of her name” (as said by the Prosecutor) has not been recognized.

You may not see the correlation between Comic Crossright and this trial, but this isn't the point. This is just the context in which the next trial took place. The year is now 2010, and The Association for the Defense of Our Names (directly translated from l'Association pour la défense de nos prénoms) as well as the parents of a child, named Zoé, decided to face Renault in a tribunal becaused they had named their latest car model, you guessed it, Zoé. Now that you are wary of the 2000 trial, who do you think won? Yes. Renault. Because there is no prejudice caused by this decision, and because the parents do not legally own this name.

That's the same thing here. On the Comic Crossright page, I see that Dragonofelder had Crossrighted the name Jacob Stark. According to the U.S. Social Security Administration, Jacob is the fourth most popular child name from 1915 to 2014. It means that no one ever has a right of opposing the usage of the name Jacob, just from this fact; and that's only the USA. Stark is a germanic surname, there aren't any stats on it, but given the fact that's it's germanic, and that the germanic people are some of the earliest in Europe, it's easy to assume that no, the name Stark doesn't legally belong to anyone. Now, just search Jacob Stark on Google and tell me how many different people with this name you find.

Those are only a few reasons why copyright law does not protect names, titles, or short phrases. But I'm sure it's better if the United States Copyright Office says it. Again, I'm not trying to be a dick about problems on the wiki, but I want to address them so that we learn from them and don't aggravate the situation.

Since we're on Dragonofelder's Jacob Stark (nothing against you, dude, just an example,) he also Crossrighted the powers and abilities of his character. So that means that no one here can ever use teleportation, alternate forms, geniuses, or stealth in their pages. There are 1249 pages in the Geniuses category. That's around 15% of the entire wiki at the moment I'm writing this. That is why Comic Crossright should not exist, in its current form.

“O'ight, listen, mate, I get it, that's not good, but what do I do if I want to protect my character's origins?” You don't! You just don't do that! What's Jacob Stark's origin, concretely? Some dude discovers a weird substance and gets powers from it. Yeah, that's Venom. What about PhotonCommander's Alexander Parker? It's a bloke who got his DNA fused with an animal's. Yeah, that's Spider-Man. You can't copyright stuff that's not yours. “But there's more to my character origin than just the outline!” Yes, indeed. That's your expression of it that matters, and how you execute it. And guess what? Copyright covers that already, but the way Crossright takes care of it is flat-out illegal.

And don't get me started on illustrations. Because I corrected that a long time ago (I was still shit at copyright,) and there are a few words I'd like to have about that. What you are doing is appropriating this art as your own. Not only are you violating the author's dignity, but also you're plain stealing from them by doing so. And that makes the wiki vulnerable to a DMCA claim. I'm not gonna go into details, but if one DMCA claim touches this website, it will be closed, a few members probably blocked or warned, and well, there won't be any more Comic Crossroads, which would kind of suck. Especially given Photon and Artemis Thorson's current activity, I'm sure that wouldn't like to come back to this screen.

So, how can we fix this? The wiki has been that way since the beginning, and how are we gonna ever be able to do something about it? I have an idea. Comic Crossright needs to stop existing. Or at least, not in the way it currently is.

I propose one layout for Comic Crossright, and I'm only gonna propose one, because I want your opinion and ideas on the matter, because it's important. Vital to the wiki and the community. Instead of using Comic Crossright as a rotten addition to copyright law, we need to use Comic Crossright as a mean to enforce copyright law, on the wiki and outside of the wiki, so that we can represent you in the eventuality of a copyright feud. What I first propose is to explain what is copyright: What copyright does, and what you actually can copyright or not, and how you can copyright. Then, Comic Crossroads-specific rules, which we will come back to. But for example, there's, well, my own rule: My original illustrations are made for a specific thing, and you are not allowed to use this specific thing unless it is under fair use, or unless it is related to the reason why I made this illustration. For example, this image was created for the Owlverse created by R&#333;nin, and it can only be used in this context, it is only meant to be used in accordance to the Owlverse and related articles, but if you mean to illustrate it, you can use this image without any permission, that's fair use.

