Misplaced Pages talk:Notability (fiction)

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Proposed change to the guideline

This proposed change is to address the problem of many notable fiction articles do not have reliable secondary sources. One example of this is the Naruto Uzumaki article. Clearly notable but have no RELIABLE secondary sources what so ever. In the case of fiction articles, there is only one source of infomation - and that is the creaters and "databooks" released by them and many other secondary sources are derivitive of this(fan sites). This change aims to makes fiction articles that have been rated as high on the notibility scale exempt from deletion for the lack of secondary sources and/or secondary sources themself as obviously content relased as primary sources(ie, the databooks, from the creates) are obviously accurate. For an article to be exempt, it must be rated high on the notability scale by the wikiproject that is part of or have majority consenus(ie, a vote) Af 648 02:19, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Oppose The problem is that these ratings would give fans a blanket assurance that their favorite articles won't be deleted, and fans could (would?) tag all their articles with top-importance. It's IMO better to enforce guidelines like before with "if you can't or won't provide reliable third party sources, non-notability has to be assumed and this article will likely not be kept". If annoyed fans can find sources, great, add them to the article, improving it in the process. And I am not worried over mistakenly deleting really notable fiction articles; fans are saving them by what appears to be vote-stacking anyway. – sgeureka 03:07, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

The problem is that there little or non secondary sources for notiable fiction articles. Of course the notability rating would have to just and fair. And vote stacking wont count during afds anyway. What the change is trying to protect as articles that ARE important that lack secondary sources. See the example Naruto Uzumaki article. Af 648 03:22, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

If a topic has little or no secondary sources, it is not suitable for a separate wikipedia article. (I just read this comment by User:Shoy, which summarizes the points quiet nicely). What I see in Naruto Uzumaki is a huge violation of Misplaced Pages is not a plot summary and No original research. A good rule of thumb is to have 50% plot summary (preferably less), and 50% conception/production/reception/merchandise info. Except for the shortish (and hardly sourced) Design section, Naruto Uzumaki is almost only sourced by primary sources, and anybody at WP:GA or WP:FA (what all article should strive for) would advice you to massively trim the plot. And while I do realize that manga/anime/cartoon fans have a hard time to cover their favorite subjects in detail (because there aren't that many sources to begin with), it is not impossible to write awesome articles - have a look at The Simpsons's Troy McClure. – sgeureka 04:18, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

What i'm trying to say is not that articales do not need reliable secondary sources but for some there topics are none. In the case of Troy McClure, the is from the Simposons, if you do a google search, half of the results are objective, reliable secondary sources as it has many popular culture references where are there are almost none for the the character Naruto - all fan sites. Af 648 05:09, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

"... where are there are almost none for the the character Naruto - all fan sites."...Which means exactly that the topic is not notable for inclusion in Misplaced Pages, which is exactly what WP's definition of "notability" means. "The Simpsons" has been reviewed, being a prime time American-produced TV show, much more critically in English works than the licensed, sub/dubbed Japanese produced cartoon shown on a cable network. Thus, there is precedence for having more information about The Simpsons in-universe materials than there is for Naruto's in-universe details. WP is not an indiscriminate collection of information, and "notability" is the line that decides what is appropriate for inclusion. Note that this doesn't mean that Naruto the anime/manga is not notable - the series and its real work aspects (DVD releases, sales, etc.) are sufficient for supporting the series within WP, but because the universe within Naruto has not be critically analyzed through reliable sources, the inclusion of excessive in-universe fictional detail makes no sense. Remember, WP's definition of notability does not consider "importance" or "fame" or "popularity", so even though a character may be the favorite of millions through fan sites and forums boards, that's not reliable to include WP which is trying to build a verifiable source of general encyclopedic information.

Also, be aware that there does exist a wiki-type site that can be linked through WP where you can expand on these details without worrying about notability, through Wikia (Naruto specifically at . We encourage you to keep all the details at those sites, but the main space of WP must meet the goals of the Foundation. --MASEM 05:25, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Af648, the guideline already has a note to allow what you've proposed. "To a limited extent, sub-articles are sometimes born for technical reasons of length or style. Even these articles need real-world information to prove their notability, but must rely on the parent article to provide some of this background material (due to said technical reasons)."

In a situation like Naruto Uzumaki, the title character in a series that has been going on for about 8 years, having his own article isn't that much of a stretch. I haven't seen the show or read the manga, so I don't know if the same can be said for any of the other characters, but for the main character it would not surprise me. That being said, I think it's actually unlikely that there are no reliable secondary sources for Naruto Uzumaki. There more than likely is such sources, but likely in places people didn't think to look (other than the internet, and other than in English). -- Ned Scott 05:22, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Support Any new media, i.e. any work that has been published or broadcast on the past 5 years will be lacking in academic coverage and reliable secondary sources. As an example, our team looked extensively for it, for months, in English, Japanese and even Norwegian for those elusive secondary sources for 10 years old game bestseller Final Fantasy X (and managed to find some) but it was hard as hell. Earned us an FA, but fact remains that a fictional work needs TIME to be featured in "reliable secondary sources" no matter how popular or ground breaking it is. Should that fact keep all new fiction away from Misplaced Pages ? I believe it would be a darn shame. Were we printed in paper we could justify that newer works just "didn't fit the encyclopedia publishing date", but being the only real time, live update encyclopedia, Misplaced Pages's power to provide better coverage to new media is so great - and witnessed by us all - that I think it is almost a crime to limit Misplaced Pages to old moldy media. There are plenty of venues that cover old media. Misplaced Pages's unique nimble, agile reliable covering of newer works was one of it's powers and I will be sad to see it go just because we saddle ourselves with a self imposed demand for old moldy secondary sources that we already know won't be there for newer material Renmiri 05:55, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

PS: There is a Final Fantasy Wiki at Wikia, very thorough and very successful, so as a FF fan I couldn't care less if Misplaced Pages covers the games well or not. My games are very well covered elsewhere. My vote here is as Wikipedian, as I believe not having comprehensive material on one of the top selling video game series in the past 20 years or on Naruto, a wildly popular manga, or on Babylon V a groundbreaking TV series, would make Misplaced Pages a poorer encyclopedia. Renmiri 06:07, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

A damn shame indeed, and this is the fate of many topics that don't have sources. Fiction does not get special treatment when it comes to those kinds of things. But this is besides the point, in that we are looking for sources so that we have real world information. We are comprehensive with our topics in relation to the real world, not in relation to the fiction itself (that is, besides a basic understanding of the plot, etc). -- Ned Scott 06:25, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

PPS: Since when fans - people who care deeply for a topic and want to see it well covered here - have turned into the enemy at Misplaced Pages ? Amazing -and sad - how this place has changed since 2006! Renmiri 06:07, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I would be very interested in hearing an answer to this question, or further discussion on the topic. --Kizor 06:20, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that the people who are behind this guideline are not fans? This has nothing to do with being a fan of fiction or not, or editors vs other editors. -- Ned Scott 06:43, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Just read the comments above, like these ratings would give fans a blanket assurance that their favorite articles won't be deleted, and fans could (would?).... Anti fan bias is blatant in several comments here. And it saddens me, this used to be a place that respected editors who were passionate about their topics. Renmiri 05:53, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

It's unfortunate that as soon as an editor tries to follow and enforce guidelines/policies, he (in this case I) comes across as having an anti-fan bias. I have taken my fourth fiction article to GA/FA yesterday, so I'll hardly have any anti-fan sentiments, as I am a big fiction fan myself. What I can do however is point people to Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/Episodes where countless people are arguing, "But I added the Nielson rating and a TV.com review to the other 20kB of Plot, so how dare evil user merge/redirect this episode per WP:NOT#PLOT, WP:FICT, WP:TRIVIA, WP:QUOTE,...? Edit-warrrrr!!!" It's not far off to assume that at least some of these devoted fans would rate their episode articles with top-importance if that can save them from becoming redirects in the absense of other measures. – sgeureka 12:53, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Heh, there has always been a worthy effort to keep Misplaced Pages free of fancruft but the methods and attitude have changed a lot since 2006. In our team we personally took the fancrufty stuff and it's editor to Wikia or Wikbooks and helped the material get a home there. We treated people with respect, something I have not seen much of it lately, not to theres and not to me personally (not this discussion here, a prior incident). In 2006 even the word fancruft was frowned on, nowadays you see blatant stuff like above, where fans are talked about as being fanatic mobs that won't rest until they put their articles, in - gasp - a free wiki that is for billed as for anyone (lol!!!). I'm just lamenting the loss of the Misplaced Pages I knew and loved. This new Misplaced Pages saddens me, with every fictional article littered with self righteous "cleanup" tags from people who never wrote or edited.. :( < /end rant > Renmiri 23:43, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Your team? Last I checked I was an active editor in 2006, and last I checked I just spent a few hours today importing more articles to wikia:digimon. We encourage redirection over deletion so we can easily retrieve content for transwiki or article resurrection. This very guideline has a much stronger emphases on finding this content a new home than it did in 2006. I can't speak for every editor you've interacted with, the ones who really helped develop these guidelines that you are here to complain about, are not the people you think they are. ~~You want to talk about lame ass stuff like "the Misplaced Pages I knew and loved" go somewhere else. Drop the drama act and think about the situation for a moment.~~ Misplaced Pages has always been a harsh place, we've always had people on both extremes, and the grass was always greener on the other side. -- Ned Scott 01:20, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry about that last comment. I think I might be missing the same thing you're missing from time to time, perspective on the situation. From your perspective things have gotten much "worse", and I don't want to argue with you, I want to show you that things have gotten better. -- Ned Scott 01:30, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Never meant to say all who oppose this proposed guideline are evil. Deckiller, who has proposed a rewrite here, for instance, was a member of the project team I was on. He is a very nice guy and I consider him a friend and a superb editor. He and I opened a wiki at wikia to be a repository of articles for transwiki or article resurrection, for places that don't have a wikia yet. But guys like Deck are leaving in droves, while jerks are staying, at least from my perspective. Which really saddens me. Relax, I'm not accusing you of anything. The very fact that you are going through the trouble of transwiking articles and caring about fangirls like me shows that you are not like the jerks I'm talking about. Renmiri 14:57, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm a comparably new editor, so I have no idea how wikipedia once used to be. But what I can say with absolute certainty is that respect goes both ways. I like to think respect for wikipedia's policies and guidelines is essential to make it the best it can be. But when there are dozens of fans screaming murder at the few editors actually trying to uphold wikipedia's guidelines and policies, I am not in favor of further softening policies/guidelines just so that guideline-ignorant fans can happily run wild. (Maybe my time with the episode article discussion just gives me the wrong impression in this matter, who knows.) – sgeureka 02:36, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

...but fact remains that a fictional work needs TIME to be featured in "reliable secondary sources" no matter how popular or ground breaking it is. Should that fact keep all new fiction away from Misplaced Pages ? I don't have the impression at all that new fiction is kept away from wikipedia, in the temporary absense of secondary sources or not. Creating new articles to cover the plot extensively however should be limited to providing context for information from secondardy sources. It's not important for the general reader what a character did and what happened to him, but why (intention of the writers) he/it did.

