[Proposal] Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels

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Do you support repealing the restrictions on webnovel translations on Baka-Tsuki?

Yes
3
75%
No
0
No votes
Other (please comment)
1
25%
 
Total votes: 4

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cloudii
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[Proposal] Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels

Post by cloudii »

Proposal: Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels on Baka-Tsuki

Background:
A few years ago (c. 2015), it was decided from a vote among BT contributors that web novel translations should be strongly regulated (effectively banned) from the Baka-Tsuki Wiki along with MTLs. Part of the basis of this ban was:
  • Web Novels are effectively someone else's original light novel (OLN) so the quality of many web novels are poor.
  • Web Novels are easy to machine translate, so many of the translations were poor.
  • Many of the web novel translation sites engage in donations/financial practices that Baka-Tsuki does not support.
  • At the time, Chinese Web Novels were flooding onto the Baka-Tsuki at an unmanageable rate.
Therefore, on May 02, 2015, Baka-Tsuki members voted to restrict Web Novels to the Baka-Tsuki forums and ban them from the Wiki except in special circumstances.

By my reckoning, the web novel ban was extremely effective at achieving its goals. During the peak burst of fan interest in Chinese web novels, Baka-Tsuki successfully deflected the wave of new interest in Chinese web novels.

Arguably, it was too effective though. Through 2015-2017, the series of big DCMAs from major Japanese light novel publishers killed much of the activity and readership at Baka-Tsuki. Furthermore, the rise of link aggregators such as Novelupdates has diminished the relevance of Baka-Tsuki as a hub for light novel translations. As of today (August 2017), activity on Baka-Tsuki is perhaps at an all-time low.

Proposal/Request:
Today, my request comes from my perspective as a Chinese translator who left Baka-Tsuki for two years, and in fact switched primarily to reading and occasionally translating obscure Chinese web novels. As a person involved in this portion of the subculture, I can report that the Chinese/Japanese web novel-translating scene lacks a Baka-Tsuki equivalent, and small-time translators (myself included) lack a good place to put their translations.

Furthermore, I believe that the poor quality of many web novel translations could in fact benefit greatly from a collaborative wiki model such as Baka-Tsuki.

Therefore, my request is that Baka-Tsuki reconsider its ban/restrictions on Web Novels, and consider re-allowing web novel translations to be posted to the Wiki.

The pros:
  • Repealing the WN restrictions may possibly increase the activity at Baka-Tsuki
  • The collaborative wiki model has the potential to improve the quality of existing web novel translations on the Internet
  • Baka-Tsuki can remain culturally relevant by advertising its values to the broader community of light novels and web novels (e.g. non-commercial translating, translation ethics)
The cons:
  • Poorer quality translations may come to Baka-Tsuki
  • More Chinese novels (e.g. wuxia/xianxia) may come to Baka-Tsuki, which may not be the preferred genre of many of Baka-Tsuki readers
Discussion is very very welcome!

Thank you!
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Re: [Proposal] Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels

Post by Lunar Vitae »

I see no reason to continue the disallowing of web novels being hosted/linked on the wiki when presented with the above argument. Given the backstory, I think the decision made at the time was appropriate, and now it should be time to revisit it.

I think that we should allow web novels to be linked and hosted once again, obviously adhering to current site rules, policies, and guidelines that apply to all projects.

To address quality, I would argue that nothing is stopping current light novel projects from being translated with questionable quality, both linked and hosted.
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Re: [Proposal] Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels

Post by Cthaeh »

As the one who spearheaded the previous/current policy, I'll post some thought on the matter, in particular expanding on motivations for the policy's creation:

The policy was modeled after OLN mostly just to use it as a precedent. With the introduction of the stricter MTL policy and the new commercial activity policy, together with the large influx of WN projects, at the time I felt the policy focused on WNs was a necessary step for enforcing the other two, MTL and commercial activity policies. As cloudii points out, that may not be the case now even if it was (possibly) then.

