Original thread here: http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-14152698/discussion-art-restructuring-proposal
Ported from 05.
Heya everyone. UncertaintyCrossing and I are coming at you with a fairly big proposal, so I broke it all into collapsibles for the sake of mobile users and backreaders.
While talking to artists on the wiki about one topic or another, I noticed a very common sentiment being expressed by the majority of them - That SCP artists are being heavily mistreated by the active community. This mistreatment doesn't seem to be malicious in nature, (far from it, most users seem to very much appreciate the work of artists when the topic is brought up,) but rather just a disregard towards the existence of art on the wiki and the effort artists put into it; it's closer to neglect.
This mistreatment presents itself in multiple forms, whether it be artwork getting a fraction of the attention that the writing does, art being specifically made for an article and frequently ending up unused, and as a whole having artists being treated as "second-class citizens" as compared to the writers.
In my opinion, this seems to stem from art being seen as "not on the same level" as the writing. This makes sense on some level, this is a writing site so writing would be expected to be the focus, but the wiki has grown a fair bit from the creepypasta site it used to be, and it'd be a disservice to not acknowledge the dozens of other creative avenues people have taken the wiki's content in. As such, I think it's high time we started giving them equal footing on the wiki's spotlight.
This proposal, in essence, seeks to make each piece posted by an artist its own unique page, similar to the articles, rather than having all of an artist's art cobbled up in one giant art page.
Instead of giving each artist one singular page where they just unceremoniously dump new art into, artists would now post their new pieces individually to the wiki (or in small galleries of assorted, similarly themed pieces), as a new category of pages. These pages will be subject to the same quality control measures as articles, (the rating module, deletion thresholds, criticism, plagarism deletions,) and would also enjoy all the benefits that having individual pages could provide (tags, newest posted articles modules, visibility on the Top Rated Pages lists).
Since now artwork is treated similarly to articles, artist pages will also have to be changed to an author page equivalent, requiring a certain amount of successful art posted to the wiki before being able to create such a page. Art posted to the wiki would not count for the author page requirements, and vice-versa for the art pages and articles.
(Also, for readability's sake - from hereon out the individual pages will be referred to as 'art pages', and the author page equivalents as 'artist galleries'.)
However, due to many artists with artist galleries not being active on the wiki anymore, artist galleries that existed prior to this proposal's passing will be Grandfather Clause'd (meaning they do not have to change how they work and could remain the same). Artists that are still active in the community will be encouraged to move their existing artwork to new pages, and if the amount of artists who plan to do so turns out to be quite substantial, a week of grace-posting will be given for old artists to move their artwork to new pages. The grace-posting week's goal is to avoid having said avalanche of old-new pieces drown out any new artist who may be stepping their first foot into the wiki. Similarly, outside of the aforementioned week of grace-posting there will be a posting limit of three art pages a day, as a preemptive counter measure in the case any new artists start pumping out art at record speed and drown out the rest of the posting artists.
Doodles, WIPs, and other such art could be directly posted to the artist's gallery rather than as an individual page.
Such a major change to how the site functions will require a few changes and additions to other aspects of the site.
Firstly, a lot of art-related policy (such as what counts as tracing, the repercussions thereof, to which sites to post art and in what format) will have to be created, both technical and not. This is policy that will likely need to be made regardless of the existence of this proposal, as up until now we've been mostly using precedents rather than anything written in stone, but said policies will be essential once the change is made.
Secondly, additional guides and essays for creating, critiquing, and voting on art will need to be made. To avoid the problem of people voting blindly on pieces, some guidelines will need to be set as to what should and should not influence a user's vote. Said guidelines will need to be very vague and subjective, since art is very subjective in itself, but it will need to outline some things that probably shouldn't affect a vote on art, such as "if I downvote it might be rude." Essays for creating art, although not essential, will probably be appreciated by new artists and would help make them feel on equal footing.
These are a few issues that might not be exclusive to this proposal, but that this proposal will likely exacerbate, so I'm mentioning them here.
This proposal will likely add more strain to MAST, and more specifically the tagging team, due to the creation of new tags and more pages that will require said tags to be applied to.
Additionally, the site will also be taking a stress from having more pages be created and deleted, which may be a problem on a site that's already as volatile as Wikidot currently is.
This proposal will not fix the entire issue of artist mistreatment on its own, and there are still many other avenues where I believe we should be giving artists so much more than they currently are getting (such as frontpage spotlights and contests). The issue of a pervasive mindset is much more difficult to solve than just changing a few rules and hoping for the best.
Hopefully, though, this proposal will help kickstart an unconscious change in how we view artists in the community, and help push for more non-writing-related policy to spring forward.