I think that if you wish to take an article to GA or FA, you'll realize pretty quickly that the plot is not important at all. For example, I'll be taking my fourth article (Characters of Carnivàle) to GA/FA in a few weeks, and although I had originally planned to take some of the plot weight off of List of Carnivàle episodes by going into more plot detail in the Characters article, I still haven't got around to do that. Several main(!) actors still have only one or two lines of plot summary, and the article already hits 80kB. Furthermore, I'll probably trim the plot (what little there is) in the Characters article before I massively add to that. Why encourage fans even more to write up the plot when it will most likely be deleted anyway when the article gets improved to GA? (Compare the article Brother Justin Crowe with the first paragraph of Characters of Carnivàle#Brother Justin Crowe; that his section may be long enough now to be spun out again is besides the point). – sgeureka 16:17, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Strongest possible oppose. There is no need for a relaxing of the guideline. Obviously notable subjects like the Naruto series and Final Fantasy series are incredibly well-covered in numerous independent sources. Very often, reliable sources are difficult to find online. However, there are a vast number of periodicals that deal with anime and video games, for example. It may require a subscription to an online periodical service or a trip to the library to access the magazine stacks. However, there are certainly plenty of sources available. There's no need to weaken the guideline, just a need to use some sense and better research practices. Vassyana 19:52, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

This isn't a vote, but this is the wrong place to discuss this anyway. That would be at WP:V, which pretty unequivocally states that "If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Misplaced Pages should not have an article on it." (emphasis added) That's pretty unequivocal and very true. If you want to write long, primary-sourced plot articles, there are Wikias available for that. They don't go here. Articles here about fictional works should cover them from an out of universe perspective, and that means using out of universe sources. If there is little or no secondary material about a work, it doesn't belong here yet, it belongs on a fansite or Wikia. Seraphimblade 20:02, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
My advice to Af648: Learn Japanese. If you want to write about elements of Japanese popular culture, you'll have lots more luck finding useful secondary sources if you search materials written in the language of the element you're researching. — Brian (talk) 02:30, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

We had a fluent Japanese speaker / reader on our team and it was still hard to find the much vaunted reliable, third-party sources for a 10 year old game. With new media works it's like a catch 22, you find reliable sources they get tagged as much too "in universe", if you find 3rd party material it gets tagged as unreliable. People seem to forget that academic material goes through a lot of bureaucracy to get approved as course material. It is simply an unrealistic expectation to demand academic coverage for media works that are not at least 10 years old. Anime and manga periodicals are not exactly treated as "reliable" here. And when you get the Game publisher's own material you get told it's too "in-universe". Renmiri 05:47, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

You're one situation should not be used to open the floodgates to tons and tons of dreck sourced from fan pages. If something is notable and needs its own article, we use secondary sources to establish that that is the case. If there are no secondary sources, the item does not need its own article. I'm glad you are able to draw on a Japanese speaker's talents, but I think a great many of the people who complain about not being able to use fan sites and the like are not even trying to search in other languages. Unfortunately, it may simply be a waiting game with some topics. You just might not be able to get that FA star for your article on the series that came out last week, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for reliability. — Brian (talk) 05:59, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Or to put it more bluntly: If those sources don't exist yet, don't write the article yet. Wait until they do. If they never do, never write. That article doesn't have to happen now, or ever. Seraphimblade 08:29, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

I hesitate to weigh-in on this discussion, believing that Deckiller has a point when he says this is an "impossible-to-solve debate." Nevertheless, I feel compelled to object to Seraphim's line of reasoning. IMO, the black and white demand "secondary sources = article/few or no secondary sources = no article" are thoughtless. It has the net effect of a zero-tolerance policy. We don't have to think about whether a subject is notable and come up with a rationale argument, all we have to look at is secondary sources or no secondary sources. I think we apply a higher standard to fiction and fiction-related articles than any other article in WP. Many articles regarding highways have few sources, and most of the sources they do have simply say the highway exist - not comment on the notability of the highway. I think we can afford to look at fictional articles on a case by case basis. Have faith, the chaff will eventually be sifted out. Ursasapien (talk) 09:29, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Agreed 100%. I think though that his position really goes to the core of what I'm saying here: New media, should it be covered by Misplaced Pages ? I believe that Misplaced Pages's web nature and it's "anyone can edit" policy makes it the PERFECT match to be a powerful source for information in newer works, fiction or non fiction. Yesterday's episode of CSI or Al Gore's Nobel peace prize - last week's news - can be covered in Misplaced Pages today, thoroughly, comprehensively and properly. What other encyclopedia or reference work can do this ? Not one. Even on line Britannica can't do it, because of all the red tape. Let's not make Misplaced Pages into a red tape heaven, let's use it's powerful and innovative policies to be the best source for all topics, be it new or old Renmiri 10:57, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

The problem comes when you define what a best source for all topics actually means. As soon as someone triangulates a better position than WP:AFD from Misplaced Pages is not paper and Misplaced Pages is not indiscriminate, we'll be fine. Until then, happy editing. Hiding Talk 11:25, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

The reason we want sources is so we have real-world information. An article about a highway is something already in the real world, so you can't really compare the two. Sourcing the plot itself is never a problem, so that is not what we are looking for. -- Ned Scott 01:35, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

I understand what you are saying, Ned, in a sense. I fully support fiction being written about using an "out-of-universe" tone and being more than simply a plot summary. I just believe strongly that a work of fiction is a "real-world" thing and notability for a particular fiction-related article should be able to be established by the number of readers/viewers/purchasers. Once notability is established, a decent stub article can be made by including information about the author/producer/etc. along with a plot summary (not a rewrite of the entire fictional work). I think Renmiri has a good point about WP's ability to keep up with this information and document things in an encyclopedia that were never available before. Ursasapien (talk) 07:58, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

We're mixing up issues here. Rarely have I seen an article that covers a fictional work put for deletion ("work" being book, a complete TV series, a movie, a video game, and whatnot) - there are certain clean-up aspects such as merging of individual books into a single series article, but generally it is still acknowledged that the published works are notable. The release of such a work is generally notably by itself, and particularly for modern works, its easy to find and source this information. Mind you there's still a level of notability covered by WP:N that must be met - I'm not going to put up a page about a local cable channel show, for example, unless it has earned some national coverage - but in general, "published" fictional media is notable. The other side which is the issue that we've been discussing, is the fictional elements of that work, and how notable they are to be able to merit their own articles - this is where we've been contesting this issue for several months. This is an area where some newer media may not have as much analysis or criticism or the like to support having subpages for individual fictional elements compared to older works. Notability must be demonstrated for a topic, it cannot be assumed that just because the work is notably popular that the characters or other fictional elements of the work are also notably popular. However, once notability is demonstrated, it never goes away. --MASEM 14:06, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

People are still going on about this? Here's some advice to all of you: edit some non-fiction or blatantly notable topics. Take a break from this impossible-to-solve debate. — Deckill er 05:53, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Comment, I would say that this 'proposal' is the situation we have now. Fancruft with weak wikipojects gets deleted, fancruft with strong wikiprojects stays put.--Nydas 20:14, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm not really sure how to interpret your comment. Are you saying this is a gaming-the-system kind of thing, or a we-let-it-slide-because-there's-evidence-people-are-going-to-deal-with-it-and-make-it-better thing? (don't get me wrong, as I have seen evidence of both examples) -- Ned Scott 20:50, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Gaming the system is closer to what I mean, though ultimately the only 'system' which really matters is winning AfD votes. Fancruft with powerful Wikiprojects, experienced editors and admins behind it can be kept more or less indefinitely. Look at the Spoo AfD; the keep voters are overwhelmingly experienced editors (and quite a few admins too). It's not a conscious process, just an unconscious reflection of our inbuilt bias towards certain topics.--Nydas 21:43, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

And you say there's no bias against fans Ned ? /that is just soo typical. A strong wikiproject with experienced editors tends to produce QUALITY articles, of course those articles stay. As they well should. Weak wikiprojects might be lucky enough to have one dedicate genius but odds are the articles are poorly written, poorly sourced and out of shape. Yet instead of going for the obvious conclusionm Nydas blames fans and tars all fiction articles as "fancruft". By it's nature, the current system already ensures that weak articles that get deleted merited deletion and the articles that stay deserve to be kept. Nydas seems to be looking for a silver bullet to delete all articles he dislikes the topic, be they done by experienced editors or not. How typical of a mindset that treats fans as the enemy! Renmiri 04:45, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

It's NOT quality which matters, but notability. Poorly written, poorly sourced and out of shape articles are not supposed to be deleted just for that. Similarly, articles with good formatting and lots of little blue numbers do not automatically entail a keep. But you seem to be arguing that this is the case.--Nydas 08:45, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages is a dynamic project - the level of quality for articles can, will, and has changed over the lifetime - this means that some articles that were Featured or Good articles may fail the new standards and are effectively demoted; similarly articles created by large Wikiprojects of experienced editors may need to be merged, trimmed, or deleted because the guidelines and policies of WP change. Mind you, there are review procedures for all of these: not one person can mass remove large swathes of fictional element articles without either being reverted or being put through consensus.

The point I think Ned is making is that when these articles from long-standing wikiprojects are brought to light per new guidelines, there's a majority of votes to keep it because of partial ownership ideas - they've worked hard to get that article to that state prior, and in most cases don't see the need to change it to met new guidelines. However, it is necessary to point out that majority is not the same as consensus if the wider WP consensus is against that majority (eg it violates consented policies and guidelines) (Of course, that said, while a previous version of this guideline was consented, the current one is still up in the air pending several other actions).

Basically, this is not a war against fans, this is attempting to convince those dead-set in certain ways that consensus can change and that new notability guidelines make may some articles less qualified than before - this happens not only in fictional works but real-world and other more practical arts and sciences categories - its just that because of WP's unique nature, the bulk of these seem to be fans of fictional works. --MASEM 05:13, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

That is indeed a very good point Masem. This newly found worshipping of Notabilty above all, for instance, wasn't here last year. I myself lost an editing discussion when (oh the irony!) I proposed to merge a marginal article about an obscure minigame. I was told that even if it wasn't notable it still was important, for completeness. I can understand and respect that, what I can't really swallow is the lack of civility and the zealot stance those disputes are taking shaoe nowadays. But meh... maybe it was just my personal experience Renmiri 14:04, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

In that case there really wasn't a WikiProject behind the article, and Spoo is it's own weird existence. Any editor is going to hesitate on supporting deletion on something that was once an FA, and is really well written. Like I said, Spoo is just a really weird article, and an example of how we try to define notability. I think Spoo exists because we were so focused on getting real world information that when we got it, we didn't expect to have it for such a minor topic.