It is also true the end policy and results were harsher than I had intended. Regardless of the requirements, merely having the policy in place seemed to dissuade most from even trying for approval more than I had anticipated. I had intended on the approval process being easy for any translator who wanted to post their WN translation on the wiki (mainly a check that it wasn't MTL and that it wasn't a hentai novel), though consensus of the Exec Council at the time made the requirements harder (1 volume worth for approval) than I had personally intended.

The motivations behind the specific ban about WN linked projects were two-fold: one was merely an effort to keep approvals to a manageable level and also to ensure that checks for approval (MTL and similar) would be going through the translator, not some random fan who wanted to add links. The second is tied to something that may not be universal, and which doesn't have a right answer; that is the vision of BT as a place to host and edit translations (hosted projects) versus a hub and directory of all translations (including linked projects). BT has had elements of the two for a long time, but the BT WN scene was shifting dramatically towards linked; I was in favor of keeping BT more focused on hosted translations, therefore I was more inclined to be more restrictive on linked projects. Current administration may not share that vision for BT, and therefore may not look at that part of the policy as relevant, particularly if they don’t intend to do any checks with the WN translator.

In some sense, the application of the WN, MTL, and commercial activity policies likely prevented BT from becoming something closer to NovelUpdates (you could debate whether that’s a good or a bad thing); though I was under the impression that the creation of NovelUpdates itself had more to do with mangaupdates (or bakaupdates or something) restricting WNs/LNs, so NovelUpdates likely still would have emerged and eclipsed BT for that purpose.


TLDR / Summary

I agree with cloudii that the circumstances/motivations are likely no longer exactly the same as when the policy was implemented, and that the policy could likely be significantly revised or possibly fully repealed depending on the views of current active users, and the exec council and admins who will administrate whatever the policy is.
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Re: [Proposal] Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels

Post by hobogunner »

Has it been that long? Some days I feel like I only wake up twice a year. Just enough to make the previous sentence make logical sense. :lol:

I'm fine with the ban being revoked, but I would still like to implement some differentiating features due to alt-languages basing most of their translations on the English version.
Much like the MTL tag (if that used to exist) because web novels can be edited down the road and the further into the chain it goes the harder it will be to make it not weird.

As for what Catie and Cloudii said, the goal was to survive the dark days and we have done that. The ability to not have to govern every little thing and verify links to pay-sites or "translation donations" was far too worthwhile at the time.

One link I would propose to having, as oddballish as it is, is a link to the direct source material. Assuming it is just published on a forum or OLN-esque website it would effectively be free domain and the traffic would help the author potentially. Unless those sites work differently than what I'm familiar with. I'll throw that into your court, Cloudii.

IIRC it was sort of a lump-summed thing together with the MTL policy so we fought both at the same time. Now coming back to it having done what was already done together is weird, but doable.

As for the potential genre issue...we might need to be a bit more steadfast in marking genres of the novels. It might put us a step closer to NU that we don't want to go but it would help people not go "What should I read, I like ---." I'm not suggesting we use wiki tags, rather a italic "Genres: ---" below the synopsis. It would also help people not go "What did I just read." (I still recall MariMite having a warning about yuri....it still does: https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/inde ... _ga_Miteru ). Exactly like that.
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Re: [Proposal] Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels

Post by R~S »

Seems like like something it could bring more activity to BT, which is good. I imagine this would apply to all web novels? meaning japanese, chinese and original (english) web novels?

I don't really follow web novels, but do authors have donation buttons/patreons or similar? that would be, along with mtl for the translators, the main things to regulate to enter BT.
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Re: [Proposal] Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels

Post by cloudii »

I just wanted to provide an update that my current thoughts have changed a bit since the original post.

Currently, the idea that I favor the most is making a Baka-Tsuki sister site (e.g. similar to how Mangaupdates is the sister site to Bakaupdates) dedicated to web novels. If possible, I'd like for the two sites to remain affiliated, and in fact have the two communities share a common discord/forum/social space, but have the administration of each site be independent.