And fair use is a thing that must also be explained on Comic Crossright. Because it's being abused. When I say that, I'm thinking of user Spencerdude95, whom I think is capable of doing some good writing, except he's not trying. any page, any blog post, any anything, it's just images over and over and over again with so few lines of text. The problem isn't personal. Yes, I do not like that this is the case, but there is a reason. It is illegal. You can only use illustrations from copyright works without permission if you follow Fair Use, and Fair Use is relatively simple. Your work falls under fair use if you are using the illustration as a sort-of optional thing, and that your work is transformative enough to give a whole new meaning to this work. For example, if I use a picture of Barney the Dinosaur in my Barney the Dinosaur creepypasta, I'm giving a whole new meaning to it, but if I'm using a picture of Barney the Dinosaur on my Top 10 Pictures of Barney the Dinosaur I Found on the Internet And Whose Authors I Forgot To Give Credit To, this isn't legal. Warning: This isn't because you give credit to the author of a work that it is legal to use it, that was just an example. Though, my definition of fair use is very scaled down, and, as I look back at it, incorrect. If you want to really understand what fair use is about, check this link.

My point is, it's illegal, and that needs to stop. Now that we've compressed all of this knowledge in our brand-new Comic Crossright, we can start writing the names of the authors, and protect the works. No names, no origins, no powers and abilities, just the works and their execution, with a specific mention of their license, and the users who have gotten permission to use the works. That is, if said authors are willing to come to an agreement. What I mean by that is that we all need to work together, and if a user doesn't want to respect those rules, well, obviously, the user can't be protected. But that's a euphemism for banning troublemakers indefinitely, because, well, the contrary would be illegal. And yes, I'm using the word illegal way too often, because I can't stress it enough.

What do you think of that? Should we add more? Did I miss something? Tell me. Now, onto the next problem I have.

Content Is Not Optional
Another problem I have, that I thought was benign but is actually very destructive, is the lack of content on the wiki. Let me explain. This page isn't okay. It's just an image. That the author doesn't own. Which means you could get the wiki closed for something as stupidly insignificant is that. Not only is it illegal under the state's laws, but it's illegal under Comic Crossroads rules as well! This is literally spam, flooding pages, pointsgaming, and vandalism all at once. Here, a less illegal, but also even less complete page. Another one. Another one. Another one. Again, I'm not trying to call anyone out or anything, I'm just pointing out things that we need to change, imperatively, for the sake of the wiki, because it's kind of our online co-property. Why don't we sack this wiki? For the same reason we don't burn our homes. Because we pretty much live in it, in a way or another. Here, even one of my pages fits in. The execution of the work is the only thing that makes fanfiction legal. So if you don't have any content to show off this execution, then either it's not legal, or it's vandalism. And, yeah, I have titles, an infobox, even an image, but this still should be deleted. I didn't delete it, like the other pages because I want to raise awareness about that. I'm sure that if we delete all the pages with as much content or less than this page, we'd lose about one fifth of our page count; and that's big. I don't want to do that without you guys knowing about it. Content is not optional, it's mandatory.

And that's about all I have to say about copyright, but I'm not done yet; I told you this ain't gonna be short.

Social Media
Hey, did you know Comic Crossroads has a Facebook account? It's funny because from what I can see, it was shut down. Here's the link. It was probably shut down from the lack of activity on it. That's a thing I wanted to talk about too. This was R&#333;nin's idea, a great idea, may I add. We wanted to make it a big thing and start contributing on it, in order to maybe make this community grow, but well, we didn't. Our activity, lack of ideas, and overbooking didn't help us a lot, and we pretty much abandoned the concept. It's not really a terrible problem to me, but I wanted to tell you guys about it, because you probably never knew about it, or you just don't remember. But note that we also wanted to make a Twitter account, and this predates most users here. It was at the time The Great Lord David was still active. If you don't remember that time, it's probably because you weren't here yet.

Though this brang something to my attention. If we still want to do this, we need to fix the wiki, because we can't allow anyone to have a terrible experience from this website. So, here are the other problems we just may wanna fix. Just maaaaaaaay. Yeah, it's an euphemism too.

Main Page
The main page requires constant updating, and given our activity, this doesn't work very well. All of it is completely outdated and the problems with that are as follows.