I do know what you mean, though, and there is always some form of bias in all of us. Surely there are many AfDs that get a lot of supporters for one way or the other based on their own personal taste, but such an issue is not nearly as extreme as the picture you've just painted. -- Ned Scott 01:02, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Very true. AfD is a rather political, often arbitrary process. It makes me think of "Is This Anything?" from Letterman's show.--Father Goose 03:56, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

This may have been raised previously, but I can see one potential reason to include articles on main characters in fictional works even without readily available secondary sources: elimination of redundancy. Imagine, for instance, that we didn't have any secondary sources to support an article on the fictional character Spider-Man. Without that article on Misplaced Pages, every article on books, comic books, television series, movies, or any other media featuring that character would have to contain at least some backstory and description of the character to give the article context, whereas now we can just link there. This may be an analogous situation to the Naruto Uzumaki article described above. Imagine The Hound of the Baskervilles, for example, if the first main paragraph of the article had to be devoted to explaining who Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were. JavaTenor 17:01, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

While eliminating redundance is of course always desirable, this doesn't mean that a separate article needs to exist. For example, Ben Hawkins (main character of Carnivàle) redirects to Characters of Carnivàle#Ben Hawkins, which works great for the article series. (FYI, he has established enough notability for a separate article, but he may not have enough material overall to become a good article, so the decision to merge him was purely editorial.) – sgeureka 17:48, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

That's certainly fine (and in many cases the best solution), as long as the relevant "list of characters" article is not also deleted. JavaTenor 17:52, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

SUPPORT Non-editing users of wikipedia expect it to contain "The sum of all human knowledge" as Jimbo Whales once said. These non-contributing users of wikipedia do not care a tinker's cuss that there is a star trek wiki, and monty python wiki or whatever - they come here because they believe they can find everything they need to know about ANY topic - as it should be. They do not goto Google and search for "Naruto Uzumaki wiki" the come to wikipedia and expect there to be a consider article detailing the character: Naruto Uzumaki. Reliability? Reliable sourcing is used to provide verifiability - who better to check the facts of a fictional universe than the (rabid?) fans of said universe. Notability? Notability is not only established by the presence of reliable sources, it is pretty much accepted that all highschools are notable, because they affect the lives of many people. Fiction does this as well, just look at the star trek conventions, the people dressing up as characters from movies and they go and see them etc. Misplaced Pages needs to contain articles like this, people deleting apparent "fancruft" just because they personally don't believe that it "deserves" an article page, and then hiding behind bureaucratic policy quote are cowards. This is not meant to offend, but I am yet to see a reason for not including these types of articles that does not involve someone quoting WP:NOTABILITY.. I would like to quote my own, two infact - WP:NOTPAPER and WP:IGNORE. If an article is annoying you, that nice, go and make a nice cup of tea and hit the random article button again - and have a nice day while someone who wants to find out information about that topic you just left is actually able to. - Fosnez (talk) 13:16, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
- Um, if it contains the "Sum of all human knowledge", then you should really be advocating for a change to What Misplaced Pages is not, because it's clear there that "the sum of all human knowledge" doesn't actually include everything you can think of. There are restrictions on what can be added. Sorry, but Red #434 in Star Trek does not deserve his own article. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 13:19, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
  - "Sorry, but Red #434 in Star Trek does not deserve his own article" - Why not. Give me one reason why we can't have an article on every character that has ever been. If someone has the time to write them, well who are we to stop them - just because we think it is not "worthy" of an article... Fosnez (talk) 02:46, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
    - Because Wiki is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Also, what would stop you from writing an article about yourself? Who are you? How are you noteworthy? Red #434 is in an episode for 10 minutes before he's killed; then he's never mentioned again. That means it isn't noteworthy. Sure, if his character received significant coverage from reliable sources, he should have an article. But simply existing is not a reason to have an article. Also, I don't believe that Jimbo meant we should have an article on everything, when he said that part about "sum of all human knowledge", I do believe there is a limit to what should be considered "knowledge" and what is down right "trivial". BIGNOLE (Contact me) 02:56, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
      - Red #434 was nominated for deletion in April, but got kept (quite resoundingly). --Nydas 09:03, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
      - Firstly, as Nydas has pointed out above - Quod erat demonstrandum. Secondly, you cannot decide what is trivial, noone can. Somebody thought that Mzoli's Meats was not trivial, and other people who would have never visited the place thought it was, and there was one almighty shitfight about it. As I have said before, yes there should be limits to can be included, but we are currently FAR short of Jimbo's goal - why do you think there ARE so many "fancruft" articles, could it be, perhaps, that people think that this is knowledge that should be included? A central source of knowledge for the entire planet to refer to? Edited by people who are experts in the field? (I.E. the fans) These articles are actually FAR less likely to contain error because they are attended to by the people who love the subject. Until the recent spate or deletionism that is sweeping wikipedia like a plague, I would come here to read up on the Lore of a tv series or games, but now I have to refer to google and sort through the websites with more ads than content... If I understand Jimbo's dream, it is that if the human race were to disappear tomorrow, and an alien race were to find a complete copy of the wikipedia, they would have a complete understanding of us as a species - this HAS to include our Lore, or it is just a set of sterile bullet points, with no examples of actual culture. Fosnez (talk) 11:56, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
        Nice try fellas, but "Leslie" appeared in 56 episodes of Star Trek, and not the "single episode" example that I provided. Your rebuttle has not water in this case. Also, you should go to the interview where Jimbo gives that quote, because he also talks about something else, and that's sourcing. He considers it an imperative, and that we should do it more. Guess what, we have a policy here that says if it isn't sourced then it can be removed on the spot. We also have a policy on plots, so you cannot have an article that's just a plot, and nothing else. Since you cannot interpret things for the character you cannot include your own "expert" opinion. Oh, and most importantly, this is "Notability (fiction)". Nothing can be changed on this page that will contradict what is one the general notability page, which is clear that all articles must have significant coverage from reliable third-party sources to establish their notability, and inclusion on Misplaced Pages. Or, as has been said, what will stop every person in the world from making an article about themselves? BIGNOLE (Contact me) 12:05, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
        Excuse me but I happen to know Jimbo Wales loves video games and does consider them worthy of coverage. I was there at Wikibooks when the issue got discussed and that is one of the most puzzling things to me, to see Misplaced Pages deletionists targeting game fans, and IMHO going against his wishes. Renmiri (talk) 03:21, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Okay, and since when did Jimbo's opinion actually mean anything other than yours or mine? Jimbo doesn't dictate what goes on Misplaced Pages. He can pull the plug when he wants, I'm sure, but nothing on this site is on here strictly because Jimbo says "it should be". Regardless, as valued as his opinion is anyway, what you are quoting is Jimbo talking about game walkthroughs on Wikibooks, not about the inclusion criteria as it pertains to fiction on Misplaced Pages. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 03:45, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
- Tall words for someone who just disputed a quote by Jimbo Wales on the prior comment. The quote in Wikibooks is very relevant here because it does show his unequivocal support for including video game information on his wikis. His problem at Wikibooks was the charter he had to abide by for Wikibooks to receive public grants, i.e., articles and topics at Wikibooks have to be part of an academic course. This is not the case at Misplaced Pages yet you guys seem to want to know better than Jimbo. Renmiri (talk) 06:37, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
  - Um, I think you are taking his words out of context. No where in there did he say, "I love video games and I think we should have as much information about what happens in a video game with its characters." He merely stated that he wished they could have walkthrough guides on Wikibooks. In no way did that translate to fictional character histories on Misplaced Pages. Please re-read his statement before making grossly negligent interpretations over here. Thank you. (P.S. I like video games too, does that mean anything? No. The fact that he likes anything has no bearing on this encyclopedia. Jimbo is not God. Jimbo's opinion on whether a movie should have an article, if it fails notability does not change the fact that it fails and thus does not get an article). To better clarify my point, if Jimbo came here today and said "are fictional topic articles need to no criteria for inclusion; we should have an article on every character no matter how minor," we still would not follow his opinion. Jimbo's opinion does not dictate policy or guidelines, consensus does. On Misplaced Pages, he is just another editor (granted one that can pull the plug if he so chooses, but still just an editor). He has to abide by all the rules we do. That means that we respect and welcome his opinions, but they are of no more value than yours, mine, or any other editor on Misplaced Pages. Everyone is treated equally (supposedly, I'm sure some people get treated crappy). BIGNOLE (Contact me) 12:48, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
    - Hehehe, No where in there did he say, "I love video games and I think we should have as much information about what happens in a video game with its characters." except in the second paragraph where he says I am an advocate of free culture. I love video game books. I think that people should be passionately writing books about video games in a collaborative manner. These can be walkthroughs, these can be textbooks about the sociological phenomena of games, these can be textbooks for game programming, these can be user manuals, these can be joke books, these can be fan fiction, these can be all kinds of cool and interesting things that I have not imagined, and that none of us have yet imagined,... You are welcome for the English Reading 101 lesson you thanked me for. And a piece of advice: You should respect Jimbo and his vision, without him there would be no Misplaced Pages for you to strut around grandstanding Renmiri (talk) 14:29, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Um, let's see. "I love video game books"--that's from Jimbo. Exactly where does that apply to Misplaced Pages? Nowhere. "I think people should be passtionately writing books about video games"--Jimbo again. Where does that apply to Misplaced Pages? Nowhere. Please stop confusing his discussion about Wikibooks, with this discussion about Misplaced Pages. They are two different locations, governed by different sets of rules. If my next statement is too difficult, please ask and I'll explain further, but: He is not talking about fiction on Misplaced Pages. He is talking about Wikibooks, and fiction in general. Otherwise, if he was referring to Misplaced Pages then his "opinion" would be in direct contradiction to the What Misplaced Pages is not policy. Lastly, please show me where I said that I do not respect Jimbo's opinion. I don't believe I ever said that. I have actually, carefully stated that Jimbo could close this place down if he wished, which alludes to the fact that I'm quite aware that it is because of him that we have Misplaced Pages. That being said, his opinion is no greater than anyone else's that edits this site, when it comes to articles in question. What I wish is that editors find real rebuttles to guidelines and policies, and not misquote or misunderstand what Jimbo says. Hell, I think there should be a rule, simply put, Don't Quote Jimbo period. Find your own arguments, because most of the time people are misusing what he says in an effort to justify what they think. We have notability requirements for a reason, because not everything in the world is worth noting beyond a couple of sentences of information. Plain and simple. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 18:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
- Yes, please explain why you deliberately omitted the end of the sentence you quoted: passionately writing books about video games in a collaborative manner which is the specific mention to wikimedia venues as Wikisource, wikia and Misplaced Pages, as Jimbo adds in a further paragraph. He also has a comment that IMHO applies specifically to this newfound Notability fanaticism here at wikipedia: it keeps us from having to fight about whether various things are 'important enough' or 'serious enough' for Wikibooks. (A silly question, I think, because all kinds of things are important, and demeaning someones work as not being serious enough is not kind.) Renmiri (talk) 09:34, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Renmiri, I think you are misinterpreting that post on Wikibooks. But I won't engage in this kind of Jimbo exegesis. If you think it's of any relevance, why not post a message on his talk page to find out what he thinks about fiction on Misplaced Pages? --B. Wolterding (talk) 14:01, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
- I might just do that ;) If you read that wikibooks page you will see it wouldn't be the first time I engage in discussion with him. Renmiri (talk) 09:34, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
  - - - Answer me this then, why do you think there are so many "fancruft" articles. Fosnez (talk) 13:49, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
        Two reasons: first, the present version of general notability requirements ("significant coverage in secondary sources") is less than a year old; previously, it was just a concept which was very subjective, and thus easily allowed the inclusion of such fancraft articles. Secondly, it is a combination of writing by example and a certain amount of satisfaction and enjoyment for a new editor to come along and help to fill in information missing on his/her favorite show or fandom, certainly when we have a good chunk of The Simpsons information here. People want to write what they know and WP provides them that outlet. Thus, fancruft type works tends to be kudzo-like - it can grow at a much faster rate than it could be managed. Because of both of these, we are trying to help educate editors that there is a standard that pretty much pushes most fancruft to Wikias, though allows for those elements that can be described as notable to remain. --MASEM 14:45, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Rejected?

