My problem with Lost Media Chronicles - Dubs

Well, does anyone want to find lost Greeny Phatom episodes, even though it's gonna be useless, since it's not notable?
Besides, I don't feel like repeating myself, but Dubs are literally fucking audio tracks, and they don't serve much importance aside from the GoAnimators who think that they belong to a museum.

audio tracks of a translated script are not important

Forgive my rambling...

Would you say that a 30-second youtube video made by a 12 year old with 20 subscribers is on the same level of importance as a professionally made TV series that was aired internationally? Maybe, but probably not.

If I recorded a video of my dog taking a shit, then deleted it from my phone, should I write an article for it? After all, it's "lost media", so it belongs here, right? Well, I'm assuming you'd say no. But why is that? It's because, even if you don't want to admit it, you know that some stuff just simply doesn't matter - at least not from an encyclopedic perspective. Anyone can record a video of their dog taking a shit and have it turn out exactly the same as any other video of that, and I'm sure you don't want a flood of 200 identical shitting-dog-video articles plaguing the site. So that means, at some level, you DO have a cutoff of what you think should be allowed here. Everyone does.

The issue is that everyone's cutoff level is different. We can't please everybody, since not everyone cares about the same things. But our decisions aren't made on only what we the staff value. At its core, this site is dedicated to documenting LOST MEDIA. In the historian's sense, that would mean only including pieces of media where NO copies are known to survive - even within studio vaults, all known prints have been destroyed or misplaced. This would probably mostly consist of silent films from the early 20th century (and late 19th century), and there are already plenty of people who think that's what the site should focus on documenting more. Those people just typically don't get involved with the community.

Of course, we've stretched the definition of "lost" in order to create a wider appeal - now, it includes anything that isn't publicly viewable, even if we know the rightsholders or creators have their own private copies. This has led to our community becoming known for its searches, which is great. But it does raise the question - how far can that definition be stretched before it becomes detrimental to the original goal? If something's on a private tracker, is it still lost? If something is cancelled before it's finished production, does that count as lost? If something is for sale but it's really expensive, would that count as lost media? And how expensive would it have to be to qualify? Those are all grey-areas which we decide on a case-by-case basis, since we brought it on ourselves.

Having a looser definition of "lost" also allows us to loosen up some other stuff. You'll notice that Wikipedia has VERY strict policies on what sources can be used as references and how many are needed, while our only set-in-stone rule is that you have to cite at least one source. That's because the focuses of our sites are different - Wikipedia strives to document things that our popular, while the stuff that gets documented here is usually lost specifically because it WASN'T popular. This means that in most cases, there won't be 500 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles from famous and trustworthy publications for whatever you're writing about. Information is usually scarce, so we just have to do the best we can. But the more obscure your media is, the less sources you'll have. With a lot of stuff like dubs and YouTube videos, they're so obscure that there AREN'T any sources you can use that aren't just personal testimony on behalf of the author. The issue isn't fixed at all by sourcing from other amateur wikis - playing telephone only makes things even more unreliable. So eventually you get to a point where something is so obscure that even if we got rid of the notability rule entirely, you STILL wouldn't be able to write an article for it because there's no way to reasonably confirm anything about it by the standards of a wiki.

Now, getting back to your question on what makes something important. Our current rule is a little misleading: the media "must be relatively known amongst the general public" - "relative" is the key word. For instance, I'd certainly never heard of Canzo Empyrean before I joined the site, but that's allowed to stay here without an issue. How come? Well, it's made by an actual filmmaker who's had his work publicly recognized, it's been physically screened in international countries, it has a very interesting backstory, and it's clearly something that would matter to fans of underground cinema.

