RFC: warnings database/wiki

[vass]

I was talking to a friend, and she had this great idea that neither of us has the spoons to run, so I thought I'd throw it out and see if anyone else wanted to run with it.

The idea: a fan-run database, possibly in the form of a wiki, with episode by episode guides to TV shows, warning for what episodes have what triggers. You could have a template for specific triggers and a template for shows. So people could look up season one of an old show they're thinking of picking up, and check if there's any episodes they might want to avoid or at least brace themselves for. And if someone gets triggered by something, once they recover they can add it to the list so that at least no one else gets caught by it.

Obviously, it'd take a lot of work, and it would also cost money to run. But yeah, if you want to do it, there's the idea.

Comments

[trialia]

Hmm, not that much extra money if you could find someone to host it, and I would be willing to. I don't have the spoons to build it, but I could certainly provide hosting. I think it's a very good idea. I wouldn't want anyone getting so horribly triggered by a certain Stargate Atlantis episode of evil memory as I did when it first aired...

[rydra_wong]

Thinking out loud: a low(er) spoon way of doing this might be a comm.

People could post asking whether particular series or specific eps contain particular triggers (which might be useful for people who have very idiosyncratic triggers).

And you could also have posts for individual shows listing possibly-triggery stuff.

It wouldn't cost anything, and it might be the sort of thing that people would pitch in on.

[jackandahat]

You could tag the info posts by show and by trigger, so if someone was getting into a particular show, click on Show: [name] and it would bring up all the warnings for that ep. (Is there a way to bring up two tags at once? Because something like Criminal Minds has a *lot* of triggers, so that would pretty much be 100 posts if it was a post per ep, but there's only really been one ep that got to me, so I imagine searching by show + trigger would be quicker.)

[cesy]

Not any easy way at the moment, but they're planning to add it, and in the meantime, you could use "search this journal" if we made it a paid comm.

[jackandahat]

If someone does something like this, and it's fairly simple (as in, just simple text-input, or text + tags like a DW post, I know nothing about coding) I would be willing to put in for Criminal Minds - I have every ep except the most recent one, and I know them pretty well.

[thingswithwings]

This is a fabulous idea, and I would be happy to contribute to such a project (though, alas, I cannot host or code). But I do think that the original wiki idea is better than a comm - that way the focus is on providing information, rather than asking for it (though an associated comm where people could request reviews for things that aren't up on the wiki yet, or for more idiosyncratic triggers as rydra says, might be a good idea).

[longmagpieroads]

You could set it up as one of the free wikis, like wikia. I'd be willing to do Fringe and a couple of other shows.

[naraht]

Why just TV shows? Do you think they would be a higher priority than movies/books/RPF sources?

[coneyislandbaby]

Just a thought on my part, but I think people are less, um, annoyed? by blatant spoilers for old TV shows than they are for movies/books/etc and some of the things that trigger would be major spoilers. I say this as someone lucky enough to only have one trigger (at the moment) and it's one that's pretty easy to avoid... except, oddly enough, in RPF but it's also something long term, so if I need to, I can set things before the triggery thing. I don't know, it just seems possible.

[cesy]

I have somehow picked up the vague impression that being triggered by TV is more common than any other source, because most people tend to watch more hours of TV than movies, and visual media have more of a particular type of impact than books and other sources. However, it would be good if the setup could encompass warnings for other types of media as well.

[fish_echo]

This sounds like a really neat idea. If it existed I'd certainly wander my way through occasionally and edit/add things. I don't however have the time presently to help maintain it, sadly :(

If you do go forward with this, it might be nice to not only be able to comment on individual episodes (/book/etc if more media are included), but on arcs as well-- perhaps at the series/season level and at the 'this entire show' level. I can see this being useful because then, say: an editor could write in only one place 'this entire show has Xism show up consistently at a low level' rather than on each and every episode-- and then on the specific episodes where its really bad there could be an additional note of 'in this episode the Xism is amazingly horrifically blatant'.

[ambrmerlinus]

I realize it's been almost a year since this idea was proposed, but I would like to throw my hat into the ring and offer to get this Wiki started. I can't guarantee that it will be pretty, and I would need all the help I could get in terms of contributors, but I would be happy to get the ball rolling.

That said, has there been any progress on the idea since this post?