Since it seems very clear that there is no consensus on multiple issues with this guideline shouldn't we change this to rejected? At this point I'm not even sure if we have a consensus on what we disagree on. The only thing there seems to be agreed upon is no one is happy with this guideline, no mater what changes are made. This discussion has taken place here, at the village pump, and at WP:N on various occasions over the past few months and the only thing I have seen is that no one can agree on anything. Ridernyc (talk) 15:11, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think anyone involved thinks that the core of the guideline is incorrect - it's either that it needs more guidance as for its application or it needs more discussion on a rationale procedure to handle non-notable works that doesn't promote AfD as the first step. WP:N + WP:PLOT gives the core of the guideline - that cannot be changed.

I would say that those involved in trying to support articles from going to AfD to make sure to get an idea of the history of the article and bring it to light if the article was AfD'd without any warning or with minimal time to make changes, pointing out that WP:FICT does not advocate deletion unless other routes have been taken (which the present page states, and what we're trying to make crystal clear in a rewrite.

(I'd also be worried that if this was marked rejected, and other editors started noticing that, we'd have a flood of fancruft. Again, the core, being WP:N + WP:PLOT, is a logical continuation - its the details of implimentation). --MASEM 15:24, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

If this guideline is rejected, then people will just go to AfD directly, citing WP:NOT#PLOT and WP:N, possibly also WP:OR and WP:V/WP:RS, making the goals of those who opposite its current state much harder to achieve. Finding a middleground that encourages discussion before going to AfD is wanted here, although you can never punish those who take a more direct approach to prevent gaming-the-system discussions. – sgeureka 15:59, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I think some sort of guidance has support, even if I don't think this page as it stands does, and I think disputed is the right tag. Most of us want to see a push towards the middleground sgeureka identifies. However, if we can't find that middleground, then an historical tag might make more sense. Hiding T 16:15, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I think we have tried to reach the middle ground and it never works. The main problem I have is with this guideline being changed constantly. If we want conversations to take place instead of AFD the guideline needs to be stable and stay the same for months. You can't have a guideline that changes 3-4 times a month. If anything this is forcing things to AFD. I personally have stopped citing this guideline due to the edit warring. Any middle ground will always be fought over. And as I have pointed out before most of this is and should be covered other places such as WP:WAF the sub-article argument is not a notability issue. Ridernyc (talk) 16:24, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

The sub-article is made a notability issue by those people who nominate and delete such sub articles based on lacking notability. Hiding T 16:43, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I understand and agree that technically, there is nothing in WP:FICT that changes from WP:N. However, I strongly believe that fictional notability is an area that needs a large amount of guidance for both new articles and existing articles, above and beyond the guidance that WP:N outlines or the scope of WP:WAF (which is a MOS). We just need to start a rewrite, propose it to the community at large, and get it in place ASAP. --MASEM 17:09, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't agree that the sub-article problem is not a notability issue. While subarticles are in principle covered by WP:SUMMARY, the summary style approach is often so much overstressed for fictional topics (dozens of plot-only subarticles for one work of fiction) that we need additional guidance here. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:52, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

You say it's a notability issue but then talk about real world context of articles, notability and real world context of sub-articles have nothing to do with each other and should not be dealt with in the notability guideline. Ridernyc (talk) 20:45, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I hate to break it to you, but WP:FICT is basically broken down to "notability of a sub-topic can be justified by real-world information". For non-fictional topics, this isn't an issue, because all of the information is in the real world, so we then define notability by reliable sources, but don't bother mentioning real-world context since it's already there. -- Ned Scott 23:32, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

It is laughable to think that WP:FICT is rejected just because of the recent ranting on this talk page. Stop. and. think. A great many of you have become down right impatient, expecting instant and completely satisfactory results. Also, many of you seem to forget that a consensus does not mean getting everything your way. Most of these issues we don't have disagreement on, but we don't agree right away on how to word them. Stop freaking out and getting all over-dramatic. -- Ned Scott 17:51, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, when we do come across stuff that a lot of people can't agree on, we often counter that by giving more vague advice and letting editors sort out the details on a more case-by-case basis. Personally, this is why I think WP:FICT does look the way it does, because the more exact you try to make it the more people start to disagree with things. We don't have a rule saying what exactly you can or cannot write about, but instead we try to guide the thinking of the editors and get them to view the articles from the perspective of the real world.

I'm sorry for being a bit harsh in these discussions, but everyone needs to stop panicking and/or being so pessimistic about all of this. We all pretty much agree on is finding more alternatives to AfD for these articles, even the ones that don't really have a home here. We don't necessarily agree on arbitrary guidelines like how many articles should be made for each subject, but we can give examples and at least get people thinking of different situations. A few different times I proposed a "gray area table" example that was similar to what is seen on WP:CANVAS#Types of canvassing and WP:BADLINKS#Link assessment table (maybe with more than one table for more than one type of article).

This also goes back to some discussion a while ago when the "sub-article for style/technical reasons" part was added. There was a lot of talk about re-evaluating all of our fictional guidelines, WP:FICT, WP:WAF, WP:EPISODE, and seeing how they relate to each other. Not to mention the current arbcom case (that I'm a party of) that talks about the community's need to find ways to deal with these articles. These are on-going issues that we are trying to figure out, and they are not disputed issues simply because we haven't figured out all the answers yet. Thinking about these things as disputes only builds up the non-existence dispute in our minds. -- Ned Scott 18:32, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the core of this guideline is good, but it has a major deficiency in its wide-open treatment of sub-articles.

As per a previous discussion in October, the sub-article issue is a problem because it provides a big loophole in the basic principles of WP:N. Para 2 of Misplaced Pages:Notability (fiction)#Notable_topics should simply be deleted. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:21, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

You've got it wrong. Para 2 draws directly from deletion policy, and since policy supercedes guidance, WP:N must be the page which is in error and needs to be deleted. Hiding T 00:38, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Show me where a policy states you can ignore all polices if an article is a sub-article. That's basically what has been implied to varying degrees depending on which edit we look at. Also keep in mind we are talking about fiction which has it's own set of rules, where is the policy that lets people ignore WP:Plot? Ridernyc (talk) 23:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Wow that's easy. Ignore all rules. If the sub-article "improves or maintains Misplaced Pages", then we should ignore guidelines and policies that say we shouldn't have it. Especially as WP:PLOT is not a core "non-negotiable" policy like no original research or neutral point-of-view. DHowell (talk) 07:58, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Quality (and Potential) of Wikias and Episode Pages

I would like to question whether Wikias can ever be an effective solution for information moved from Misplaced Pages. The mere fact people have had to give me links on talk pages (in response to my complaints about the reduction of information to about three lines of text) to a Wikia (and that there were no obvious links on Misplaced Pages itself) proves in my mind that the Wikia system doesn't work, added to which is the fact that the Wikias are unlikely to be as updated or have such a large userbase (or quality of articles), that Wikias (in general) lack any support by Firefox search bars or similar useful apps, that the page formats are awful, and collapse completely when the page is beyond about three printer pages in length (in both Firefox and IE, the former of which is practically unusable), and the unlikelyhood of them appearing in a decent position in search engine rankings.

I find it amusing that pages such as episode pages are considered poor quality when they are far more readable than many other pages, in particular those on scientific subjects that seem to assume that (apart from the summary, in most cases, which is normally easier to read but more limited than the article) the reader has a full knowledge of every subject mentioned, which simply defies belief in terms of research. Misplaced Pages is a fantastic resource, but this continual deletion of information seems to be taking away its primary benefit over other encyclopedias, that being that you can type in a topic you are looking for and in 99.9% of cases there will be an article for it that at least acts as a reasonably up-to-date NPOV (which is particularly useful on subjects otherwise plagued with bias if they were to be searched for on Google) starting point for further learning.

Due to the amount of effort required (and the impossibility for those who aren't admin) to return a page from deletion, and the ease with which pages are deleted without consideration, Misplaced Pages is losing that usefulness. Even a single seperate (but listed at the bottom of the main page alongside Wikinews, Wikiquote etc.) wiki for TV, Games and etc. culture would've been a better move. It seems very strange that episode pages (always a useful resource for myself) are reduced to a summary, completely useless in practically all cases. I understand that articles should be merged if they do not justify their own page, but why on earth is most of the content on the merged page taken away in the process, including (ironically) real world info which is always used as an argument by those who justify the process. The Wikia argument, as I've mentioned above, holds no water in my mind. Websites such as IMDB, and TV.com have distracting adverts, or require a subscription for detailed information, or simply lack any decent information on a subject. Misplaced Pages, by the way it works, excels at this sort of information. Splitting people into 'fans' and 'non-fans' and labelling them will get us nowhere at all.

I suggest that either linking is improved for inter-wikia problems (which still causes problems regarding quality), or (as I suggested) a single wiki for all TV and modern media info made, or that Misplaced Pages should reincorporate this information and it should once again be possible for people to use Misplaced Pages as an encyclopaedia for finding out unopinionated and unbiased information, rather than to find three lines of text that any website on the web could write and that may as well not exist at all. Thoughts?

(I created this new section because I couldn't for the life of me figure out where this should fit in on the page itself, if there is somewhere else on this page it should be, move it.) --Riche (talk) 20:26, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

For starters: "that Wikias (in general) lack any support by Firefox search bars or similar useful apps, that the page formats are awful, and collapse completely when the page is beyond about three printer pages in length (in both Firefox and IE, the former of which is practically unusable)," That is a simple CSS issue. When I took up the task of revamping Digimon Wiki I did a simple copypaste of Misplaced Pages's CSS, with a few minor alterations, and now Digimon Wiki gets to enjoy all the formatting perks and bug fixes that Misplaced Pages has. Adding search bar support for Firefox is very easy, and lot of addons simply let you add a custom search entry that is no different from the rest. I even did this on my cell phone. It's as simple as entering a url like http://somesite.wikia.com/$1 and giving it a name. Auto Wiki Browser is works on Wikia hosted wikis, as well as Pywikipediabot, software that runs a lot of our bots on Misplaced Pages (including my own User:NedBot).

As for the other issues you brought up, well most of these wikis are, as we are, a work in progress. You can't really make a blanket statement that "the Wikia system doesn't work". Wikia doesn't micromanage wikis, instead editing communities for each wiki pretty much run the show (with a few basic guidelines). If there are wikis that are not working, that's pretty much the fault of that wiki, and shouldn't be used to judge other wikis. I've been very surprised at the quality of some of the wikis out there, who not only produce in-depth information about a work of fiction, but also carry over values such as NPOV and verifiability.