Comic “News”
It was a good initiative from Photon Commander to keep us up to date with Comic-related news on the Main Page, but like many users after him, he overestimated his activity, and after a few months, it died out on October 2013. But David decided to updated it another time in 2014, and recently, this March of 2016, X updated it again. With more inconsistencies than the last time, but he still did this, and it's a good thing, but this makes me wonder: Do we really need that? I mean, whenever we discuss Comic News, it's on the chat, and we've never learned anything from this page, so, shouldn't we delete it? Erase its trace from the main page, and with it, the burden of updating it every... Day, basically. Because yeah, news change every day, that's quite a shock. This Comic News page is as much of a suicidal operation than try to keep up with the global economy.

Facebook Widget
Since it doesn't really serve any purpose anymore and is completely broken due to the last security breach on Wikia, I deleted it. Just thought you'd wanna know.

Poll Time
“This poll was created on September 3, 2015.” We were going for a monthly thing. That's another thing we can erase since we discuss that on the chat anyway.

What Does Comic Crossroads Offer You?
Four of the greatest pages on the wiki. It's really cool that they have a permanent feature, but that's also unjust to others. William Lawton (Earth-152312) is good, but even R&#333;nin considers he reached the best of his writing with William Lawton (Earth-53). Earth-1224 is a great page, and currently the largest fanfiction on the wiki, but have you taken the time to learn about the Jaguar Universe? Because it's original, very well-established, and best-seller material. I'm also not a big fan of the mention of “awards” and “critical acclaim,” because that's a lie. It's acclaimed by us, but we never took the time to reflect or criticize it truly. And other than a monthly feature, it don't see what kind of awards these pages have gotten. Those pages are great, but the fact that they are glorified and shown as the best, the untouchable, is what eclipses the rest of the pages. Such as the monthly featured content.

Monthly Features
I don't even need to say anything about it, look at the schedule, the history of the page's edits, everything is done wrong, and that's because I don't take good care of it. Maybe we need to relay the work on this page to get some sense of frequency, but since it didn't work with the polls, social media and the comic news, I don't really know what to do about it.

Basically, the problem of the main page is that it's full of responsibilities we need to take and full of things we need to update, except we can't. So, the bottom line is that we need to take some time to change the main page and make it more stable.

Rules
Everytime I think about the rules, I go take a cold shower and rethink every life decision I've taken up until this point&mdash;seriously, I've always, always hated this rules since the first day I came here. Sorry, X, sorry, Photon, sorry, David, but these were a terrible idea. First things first, the phrasing is kinda special. I know David wrote them, but they seem straight out from a 1984-kinda thing, and really not appreciative of the community, so that needs to change, but that's no big deal, what I prefer are the actual rules.

Keeping adult content to a minimum: That needs to be explained a little bit more. Pornography, gore, graphical representations are forbidden by Wikia anyway, but in terms of writing, what goes? I mean, if I follow Photon's reasoning as I see it, I'm free to say anything I want as long as there's a warning of some sort. If I follow X's reasoning as I see it, if I say one thing a little graphic, I'm gonna get booted to the arse for that, so personally, I would like to understand what this means. Litterature is an art, and pushing boundaries is only a mere characteristic of it, so it's really hard to be trustful of a website that limits your art. I know the users here, and I have good relations with everyone, but someone who's new to the site and is hoping to express themselves probably won't like that a lot.

Editing other people's pages: That's another thing I've always hated. This needs to go. Because unlike copyright law, which we barely ever enforced, this rule is way too enforced. X, at the time he was an administrator, was warned multiple times and threatened to be banned if he edited pages he didn't have the permission to edit. That isn't a good thing to do. That's terrible. What X did was housekeeping, and what he did should have been done by every administrator. And if we did that with the same dedication as he, we probably wouldn't so much trouble with the articles.

Aaaaand that's it, there aren't any more rules. So if it wasn't for Wikia's Terms of Use, everybody could vandalize, spam, insult each other and do whatever they want here, and technically, the wiki allows pointsgaming. Pointsgaming is making mass edits, as insignificant as possible, just to get the various achievements and medals the wiki offers. That's a form of vandalism, but this isn't totally vandalism. There are no conduct guidelines, no assume good faith statements. Nothing. We can thank all of the deities that we know for that. Thor, Odin, Zeus, whatever. Because if this wiki had a slightly different community, this would be utter chaos. And if I want rules, it's because it could always happen at anytime. Tekken LSSJ, Emma mary, there could have been more.