"But what about people who DON'T care about underground cinema? We could just as easily cater to the people who care about dubs." Well, sure. That's totally valid. But as you continue to get more and more specific with your subject matter, the number of people who care about it will get smaller and smaller. At a certain point, you reach a level where the only person who would ever be interested in a piece of media is the one who wrote the article for it. So when picking which groups to cater to, we go back to the site's core purpose - to be a source of information to those who are passionate about lost media. Fans of underground cinema are automatically more likely to already care about lost media, since the subject matter is so similar. On the other hand, dubs don't have much in common with lost media other than the fact that some dubs are lost. What I mean by that is that most of the people who write articles on dubs don't show much interest in the concept of lost media as a whole, they're primarily just looking to find that *one* thing that they'd like to see again. A thing which, a majority of the time, most of the users who the site is aimed at don't care about.

So now there's two ways of looking at things. The first is that we should primarily cater to people who are already interested the concept of lost media without just trying to get some personal gain out of it. It's true that there can be searches for anything, and you guys have proven to be dedicated to that cause, but your goal in using the site shouldn't just be "find this thing for me". But there are plenty of other articles that were written based on the author's other personal interests, right? So that's where the other way comes in - that a decent portion of our readers would still find the media interesting (on some level) even if it wasn't lost. Admit it - if Albanian Spongebob had never gone lost, not a single human living outside of Albania would have cared about it.

People are naturally interested in movies, people are interested in TV shows, in music, in books, comics, animation, etc. So if there's a movie that's lost, people want to find it because it they want to watch the movie. They would probably want to watch it even if it wasn't lost. If there's an album that's lost, people want to find it because they want to hear the album, and those people would want to hear it even if it wasn't lost. However, if there's a video made by a YouTuber with 50 subscribers, there may be a couple of users who want to find it because they want to see it, but I'm almost 100% positive they wouldn't give 2 dicks about that YouTuber if his video wasn't "lost". There's a SHIT-ton of YouTubers with 50 subscribers whose videos are still up, but how many of them are you watching (that AREN'T your friends)? Following on with that, I'm sure you could look up tons of American shows dubbed into languages you can't speak, but you're most likely not watching those either (people who SPEAK the languages might, but seeing as this is an english-speaking site, most of those people aren't here.) So why is that? Why aren't you watching 12-year-olds' let's plays and the Russian dub of Samurai Jack right now? It's because you know that you DON'T care about them, and being lost shouldn't change that.

(Just to clarify - there's nothing wrong with only becoming interested in something after reading about it here. That's how it usually goes and I'm no exception. My point is, though, that after you find out about it, at least *part* of you should want to see it on its own merits, whether because it's really good, because it's really bad, because it has a funny history, because it's culturally significant, whatever. All I'm saying is it shouldn't JUST be because you can't currently see it, because in this day and age, literally anyone can become the creator of a piece of lost media if they wanted to do so.)

Now, one final "But wait!" - I'm aware I had just said that we cater to people interested specifically in lost media, hence why all those lost films from the 1900s are here. I'll be honest, I personally don't watch too many movies from the 1920s in my spare time. But these movies that I wouldn't watch are inherently more important than obscure YouTube videos that I wouldn't watch because they represent a place that we came from. If you look at movies from the 20s, movies from the 30s, movies from the 40s, and so-on, you can see how the culture and the art form evolves over time. And since such a big chunk of that era is destroyed due to poor preservation, it's important to know that we're not getting the full story. THAT'S why The Fall of a Nation is more important than a YouTube video - the very first film sequel ever made vs the 7 billionth let's play ever made, how could it even compete for historical relevance? For another example, in the 20s it was REVOLUTIONARY just to have a person talking into the camera with actual speech attached to it - nowadays, about 300 hours of content fitting that description is uploaded to YouTube every minute. How could you even attempt to archive or document all of that?

Answer: you can't. That's why we only tackle what matters - because yes, for what we do, some stuff matters more than other stuff. Unless we figure out a way to stop time, there's literally no way to cover everything on here, so unless something is historically significant or a majority of our userbase would otherwise find it interesting, it's probably best to skip writing about it. We're not saying it shouldn't be found, we're just saying it's not our priority.

Since when did I imply that?

Kobochat with an essay longer than I would write for school holy crap

If you would only realize that Dubs are flat out audio mods, then maybe you would realize my point.