That being said, your concern about inactivity is something I completely agree with, and I also think it would be far more efficient to just use a general "TV" or whatever wiki rather than splitting them by show. Being split and causing inactivity is an issue we even face here within the Wikimedia family, as we have eight other sister projects, but don't get nearly as much attention as Misplaced Pages. (One exciting thing I found out last night is that wikis on Wikia can request additional MediaWiki extensions be installed, such as the one being discussed for the English Misplaced Pages at Misplaced Pages:Flagged revisions. I hope to explore that to help handle some of the issues caused by inactivity, such as vandalism reverting, or maintaining a quality version of the page by default).

There's also a lot of people who don't even know about Wikia yet, meaning we have a whole pool of potential editors for these sites that have yet to discover them (just as we have potential editors who haven't discovered Misplaced Pages yet).

And we should remember, these are issues facing all independent wikis, not just Wikia hosted wikis. Many of these issues are evolving, as works in progress. Not only in content, but in how the wikis themselves are managed. One of the ideas I want to explore is to not just take Misplaced Pages's article content for other wikis, but to take what we've learned in how we manage things. It's something not really documented outside of our own site, and simply sharing these experiences means that other people don't have to re-invent the wheel for each new wiki.

There is no doubt that we are leading the way having a successful wiki here on the English WIkipedia, but we're still far from perfect. These are new grounds we are breaking, and new lessons that we are learning. Misplaced Pages's co-existence with external wikis will be very important the more we grow, and like with Misplaced Pages itself, these things not going to be born over-night. -- Ned Scott 23:12, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

A solution to make Wikia's content better and more well known is simple in my mind. Rather than going through the hassle of trying to convince stoic "Policy Soldiers" to revise their views or create an entirely new sister encyclopedia, a template or something similar could be made and attached to articles that link to Wikia. Here, I drafted a prototype in MS Paint. An obvious yet unobtrusive template at the top of the page would catch the attention and attract people seeking in-universe and plot information and editors alike. Bam, the fascists are happy and so are the fans. Someone forward this idea to the appropriate discussion page. - The Norse (talk) 23:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Not sure how people would feel about it being presented at the top of the page (style reasons and all), but Template:FreeContentMeta seems to be what you're thinking of :) -- Ned Scott 00:00, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Hm, yes. I see... Well the obvious problem with such a template is that no uses it and no one ever sees them when they are used because their natural place is at the very bottom of rather long articles. These issues should probably addressed if subject-specific Wikias are ever to become as successful as they should be. I don't think them being fit snugly into infoboxes would be that obtrusive, say, compared to the (multiple) tags that are located at the tops of many articles. - The Norse (talk) 00:12, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

It is being used, just not directly. Most templates just copy/paste the template and make it their own, instead of transcluding it. Here are some of its offspring:

But even with that, a lot of people don't know it's an option. I personally think the idea of a top area link would be fine for a lot of situations, but not sure how others might feel about it. -- Ned Scott 00:55, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

On a side note, I've been trying to figure out what font they used for the Wikia "W", or at least looks like it, for use in such templates. The exact w seems to be under copyright. Although, it might technically be ineligible for copyright simply because it's a simple w, but I don't know that much about copyright law. -- Ned Scott 03:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Nice fair bit to reply to, so here goes. I would like to ask why most episode pages haven't been simply transwikied? When was on Misplaced Pages, it had a similar quantity of information to My Musical. Where has all the info gone? I know that some pages have been transwikied, but others have been straight-away deleted (last night pretty much all of the Scrubs episode articles, representing hours of work, were deleted) without any transwikification.

As for the formating problems, the main pages I seem to have the problem on are long pages on the Digimon Wikia such as which just keep refreshing when they first load before finally stablising about 20 to 30 seconds later. This is in Firefox using Digimon Wikia's default template (although the problem also seems to occur in IE). Any ideas, and is this page length problem common to all Wikias?

Considering the search engine problems, could this be better explained somewhere? As far as I know, many people use search boxes such as those in Firefox for doing this, and there doesn't seem to be any really simple guides for it (beyond effectively becoming a developer and editing lines of code, which is what the particular website implies to me).

As for the more general Wikia points, it does seem odd that so many wikis were made when one single one would not only generally be simpler to manage, but also easier to incorporate and likely to have a higher quality of copychecking, alongside the info itself.

Finally, about the infoboxes, they are currently well beyond the normal reading distance of the average reader, who may not go beyond the External Links section. A box at the top of the page, or, possibly and probably better as well, a tab next to the 'History', 'Watch' etc. button at the top, would be far more ideal and far more user friendly.

Thoughts? --Riche (talk) 14:01, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

The default skin of all Wikias seems to be some "quartz" thing, and I've been trying to configure it to just use monobook by default. The loading times are a technical problem, I've been told . In the meantime, editors have already started to chop up those lists back into individual articles, which will also help with that problem.

The transwiki process is largely undocumented. Special:Export, for example, contains outdated instructions. It also says that a user can't export the entire copy of an article, which isn't true. (it can be done using http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Special:Export&pages=NAME_OF_ARTICLE&history=1&action=submit). After that people need to run a find/replace on the resulting xml file (find all "</username>" and replace with "@en.wikipedia.org</username>"). Many admins have been very nice about undeleting old articles so that they can be exported, for those times when they've already been deleted. Ideally, we'd eventually have some of bot that could do this in mass. It could even become a built-in feature on Misplaced Pages (or at least a custom added one via javascript) to make it even easier.

If articles are not actually deleted on Misplaced Pages, then anyone can simply cut and paste the article text and use a {{Misplaced Pages}} template on Wikia, which will properly attribute the article's history.

I managed to find a listing of pre-made wikia search extensions for Firefox. I'll keep looking for some simple advice on how to add custom ones (I've only added custom searches to my cell phone and to Safari, and haven't really tried it in firefox yet.)

I did find a page at centralwikia:Closed Wikia that somewhat explains the process of closing or merging wikis on Wikia. I think it will be an inevitable process in the near future, as Wikia grows. I'll try to find out more. -- Ned Scott 02:47, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Interestingly enough, the Firefox search plugin on that page I listed, the one simply labeled "Wikia" will use a Wikia search that searches all of the Wikia wikis at once. -- Ned Scott 02:52, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Question

Now that there has been such a huge discussion of the proposal to change WP FICTION, and there is no consensus, does that mean that the proposal is rejected and WP FICTION remains as it was? I am just wondering at what point do we decide we have a resolution as to what is going to happen to this page, as, I believe I can say this without bias, there is clearly not a consensus for most of the proposed changes, if any. I am just curious. Judgesurreal777 (talk) 21:56, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

The question is, what is the version that was consensus agreed before there was a large number of edits in the past week? Is it the one from a week ago, is the one from May? I agree that the changes in the last week are disputed, though many of them are aimed at short-term alleviation of "delete first" approaches. --MASEM 22:18, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

It means we're not done discussing these things yet. -- Ned Scott 23:17, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Dude, you're going much too fast. --Kizor (talk) 00:32, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I know dude, asking questions makes me a Speed Demon! Judgesurreal777 (talk) 20:00, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

One thing alot of editors are also not doing is trying to look at the article and see if there are ways are shortening it and then merging it to a character list. I mean taking out unnecessary material or merging material from several paragraphs into fewer paragraphs wouldn't hurt either and with Tv or game characters when it comes to episodes or storyline plot it would be wise to try to compress it down to make it simplier since we don't need to detail every little thing, just the vital facts are needed. Lastly another issue with these AFDs is that since many people involved with these pages are unaware of whats happening pages are being unfairly deleted since those people are unable to help express their opinions. -71.59.237.110 (talk) 21:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Does merchandise indicate notability?

Is the passage "For articles about fictional concepts, reliable secondary sources cover information such as sales figures, critical and popular reception, development, cultural impact, and merchandise; this information describes the real-world aspects of the concept, so it is real-world content." intended to indicate that the very existance of merchandise confers some measure of real-world notability on the subject of the merchandise? -Malkinann (talk) 01:23, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

It can, though in many cases it's pretty standard to have merchandise for any given work. It depends on the context. For example, Star Wars toys becoming valuable collector items. It probably would be good to clarify this in some way. -- Ned Scott 01:27, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

It's mostly supplemental information. It's good for it to be talked about on some level (though entire sections are a bit too much), but it cannot really assert or establish notability in most cases. TTN (talk) 01:30, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the notability of the merchandise itself needs to be considered. Nearly every anime character has some cosplay item or custom model to go along with them ... it doesn't convey much extra notability to the show. Something like Hello Kitty or Tickle Me Elmo does create notability ... probably more people recognize those two characters than have ever watched a show with either character in it.Kww (talk) 01:39, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Reason why I'm asking is that WT:MOS-ANIME is attempting to establish style guidelines for anime character articles including a "Reception" section (to help establish the notability of the character), and sales figures for character merchandise are being recommended, which will be difficult to come across. -Malkinann (talk) 01:54, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

It would be foolish to try to make such information mandatory, but if it's available, it could go a long way to establishing notability. Whatever the yen value of Doraemon merchandise sales is, it must be astronomical, and could probably establish notability all on its own.Kww (talk) 02:01, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Sometimes, though, information about merchandising for a series is conflated together - so while grand totals may be available, it's impossible to say the sales figures for items of an individual character. What would be an acceptable alternative to sales figures of character merchandise? -Malkinann (talk) 02:10, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I would be veeeery careful here. A toy line across numerous characters demonstrates notability of the characters, but not necessarily individual characters. A specific, unique, toy (aka Tickle-Me-Elmo) may help to demonstrate individual character notability. And I have to agree that just the existence of the toy line alone is not enough (see toyetic where toys can precede the fictional medium), info on the sales/popularity have to be taken into account. --MASEM 02:12, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "A toy line across numerous characters demonstrates notability of the characters, but not necessarily individual characters." Sales and popularity of the merchandise may not be available for any given character, except, possibly, for mascot characters like Doraemon. Hopefully any character "Reception" section would not solely be comprised of a list of toys, but would have other information too. If merchandise exists, whether in toy line or individual form, does it help give a character notability? -Malkinann (talk) 02:48, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

You have the gist of what I'm saying - mechandising is generally across the whole cast of characters and not just one (save for like Doraemon or Pikachu). Saying that "such and such a line of toys sold well" is good to support a list of characters for notability, but it is not specific enough to support one single character, unless the info included "character X outsold the others in the line by more than double". But again, this is not alone enough to demonstrate notability. --MASEM 02:55, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Say that you initially only have the information that there were toys of these characters - you might have information about that the character was represented in key rings, capsule toys, plush toys, fashion dolls, T-shirts etc. Say that the franchise is outmoded, or that the toy manufacturers were being cagey about sales figures, or both. Is this a start on helping to provide notability? -Malkinann (talk) 00:10, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

My opinion is that that's not enough to demonstrate alone but is supporting for notability. Again, the example of toyetic franchises where they make the toys and then the fictional work around it is technically all primary sources. --MASEM 00:16, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

The problems with this guideline and the current proposed rewrite

Part of the wording of the original guideline, which had consensus for over two years, was thus:

Major characters and major treatments of such matters as places and concepts in a work of fiction are covered in the article on that work. If an encyclopedic treatment (a real world perspective backed by sources independent of the work) of a character causes the article on the work itself to become long, that character is given a main article.