There are several reasons why I feel like a separate site might be ideal:

1). Based on my anecdotal familiarity with the WN translation community, roughly 80-90% of all the translation sites out there have a donation button on their website. Furthermore, the WN translation community looks more favorably at donations. This is in conflict with Baka-Tsuki's values. However, in many of these instances, I don't believe that the practice of soliciting donations is necessarily unethical in the case of web novels -- a very good number of the major WN translation sites have received explicit permission from the original author to perform such translations. So in short -- I'd like to make policies and rules that may differ from Baka-Tsuki's.

2). I'm personally willing to host and put together a this afore-mentioned new mediawiki.

3). I'd like to try out some experimental mediawiki extensions and organizational features that could be used as a future model for Baka-Tsuki's improvement.

With regards to (3), here is a small list of things I am thinking about:
  • Semantic Mediawiki
    Semantic Mediawiki is an extension that will enable us to store meta-data with each wiki page that can later be searched and queried. Used properly, it can give hierarchal ordered structure to pages in a translation project that a program could traverse, and furthermore enable me to make something like an RSS feed of completed chapters (e.g. that can then be fed to NovelUpdates). It would also facilitate the development of apps built on top of mediawiki, because the data would be far more structured, eliminating the need for HTML parsing.

    Alternative languages each on it's own subdomain
    You know how Wikipedia has en.wikipedia.org and fr.wikipedia.org?
    This is achieved by running a wiki farm -- multiple independent wikis on the same server with shared data. The rationale for doing this is to separate updates in different languages from Recent Changes.

    UI changes and extensions that support translators and contributors
    I'd like to try some new skins and extensions that might help out the translation and commenting process. An example would be the Semantic Text Annotator. And also UI editors for people who aren't familiar with wikicode. There's a lot I'd like to try out.

    A front-end UI reader app for readers
    Mediawiki isn't the prettiest thing to read novels on. Using data organized by Semantic Mediawiki, it shouldn't be too hard to build a dedicated all-client-side JS reader (hosted on the same domain, like: reader.baka-tsuki.org). With this reader, you would easily be able to change the size of text, the color of the background (dark theme, light theme), etc. You'd also be able to search, filter by categories, etc. It would serve as a proof-of-concept for other open-source extensions built on top like mobile or other apps.

    New user-base and stricter policies/conventions
    This isn't a programming thing, but with a new user base, it'd be easier to enforce conventions without worrying about upsetting old users or searching through thousands of old pages. One benefit of semantic mediawiki is its "form" feature, meaning it would be easier to enforce that certain items of metadata are present (e.g. Is this a partial draft or a complete chapter?).


Some of these items are more ambitious than others, but they're things I'm thinking about!

I'm already playing around with a local installation of semantic mediawiki, so if things pan out, I should be able to put something together.
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Re: [Proposal] Repealing Restrictions on Web Novels

Post by hobogunner »

Those extensions seem useful, semantic-wiki seeming to be a springboard for most. So long as you've tested it and vetted it in your own sandbox I see no reason to not implement semantic-wiki, we can work from there.

I do like the ideas on subdomains but that increases foot traffic and makes things harder to track. We're already in a grey area as it is, I don't want us to remove ourselves from potential governance from this transaction. We also host too many languages and have the supervisors of those languages relatively idle most of the time. Sacredus and Ket'lane would be good for their respective languages but we have...quite a few more than that. Doing the subdomain move would likely cause some chopping off of older or less updated languages. I know that this wouldn't be a goal of it, but I don't think with the 5 of us we have it would be reasonable to check into the 10-ish subdomains you're proposing. (I personally use subdomains to verify actions in languages I don't understand.)

The donation thing on WN translation sites I feel like is causing some confusion here. I'm fine if it's a donation button on the original site, but I would still like to keep our hosted/partner policy against translation sites that have donations. In other words, BT would host the translation and the said page should link to the original content. However. I would feel comfortable allowing BT to link out to sites with donation buttons of WNs that have confirmed approval by the author to accept said donations.

I wouldn't be deadset on hosting yourself just yet, we could also split off a subdomain for you to be able to manhandle re:WNs. Instead of doing it for languages.
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