So, that's about all the banter I have about the wiki's problems right now. One last time, I'm not trying to offend anyone, so please be open-minded about it, I'm telling you about these problems so we can work around it.

Now I'd like to talk a little bit more about myself, my activity, and what's currently happening.

Don't Worry Folk, I'm Here
I haven't been very active these past months, actually, there hasn't been a moment since the beginning of the year where I actively contributed to the wiki, and I'm sorry about that. Lots of things happening in real life, I'm having lots of trouble thriving, I don't eat or sleep a lot, I'm very lost and confuse about what I'm doing, and I have some sort of creative crisis, which I'll talk about later, but the thing is, my life is going nuts right now. I would say it's doing pretty damn bad, but at the same time, I feel like I'm going places, so it's safe to say that I'm just completely lost.

But I'm Here!
Every day, even if I don't contribute, I check out Wikia to see if you guys have anything to tell me, and to check the activity, so if you have anything, really anything to say, I can answer within relatively brief delays, there's no issue about that. Just don't expect me to contribute a lot, but you can count on me if you need my help. Though I think I'm gonna answer a lot of your questions with the following...

Why Don't I Contribute?
You all know I'm constantly overbooked, but that doesn't stop me from leaving comments or messages or even, well, contributing from time to time, so what's the real issue? Well, I mentioned a creative crisis, and that's just that.

I don't like fanfiction anymore. I'm not interested in it, it brings nothing to me, other than a loss of time. I love writing, creating things, and fanfiction doesn't give me that; yes, I wrote a slightly different origin for Spider-Man, yes, I wrote a different Tarantula, but I don't like it anymore, I want to make something for myself. Earth-19999 is great, I can work on things that I love: Fighting games, martial arts, different cultures and lots of other things. But really the only thing it is, is a rewriting of Mortal Kombat and other games. Earth-4552 is awesome! There's extensive lore, combat, culture, litterature within litterature, fantasy, and it's just a rewriting of Lord of the Rings and the Elder Scrolls. If I want to work on something, why don't I create my own stuff? I had this discussion with Draft and R&#333;nin, two writers that I estimate a lot, and this only reinforced my will to create something. I'm tired of fanfiction. Actually, hear ye, hear ye, et cætera, and all that sorta shit: I'm cancelling Earth-619 and replacing it with fully original universes. “Wait mate, you lost ya fucking mind, mate, what're ye gonna do with Crossroads, don't we love that project anymo', mate?” I do love that project, so much that it exhales my overgrowing boredom of fanfiction, so I'm going to rewrite it whole, while keeping the most important stuff.

The main reason why I wanted to make this blog post was to say this: I'm tired of fanfiction, but not of Comic Crossroads&mdash;I would love to just leave Comic Crossroads' fanfiction behind me, but if I did that, I'd lose the community, which are my friends, and I can't do that. I don't want to stop talking to Draft, R&#333;nin, Jacky, Photon, Arty, Halo or anyone else, but I want to stop fanfiction, and I sincerely hope you can understand my decision. From now on, fanfiction is over to me. If I want to write MARVEL shit, then I'll send a proposition to MARVEL Comics, if they refuse, I don't lose anything. If I want to write more lore for The Elder Scrolls, I can take part in The Imperial Library or directly contact Bethesda, because if they refuse, I don't lose anything. If I want to write about what I love, I will write about what I love. Maybe it be alone, or with you guys.

And you know, I still remember the Monthly Frenchy Podcast, I thought about it. I have my new microphone. I can't assure you it will be Monthly, I can assure you it will be Frenchy though, and I'm really invested into making this a reality.

So I hope I've said enough to answer everyone, I wanted to make a much longer blog post, but I've been writing for five hours nonstop, so, I don't know, I'll just leave it at that. If you want to know anything else, the comments are here, I have a message wall, go ahead, spam me.

Have a good day everyone, and I'll see you soon.