Minor characters and minor treatments of such matters as places and concepts in a work of fiction are merged with short descriptions into a "List of characters." This list resides in the article relating to the work itself, unless it becomes long, in which case a separate article for the list is created.

For some reason, a group of editors decided, a few months ago, to change this long standing consensus, to the present guideline. To me it appears to be based on an overly strict interpretation of the "Misplaced Pages articles are not plot summaries" policy and the general notability guideline, and is now being edit warred because that overly strict interpretation does not have consensus.

If this current guideline were a Misplaced Pages article, it would have to be rejected as original research that synthesizes sources (in this case the plot policy and the general notability guideline) to "advance a position" (that articles about fiction must contain significant "real-world information" sourced to "secondary sources").

The fact is, however, that nothing in the plot policy or notability guideline prohibits "in-universe information" sourced to "secondary sources", or "real-world information" sourced to "primary sources". Even "in-universe information" sourced to "primary sources" should be OK, as long as it is presented from an out-of-universe perspective in a real-world context.

If there are multiple reliable sources which do nothing but describe and analyze the plot of a work of fiction, this constitutes significant coverage in reliable sources even if there is not a lick of "real-world information" about it. An encyclopedic article can be written based on these sources without being "solely a plot summary" because an analysis of the plot and a desciption of significant plot elements is not a "plot summary". A plot summary is a narrative description of what happens. A description of plot elements, such as characters or geographical settings, presented in a real-world context (regardless of whether it has significant "real-world information") is not a "plot summary". The proposed guideline is even worse than the current guideline as it codifies the idea that any description of plot elements are "plot summary" and are thus not allowed without sufficient "real-world content". This interpretation suggests that List of Shakespearean characters: A-K, for example, is unacceptable unless we were to add a sourced description of the "historical origins", "critical reception", "information about derived works", and/or "sales figures, release dates, and other commercial data" about each and every character.

Finally, the general notability guideline "presumes" notability based on significant coverage in reliable sources independent of the subject, but it does not "require" such coverage; in fact, it also allows for "an accepted subject specific standard". The general notability guideline is therefore not a straitjacket to which this specific guideline must conform. We are free to decide by consensus that certain things are "notable" even if "significant coverage in reliable sources" is difficult or even impossible to find. For two years, lists containing short descriptions of minor characters in major works of fiction were presumed notable by consensus regardless of the existence of secondary sources. I see no evidence that this long-standing consensus should have been overruled in August and even less evidence that it should be overruled now. DHowell (talk) 08:21, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

(In no particular order) There already were a couple of proposals to rename the notability guidelines on wikipedia because not real-life popularity or fame establish notability ("real-world notability"), but significant secondary sources establish article inclusion ("wiki-notability"). Misplaced Pages only cares about the latter.

Most editors are not as strict with lists of fictional elements as with articles about single fictional elements when it comes to establishing wiki-notability. Additionally, lists are often considered a convenient trade-off between what driveby fans think should definately be mentioned in the fiction coverage, and what longtime editors believe has a fair chance to be expanded for truly encyclopedic in-depth coverage down the line.

You're right, basic descriptions ("Tommy has a blue shirt") are not plot. But the longer the descriptions, the more it is likely that WP:NOT#PLOT ("Then he wore a yellow shirt and finally a red shirt") and WP:OR ("Tommy is a brave kid) creeps in.

Even the "old" summer version of WP:FICT mentioned "encyclopedic treatment". Per WP:NOT#PLOT, plot alone is not considered encyclopedic treatment, and even main characters should not be given a separate article unless/until sections for character creation and reception etc. is included. So, whether we keep the current guideline, go for a rewrite, or go back to the summer version, doesn't change that a significant portion of fiction-related wiki articles are up for review and possible merging/redirection/deletion. Now we have to decide what the best way for review is. If we don't (soon), then editors will start taking matters into their own hand to make progress (AFD, proposing mass merges, etc.).– sgeureka 11:10, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Writing "in-universe" has always been guided against, per Misplaced Pages:Check your fiction, which was established in 2003 and included the following paragraph:

“

Do not unnecessarily create small articles about largely irrelevant fictional characters, locations, objects and so on that can be better integrated into larger articles. For example, if you have to write about some fan fiction, it is better to write a larger article about this variant of a fictional universe than to create all sorts of stubs about its characters that nobody can fix. Try to write encyclopedia-type material, even when writing about fringe subjects.

”

By 2004 it was looking like this, , and that's pretty much still what the consensus community wide is still following. The crux of the dispute is this whole idea that every single topic has to be written about in multiple secondary sources, and if it hasn't been, then it must be deleted. This guidance conflicts with WP:N, WP:GTD, WP:DP, WP:CONSENSUS, WP:V, WP:NOR and WP:PLOT, and yet attempts to edit it are resisted. I can't work out a way forwards if we can't edit the page. I think there are at least three rewrites doing the rounds, as well as the three versions of the page that currently exist. I'm starting to think that maybe we should put up the six versions for some sort FICT-IDOL poll competition.

sgeureka wrote There already were a couple of proposals to rename the notability guidelines on wikipedia because not real-life popularity or fame establish notability ("real-world notability"), but significant secondary sources establish article inclusion ("wiki-notability"). Misplaced Pages only cares about the latter. That's not true. Misplaced Pages does not only care about the latter. Have a read of m:deletionists and m:inclusionists. Misplaced Pages cares about writing an encyclopedia. Certain editors believe that topics have to be notable, but not everyone does, and certainly the consensus is hard to judge. And if most editors are not as strict with "lists of" articles, why are we saying the opposite in this guideline. Oh, and as to original research and "Tommy is a brave kid, up until recently, we used to guide that people rewrote rather than removed or deleted. So you would edit to say that Tommy is shown within the novel confronting bullies on page 54, the writer revealing that Tommy "felt braver than ever before, because of his lucky blue shirt".. What's got to be decided is where the middle ground is. Is the middle ground to encourage people to write encyclopedically, source, avoid in-universe, keep plot summary to being a summary within an article, try and build lists and sub-articles in summary style from a main article and debate notability at AFD, or is it somewhere else, in telling people to go edit at a wikia, we only want to be Britannica? Hiding T 11:34, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

The intro and the nutshell of WP:N make clear what that "fame", "importance", or "popularity" don't really matter, but significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject. There is only a difference because the term "notability" grew with wikipedia. I have read the meta essays a couple of times before, but they are old, and it seems that they are now replaced with WP:N's "find reliable secondary sources, and it doesn't matter whether your're a deletionist or an inclusionist." WP:FICT has a special place because covering fiction all in one article, especially when the work of fiction is popular, is near impossible, and deletionist/inclusionist/mergist editors have to agree on a consensus about subarticles, which is obviously hard with all the wiki philosophies. I agree with your middle ground, but if we allow for the addition of material, we should also allow for the removal of "unencyclopedic" material (whatever that is) that got superceded by better, preferably secondary sources. All articles should satisfy other wiki policies and guidelines in the end. – sgeureka 12:52, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

The secondary sources phrase did not appear in this guidance until the 4th of August, introduced in a change that doesn't mention adding it and which notes people are ignoring it. Up until that point it is unclear whether the secondary sources applied to fiction, per WP:N and WP:FICT. Since WP:N allowed separate subjects to have extra criteria as well as the secondary sourcing, and WP:FICT made no mention of it, it is unclear whether there was consensus for the change. That edit roughly marks the midpoint of the edit history of the page. What that means is that about 250 edits were made between September 2003 and August 2007, and 250 edits since. Half the edits to this page have been made in the last four months. It took four years to make a similar amount. Makes you think about where consensus lies. The removal of unencyclopedic content is already catered for in WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, WP:NOT, WP:EP and many more besides. We don't need even more guidance on how to edit or improve. Unencyclopedic material is stuff that does not fit WP:NOT, to be debated at WP:AFD. That's the point, that the place for debating what stays and goes is at afd, not on guidance pages. Hiding T 17:22, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

"editors will start taking matters into their own hand to make progress." This has already occured and the impatience and resultant edit-warring is what has led to the RfAr. Ursasapien (talk) 11:19, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

This is what I was actually referring to, showing that this guideline is both ignored and taken too literally. Now it's up to us to decide what the proper measures are, even if some think it is too weak, and others think it is too strong (i.e. there will always be editors on opposing ends clashing). Remember that people reading this guideline are new to it and just want an overview of current consensus, even if that consensus is established by averaging out the opinions. – sgeureka 12:52, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I am in agreement with sgeureka in this discussion, which I note for the purpose of gauging consensus. Eusebeus (talk) 14:02, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree here too -- there is a middle ground, which I think we all accept that character list articles (and equivalents) are usually acceptable, as long as they are written in a style that strongly suggests they are written as summary style, and that good faith effort is made to try to include notability information. This is a two way street: people that write the material must be aware of what such lists should strive to look like (Characters of Final Fantasy VIII), but at the same time, concerned notability editors need to understand that there is no deadline to demonstrate notability (though good faith effort needs to be done), and that such character list articles are appropriate (again, I note the suggestion of this {{In-universe rationale}} template I created that can be included to show that a character list didn't magically appear, it was determined by discussion to be appropriate. I know we're trying to deal with editors seeking to remove articles due to notability, but I think at the same time, this guideline needs to provide the guidance for writing about fictional articles, how it should be a top-down process instead of bottoms-up (which, admitted is much easier but leads to poor quality articles). --MASEM 14:57, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Masem's position here as well. I should be clearer though: a very legitimate concern has been expressed that this guideline is the product of a small group of editors. Since this discussion is long and convoluted already, rather than simply repeat the same points already well-expressed (although good for my edit count), I mean to "proxy" my support and indicate that I am firmly behind the positions outlined above by sgeureka, Masem and Ned Scott. Eusebeus (talk) 15:16, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Ned's already said elsewhere he agrees with me, and since I agree with DHowell and DGG, I think we all agree. If that is so, why is it so hard to write guidance? Is there any real issue with simply reverting back to the page as it stood in July. We know that had broad consensus, and everything that seems to be causing a dispute was introduced after. Thoughts on that? Hiding T 17:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the problem with that one is that the main body does not obviously include WP:N (it's in the header, but not the lead) - that needs to be stated (which the present version does). Again, remember that WP:N added "significant coverage in secondary sources" in May 07, so what happened after this July revision was to include that language in WP:FICT. However, when that is added to the text present in the July revision, the rest of the guidance given doesn't seem to support that issue: there's little about secondary sources or demonstrating notability - it simply allows for more fictional content to be created but no guidance where a line should be drawn. Additionally, going off something Hiding said above, in that WP:FICT is nothing special as it merely reiterates obvious policies/GLs like PLOT and N, when those two are spelled out as they are, they suggest a strong line for what fictional notability is, one that is not apparent if you read the two aspects separately, and because of that stronger line, this is what likely led to this entire "deletionists" thing in that people used it to be bold about putting up non-notable articles for AfD.

