Abandonship

Within months of the OEDILF’s launch we began encountering submissions that had been abandoned by their authors—or rather, limericks whose authors had abandoned us for one reason or another (often neglect, at a time when the submission rate far outstripped our rate of workshopping). These pieces accumulated in our Tentative pile, creating headaches for editors looking for limericks to workshop. Some suggested that we could rescue this abandoned work, either by completing it on the missing author’s behalf or by using it as the basis for new limericks. As we discussed these ideas over the next eighteen months, I put forward some alternative perspectives and proposals, some of which were implemented as the “untended” state for abandoned limericks. I’ve recast those proposals below to describe the system as it now stands.

Modifying Abandoned Work

The OEDILF isn’t just a faceless document: it’s a collection of works by identified authors, each of whom has final say on what goes over his or her name. The latter means a lot to me; I wouldn’t be part of the project without it. (Y’hear me, OEDILFers of 2087? No meddling with my limericks!)

Most of us wouldn’t want to see our work changed without our input or consent—especially not when we’ve worked hard to polish things up to approval stage, or have resisted pressure to change particular pieces in ways we don’t want. Even if we put a checkbox on the profile page allowing others to modify our work after we’re gone, we’ll continue to get submissions that don’t come with that consent; I doubt I’d tick such a box myself.

We can’t have our cake and eat it too: if maintaining the author’s final say is important, we can’t turn around and rework people’s limericks behind their backs—not even if we’ve tried again and again to contact them and they haven’t responded. We make suggestions for rewrites and tweaks of other people’s work every day in workshopping, but I wouldn’t feel happy about forcing authors to adopt those, and can’t see how it’s much different if the author is out of the picture for some reason.

If particular limericks start to look “quaint”, future OEDILFers are entirely free to write new limericks on the same words to provide more up-to-date definitions. Everything is date-stamped, so it’s not as if there’ll be any confusion about what’s new and what isn’t.

Sampling Abandoned Work

We rewrite each other’s lines all the time in workshopping, making suggestions and so on. But we don’t claim authorship of the piece itself in doing so; if we end up as co-author of a revised piece, it’s through a process of negotiation with the original author. Their consent in such cases is essential.

I wouldn’t be pleased if someone looked at my tentatives after I’d been gone a while, decided to change a couple of lines in one of them, and submitted the result under his or her own name with a nod in the AN to mine—let alone if the result ended up approved. I know that some contributors would be fine with that, but to avoid any problems we should operate on the basis of clear consent.

We should avoid wholesale reuse of another OEDILF author’s phrasing without their blessing, no matter how tempting it might be. It can be okay as an homage to a long-dead author whose work is in the public domain, but neither condition applies yet to any of the work written for the OEDILF.

Any kind of posthumous co-authorship would be a breach of copyright, at least for the next century or so. Our authors retain copyright in their works, and their estates will retain it for at least 70 years after they die. As we won’t even be sure they have died if they leave the site, that effectively puts their work off-limits until we’re all long-gone. Adapting another author’s work without their permission creates a derivative work, to which they own the copyright.

A hundred years from now our work will be in the hands of our OEDILF heirs, and who knows what their attitude will be. Oral culture has always been open to modifying stories, lyrics and poems as they’re handed down through the ages; seeing the author as someone whose work is sacrosanct is a relatively recent development. Remix culture has changed the way many us think about music and its creation, and who’s to say our work won’t go the same way one day? In the here and now, though, we can’t just adapt any old abandoned limerick we see lying around.

Tweaking Abandoned Work

If I were to drop dead tomorrow I would want the OEDILF to treat my tentative and confirming pieces on a take ’em or leave ’em basis when it comes to the wording, rhymes, rhythm and metre, and even punctuation: approve them directly if you consider them acceptable as they are, or shelve them. If I get the definition wrong and don’t get a chance to fix it, that’s my mistake and my bad luck. Others have been willing to hand over limericks to co-authors, or to the workshop with their name removed. That’s fine, as long as it’s an explicit authorial choice. But in the absence of such instructions, we should make the conservative assumption that authors want nothing changed without their say-so.

This is another reason to move pieces from self-RFA to final approval as promptly as possible. Having them linger for months can mean missing our chance for meaningful interaction with the author at the final stage, and pieces with a lot of workshopping invested in them can end up having to be abandoned.

There’s no easy solution to this problem that lets us approve everything in as perfect a state as we would ideally want. Hiding untended tentative pieces until the long-absent author returns—which may be never—saves us from wasting time and RFAs on pieces that are going nowhere while still preserving the author’s rights in their work. Untended confirming pieces we can approve directly if the author is missing, as their self-RFA is already a strong statement of authorial approval, but we should take care with any pre-STC changes to work by long-missing authors unless they’re unequivocally necessary.

Fixing a mistake in the Defined Words box or putting parentheses around a PG doesn’t affect the verse; they’re just technicalities related to how the OEDILF works. Beyond that, I don’t think we should change anything without input from the author beyond basic formatting issues, like bolding defined words or adding a missing period on the last line. Otherwise we risk undermining the bargain we’ve made with all of our contributors: we offer them workshopping and the lure of final approval to encourage them to take note of that workshopping, but they have the final say about what appears over their name. If they aren’t around to approve changes, then sadly that means shelving some good work.

There are, however, some abandoned limericks that are approvable with only a bolded defined word or the like, which have more than the required number of RFAs; and these we can directly approve, on the assumption that the author left them in a state they were happy with.

The Solution

We now handle abandoned work quite simply: after thirty days of author inactivity, their tentative limericks move to Untended status and their defined words go back onto the Word List. Their work returns to Tentative as soon as they log back in, but obviously if they’re gone for good this will never happen.

We allow logged-in members access to untended limericks, but not the whole world—in that sense they become the equivalent of held work. Editors can leave comments if they like, and will be able to judge for themselves (from the author’s last-login date) whether that’s a waste of time.

And that’s it. We don’t try to take over and rewrite an author’s work, with all of the moral rights issues that raises, and we don’t spend time on an absent author’s work that we could be spending on those right here, right now. Abandoned pieces will therefore never be approved, unless the author miraculously returns and works on them some more.

But that’s okay. We have thousands of pieces that have been approved, and thousands more that are being actively worked on. Those authors had their chance to get the piece approved—and still have it, if they’re still around—and if they’ve missed it, they’ve missed it.

We should consider abandoned limericks like posthumous manuscripts. We publish them in the sense that they’re still accessible to OEDILFers, the same as manuscripts are to researchers. They’re not lost—they’re still there (taking up a few bytes, sure, but not much compared to the rest of the OEDILF). We don’t try to pretend that they’re approved, because they never were approved in final form by the author, which is a key aspect of how we’ve always worked.

So it’s a race to get one’s work approved before one dies—a slow race in most cases, one hopes. But isn’t that true of any creative work in one’s life? An unfinished work never has the same status as finished work, even if it’s posthumously published—whether as a part-work or completed by someone else. It can never be what it would have been had it been completed and published on its author’s terms. And readers accept that, when the work is clearly labelled as such.

Taking this minimal approach still leaves open the possibility of a future editor selecting a “best of” the abandoned limericks and presenting them to the world on those terms, but avoids all the messy problems that would come with the OEDILF groupmind trying to take over an individual’s creative work.

 

See also: Copyright Concerns and The Sequel.

Reworked from forum comments from April 2005–December 2006.