I think we can take that guideline, what we have now, and various intermediates and come up with a guideline that does the following:

Explain what policies are being considered as to create "fictional notability" (PLOT and N)
Additional rationale why this guideline exists
Methods of writing and handling articles as to demonstrate notability, and creating sub-articles (char lists) that fit with summary style
Examples of both good and bad articles wrt to notability.
Methods for handling of articles that lack demonstration of notability (notify, AGF, merge, transwiki, deletion last resort)

Again, its not so much that we're creating new policy or guidelines, I think a rewrite needs to provide the guidance for fiction and notability, both to those writing and to those copy-editing; this is above and beyond WP:WAF, which is more how to organize an article, or at least can be considered a larger discussion of specific aspects of article organization. --MASEM 17:45, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I like the July version for it's focus on WP:Plot, but it fails as far as a notability guideline. If we can make something that emphasizes WP:Plot and notability I would be happy with it. It just needs to be made clear that there are rules about fiction that supersede notability. You can have 10,000 sources but if none of them add real world context then you may pass notability, but you fail WP:Plot. Ridernyc (talk) 18:49, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

tl;dr, but will read later. I just have to say this first: List of Shakespearean characters: A-K is the most absurd example I've seen used on this talk page. To think that WP:FICT calls for its deletion is a bit much. When a work of fiction is this old, and has an impact that this has (tons of additional adaptations, tons more of indirect adaptations and inspirations, and more), then yeah, you get to have these kinds of lists. This is the kind of list that part two of WP:FICT#Notable topics deals with. The parent topic covers the notability and justifies the list, but for style reasons it exists as a simple list. -- Ned Scott 20:50, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Going a little deeper into this thread: I'm not really sure if you can say that the major/minor point of the original WP:FICT is different from what we have now, it's just no longer explicitly said. There are pros and cons to that. The old wording as simple, straight forward, and did help us easily deal with many plotty articles. But we also want to deal with main characters who might not need their own article, and we want to deal with minor character/element lists that are very excessive (listing very minor characters and very minor details about them). I can see the wording being used again, or not being used. Examples would likely be key, helping people understand what some of the limits of lists there are, and evaluating what is a main character, or if that information really is better organized as an individual article or also in a list.

During the last big dispute, there were ideas about having multi-level "notability" for fiction. I can't remember all the details right now (I'll reread the archives in a bit) but from what I can remember, mixed with my own personal advice, I can see three levels being defined:

Notable by multi-source- independently notable. Even as a sub-topic, it passes WP:N and can stand on it's own.

Notable by real-world information- Same as above, but without multiple and/or independent sources. Since it's still a sub-topic, I can see a reasonable argument for not requiring multi-sources as much, and being in it's own article because the main topic contains a so much information (style reasons). The only time I've really seen this somewhat backfire on us is with articles like Spoo (a very minor element having a large amount of real-world information), but those are pretty rare situations, and there isn't even much agreement on the extent of what should be done for them. Normally, real-world information normally helps self-regulate this kind thing. Takes care of the only-plot concern, and more often than not, does result in relevant information that we desire.

Style/technical reasons- Similar to part two of WP:FICT#Notable topics, in that the sub-article might lack any real-world information. Born for reasons of style or technical whatever, but limited by asking that such content be seen as part of the main article, and cut back as needed. Basically, this would consist of lists/groupings, with examples to help people understand what limits should be used. A tricky level to define.

-- Ned Scott 21:21, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Proposed change version 2 - One proposition to rule them all

Looking through the arguments people put on this page, all of them can be summarised into one

"Many notable fictional concepts/people do not have reliable secondary sources as the only source of infomation is from the writers of the anime/cartoon/film(and that is primary)" it is the same as problem as the proposed change version 1(the one on top of the page)

the difference is solution

Now, secondary sources are used to assert the notability and because they are used ONLY to assert notability, unreliable secondary sources would still count and make the articale notable. In addition to that, popularity = notability(as discussed above) so if the articale is popular, we know its notable.

So notable fiction articales would get written from primary sources as long as they have secondary sources(reguardless notable or not) or a good popularity ranking.

This is just to discuss this change as I want to see what the community thinks of this and hopefully we will get some response from people and fix anything that isnt good and get this policy changed. Af 648 09:06, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Weird. This proposal contradicts about every other policy and guideline we have on the topic (WP:NOT#PLOT, WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:N). --B. Wolterding (talk) 14:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

And that is supposed to mean? In what way does it contridict? *Cough* WP:VAGUEWAVE Af 648 08:15, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

We also have WP:IAR, WP:CONSENSUS, WP:NOT#BURO, (and the related essays WP:CREEP, WP:DOSPAGWYA, and WP:WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG!, and yes, the irony is intentional). "Contradicting policy" is not in itself a sufficient argument, especially when you haven't demonstrated such contradiction, but only asserted it. DHowell (talk) 12:30, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

It's pretty obvious how such a statement directly conflicts with our core policies, which we don't ignore, nor can a consensus over ride those policies. However, I'm not sure if we have the same things in mind. Like I asked Af a little bit below, what examples do you have in mind? I'm not sure if we are on the same page here. -- Ned Scott 21:44, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for being so cryptic - Af proposes to take unreliable sources into account, while an encyclopedia needs reliable ones for verification. Af proposes to write from primary sources, which is considered original research. (Unless, of course, you restrict to "descriptive claims" and "make no analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative claims", which is then very likely a mere plot summary.) Better? --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Again, it has been my impression that the primary source is the work of fiction itself, and the reason we ask for other sources is to find real-world information. So I cannot support such a proposal. -- Ned Scott 20:43, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm not saying that we dont use reliable secondary sources if we can find them, we will use unreliable secondary sources to assert notability if there are no reliable ones Af 648 08:17, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

"we will use unreliable secondary sources to assert notability" uh, yeah, that's not going to happen. We're not going to use forum posts or rumors to assert notability. I don't think that is what you are suggesting, though, so I must ask, what are some examples of "unreliable secondary sources" that you had in mind? -- Ned Scott 21:44, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

And why are we trying to demand the same standards for "reliability" for fiction that we use for subjects such as science, history, and biography? Unlike those subjects, primary sources for fictional topics are widely available, accessible, and easily understood without specialized knowledge or training. Unlike experimental results, historical artifacts, or eyewitness accounts, which typically require specialized analysis to determine their reliability and applicability to their subjects (which is why we require secondary sources in those cases), fictional works are the most reliable and authoritative sources for information about the fictional topics and elements contained therein. Also, if there are independent sources which deal with fictional topics from an in-universe perspective (including published derivative works and published plot descriptions and analysis), why are these any less valid as "reliable sources" than sources written from an out-of-universe perspective describing "real-world information"? If there a many novels written by multiple authors about a particular fictional topic, that ought to be evidence of notability without requiring secondary sources giving "real-world information". If there are published encyclopedias or companion guides to a work of fiction which significantly cover various fictional topics in an "in-universe" manner, those still ought to be allowed to establish notability. The fact that there are many novels or guides written by several authors about a topic is real-world information which we can cite to the existence of those sources, and we shouldn't require a secondary source to say that the topic is the subject of many novels or guides in order to prove it. DHowell (talk) 12:30, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

You are correct in that we are not (or we shouldn't be) treating notability in the same way as those other examples. We've never really had a problem with sourcing the plot itself with primary sources, and that isn't the intention. That's not really the point, though, rather it's that "other sources" go hand in hand with "real-world information". We want real-world information to justify additional articles beyond what is needed for a basic understanding. -- Ned Scott 21:48, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking using things such as fansites(that are not too off) to assert notability, not to use them as a source.Af 648 03:11, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that's going to fly. -- Ned Scott 07:23, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

RFC

If there is a worry that there is a lack of participants in this debate, is it worth making an RFC? I've added a pointer at WP:VPP, but I don't know how widely read rfc and the pump is these days. Is it an idea to put pointers on relevant project pages, or even into project banners, to get the word out? Hiding T 17:34, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I would make if an RFC. If you read some of the comments in the current ARBCom case one thing that they are pointing out is these guidelines are being written by small groups of editors and do not represent consensus of the community as a whole. Ridernyc (talk) 18:18, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree, but after we get a good replacement draft that we (the small group here) agree on, and then pose as an RFC to get more eyes on the subject. --MASEM 18:40, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Read it again, Ridernyc. Only WP:EPISODE was commented on. -- Ned Scott 23:35, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Read it again Ned. "The dispute centers on the existence of articles regarding individual episodes or characters from television series, and is part of a broader disagreement regarding the interpretation of notability guidelines with reference to fictional and popular culture topics." (my emphasis) Hiding T 00:16, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

The arbcom have not made any comment on the consensus status of this guideline. From the same quote you've shown, the rest is interpretation of such guidelines, not the consensus status of it. -- Ned Scott 07:23, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Be Bold. Ask for input at the Misplaced Pages:Community Portal. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 18:54, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I was bold. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 19:52, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

My draft

User:Masem/wp-fict-proposed It's not perfect, but I think this incorporates a lot of the language that has come up over the last few days. I'm sure the language itself can be improved, I'm just trying to get the concepts down for further discussion points. --MASEM 18:40, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I came here as a result of the note at the Village pump. I like Masem's draft better than the other one -- it is more concise and seems to emphazise the key points better. However, I'm against any text that tells other editors what steps they have to follow before they can list an article at AfD. To me, this is saying you shouldn't ever send a fiction article to AfD unless you've left a note on the talk page and tagged the article and then waited 1 month, and that is not something the fiction notability guideline should be concerned with. Karanacs (talk) 19:22, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I am unaware exactly how tagging show be dealt with (it seems like there's different standards for each tag type), but if it is outside the concerns of fictional notability, I would definitely want to point to its preferred/consensus-agreed usage. Do note that the reason deletion and other methods are spelled out in details is the relative recent amount of articles going to AfD due to lack of notability, and the result issues with people asserting this is the wrong way to do it - the previous draft left it too open that deletion was a possible first option and the attempt here is to outline it as the absolute last option. --MASEM 20:13, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

This proposed rewrite is much better than the others, as it finally acknowledges some of the points that we have been raising (though I would still like a concession that sources for "real-world information" should not be a necessary requirement for notability; that independently-written in-universe and fictional sources should be allowed to establish notability as well, and that we can describe sources from a real-world and out-of-universe perspective without the sources themselves needing to be out-of-universe perspectives of real-world information). And we should be discouraging AfD until other methods of dealing with the problem have been attempted. AfD is one of the poorest approximations of consensus we have, it has all the problems described in WP:POLLS regardless of how much we call it a "discussion" and talk about "!votes". In my ideal vision of Misplaced Pages, all deletion would be handled through speedy deletion and proposed deletion (actually my ideal vision of Misplaced Pages would have pure wiki deletion but that is apparently never going to happen here); all other material would be edited, trimmed, merged, redirected, or improved as appropriately decided by the consensus of those truly interested in the topic. DHowell (talk) 13:24, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I think that there is some precedent that "once removed" primary sources are ok - these would be commentary by the creative artists of the work typically post-release of the work, interviews with such, and third-party books that summarize the fictional work - as evidenced by how many Simpsons episodes are of Good Article quality or better by primarily rely on the DVD commentary and a third-party guide. But again, this has to be real world information from those sources - how the work was influenced, possible feedback, etc, and not about details of the fictional universe. Right now at WP:NOR there is a big issue on discussing exactly what primary, secondary and tertiary sources are (as WP's definition tends to differ from literary science definitions), but once that seems to be settles, I would think it wise to get their input on that. The key here is that we're guided by WP:N's requirement of secondary sources, and as we want to provided real-world information, can the example sources be considered secondary for that purpose (since they are not directly tied to the body of fictional work). It seems obvious they should, but we need to be careful here. --MASEM 15:59, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

- If you don't point to the alternatives, you shouldn't point to deletion. Our guide to deletion makes the same points. WP:N makes the same points. If we have to synch with WP:N on the common notability clause, we should synch with it on what to do if an article may not appear to meet the common clause. I'm not keen on the new draft as it asserts interview is a primary source and not suited for judging notability. I think that's too tight. There are times an interview is primary and times it is a secondary, depending on usage. The coverage itself is indicative of being worthy of note; not every author gets interviewed. Also, can we get better examples than Hamlet and Superman. They are kind of no-brainers. Anyone think of any? I think Anarky is still a good article, are there any featureds? Hiding T 21:24, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Instead of making the deletion process longer, why not simply reduce the harshness of the guideline, and have fewer deletions? The problem people have is the strictness of the guideline. I would suggest encouraging exceptions for very popular or very highly regarded fiction.--Nydas 21:52, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree somewhat. I'd rather say that sub-articles can rely on their parent article for notability, if the parent article can demonstrate sufficient sourcing and if a consensus of Wikipedians agree. That way you just let everyone know that afd is the place to determine it, and arguing at afd that it fails WP:FICT is not on. You have to say why. Say in afd that Misplaced Pages can't cover the folds on Superman's cape in a single article, but on the other hand, also say that yes, we can cover his supporting cast in an article. It's a see it when we know it thing, and we need to acknowledge that. Articles should be deleted based on the arguments at AFD, not because this page exists. Hiding T 22:14, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

(to Nydas) By notability guideline standards, WP:FICT is hardly harsh, and is far more forgiving in what it asks when you compare it to other topics on Misplaced Pages. The bar has been set very low for these articles.

(to Hiding) The point of having a guideline, or most any project page on Misplaced Pages, is so we don't have to repeat ourselves for things that most of us agree on, so saying an article should not be deleted by this page isn't right. Even if it was an essay without a consensus, it's still an argument that holds weight on its own merit, and should be judged as such. We certainly should not allow individual article series to decide their own inclusion criteria on their own (not to say that no per-case-evaluation should take place, but we need criteria in addition to that). Articles lacking in real-world information, and are excessive for basic information, should be removed. That has always been the aim for WP:FICT. -- Ned Scott 23:33, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

You and I will have to agree to disagree then Ned, because I don't agree that it is enough to say delete, fails WP:WHATEVER in a deletion debate. It's lazy, sloppy, elevates guidance over core policies, fails to judge the article on its merits and is basically I DON'T LIKE IT. It may be I don't like it because it doesn't meet WP:WHATEVER, but when you have been instrumental in creating WP:WAHTEVER, you're basically saying it doesn't meet what I like. We don't have guidance to avoid repeating ourselves, we have guidance to describe how things are done. At the minute we don't have that here. An article is deleted because a consensus emerges at AFD to delete. An admin closes in accordance with the rough consensus taking into account policy. Not guidelines, policy. This guideline has no bearing on a close for an afd, and any participant in an afd acting in good faith to build a consensus should give a better reason to delete than per WP:WHATEVER. Even if all they do is state that the article has no sources that denote third party coverage. Whether you believe we should not allow each debate to set its own standards is beside the point. That's what deletion policy and guidance for admins on closing deletion debates states happens. Each debate is closed according to the strength of arguments advanced. Hiding T 00:10, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

As to what you believe to have always been the aim for WP:FICT, you are mistaken. The aim was never that "articles lacking in real-world information, and are excessive for basic information, should be removed." I think you need to re-read Misplaced Pages:Editing policy again, for starters. The original aim Of WP:FICT was that articles lacking in real-world information, and are excessive for basic information, should be improved. I think now we begin to understand what has happened to the guidance, and why deletion has moved up the ladder. Hiding T 00:13, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Well said, Hiding. The confusion over this issue has lead to issues such as TTN's current rampage-- a focus on improvement over deletion should always be followed. Jtrainor (talk) 00:44, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

It would be foolish to believe that every article on fiction even has the potential to be improved simply because some editor took a few seconds and clicked on a red link. -- Ned Scott 02:18, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

It would be equivalently foolish to believe that every article on fiction does not have the potential to be improved simply because some editor took a few seconds to slap a tag on an article and people weren't able improve the article within a certain timeframe. DHowell (talk) 13:24, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

You and I completely agree on that. -- Ned Scott 21:50, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Hiding, are you still just mad that I reverted you on WP:FICT? Why are you acting like this? If you want to nitpick at my wording then go ahead, but removed/improved, I only meant that: "what currently is there should not be there", nothing more, nothing less. You also completely missed the point about my comment of AFD discussions. I'm sorry there are people who blindly say "delete per" whatever, but there's a lot of us who are not doing so in a blind way. I myself try to make an effort to explain why I believe something doesn't pass a guideline, not just "PER WHATEVER", and I believe all people should actually give more than just a per whatever. But to say that a notability guideline has no place an an AfD discussion? What? -- Ned Scott 02:18, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

At no point have I implied that you do any such thing Ned. I'm also not sure where I have led you to believe I am in some way mad at you. I was unaware I was acting in any way other than attempting to discuss the issues with this guidance. As I have never argued that notability guidance has no place in an afd, I'm not going to defend that point. If you want to take the other issues to talk, that might be better. Hiding T 15:22, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh, ok. Sorry about that, then :) -- Ned Scott 21:50, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Question then (to much of the above): Is what is in the proposed rewrite too strict or too lax? I did try to write the process such that deletion should be always considered as the last option when there is no option left available.

I have seen how some of TTN's cycles have gone for AfDs, though since he's been warned on AN/I at least once, he's been better. The problem is that this often leads to the following process: TTN tags an article non-notable. TTN comes back a month later, nothing's been changed to address non-notability. TTN proposes merging followed by deletion. Numerous "keep" votes are given, most following WP:ILIKEIT reasoning, or otherwise a rehash of WP:N/WP:FICT/WP:RS. Either the issue is dropped or the AfD/Merge is closed as being "keep", notability is not demonstrated. Yes, there is no timeline to demonstrate, but I also believe that leaving articles that lack notability demonstrations and do not reflect appropriate summary style too long will encourage the creation of more articles without those aspects by WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. To that end, I think it needs to be stated clearly that if an editor suggests a merge & trim of information on your article, you should not take that personally (hopefully) nor a slight on one's writing: merging will keep the key details of the information and if new information relating to notability does arise, great, recreate the article. --MASEM 02:07, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Compared to the de facto standard of other areas of Misplaced Pages, WP:FICT is very harsh. Train stations, major roads, hamlets, national level elected officials, tiny islands, species of beetle, London bus routes, horse racing events and asteroids are presumed to be notable, regardless of sources beyond evidence they exist. Fictional characters, on the other hand, are treated as little better than Internet memes (with some glaring exceptions).--Nydas 10:13, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

While I continue to lack the stability to actively participate in this discussion, I thank you for bringing that up. --Kizor (talk) 12:34, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Absolutely. We allow tiny African villages, small-market radio stations, and numbered highways to be presumed notable often with no more evidence than a map, a government record or a newspaper blurb, and yet that same type of evidence is routinely rejected for fictional topics as being "too trivial". We've set the bar for fictional topics way higher than for other topics. I understand the need to keep Misplaced Pages from becoming a fan-wiki, but we can trim most of the true "fancruft" by simply not allowing non-notable self-published fan-fiction or fan speculation to be used as sources. DHowell (talk) 13:24, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Agreed 100%!!! And the irony is, were it not for a dynamic, web based collaborative environment like wikipedia, those things like obscure roads or brand new media could never get coverage. It is almost a crime to kill the coverage of it here, the only place that can do it well. Renmiri (talk) 15:16, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I take some issue with the above comments. 1) Even a tiny radio station exists in the real world. The comparison reminds us (Masem) that we have to be very clear in underlining the need to assert real-world significance in fictional articles. (2) A tiny radio station or hamlet is unlikely to spawn sub page after subpage after subpage. The equivalent would be if every single radio show on my local station had its own article. By encouraging articles to focus on real world significance we avoid becoming a repository for fancruft, we apply an encyclopedic standard and we prevent myriads of subpages from being created which can almost never satisfy the criteria for a standalone. (3) Finally, even if one accepts that the standard here is perhaps more stringent than elsewhere, that is highly desirable in my view and could be sued as a case for improving standards elsewhere. I am no fan of roadcruft, for example. Eusebeus (talk) 15:35, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

The other problem specifically with fiction is that there are two policies that can be easily broken when writing about detailed fictional elements that cannot be done by the real-world "minutiae" that Nydas and DHowell points out. One with original research - whenever you summarize a plot, you are partaking a bit into this aspect since you are writing about the fictional work's events in your own manner. Of course, as long as you don't attempt to analysis or synthesize on what is presented, its generally not considered OR. However, the amount of true WP:NOR violations that can come in when writing about a work a fiction is proportion to how much is written - it is bound to happen particularly with newer editors. It may be easy to correct, but by provide some bound by stating some inclusion threshhold for fictional details, it is much easier to maintain. Similarly, neutral points of view can also be difficult to maintain as the body of work grows, particularly if these are written by highly interested fans of the work. It can lead to undue weight on one character or aspect. Now there is also the issue of non-free fair-use of plot summaries. There is yet any requirement/ArbCom/policy on this but plot summaries are a non-free, fair use of the fictional work as it is a derivative work of the work of fiction. If we were only to provide plot details, characters, settings, etc. without additional commentary, as set by US fair use laws, for a fictional work, there may be cause for Misplaced Pages to be sued by the owner of the fictional work (there are two known cases where publishers of a book that strictly summarized the details of a fictional work (one being Twin Peaks, I forget the other) without permission of the copyright own were sued and lost in court). This at least points out the importance of a balanced coverage of a fictional work between in-universe and real-world information particularly for educational purposes. As Misplaced Pages both encourages the minimal use of non-free fair use materials and that has set standards for their use that may exceed what is generally accepted for US, as to avoid any such lawsuits, we should consider this as well for fictional works. This is not to say we can't go into any element of a fictional work in depth, but this does tie in very well with notability guidelines - by satisfying notability, you are very likely at the same time satisfying appropriate fair use requirements. Again, there is yet no direct policy on fair use and plot summaries, but this becoming a cautionary tale in other parts of WP's policy. --MASEM 16:17, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Tiny radio stations have spawned sub page after sub page. Broadcasting schedules per year, articles on shows, they've been branched out, and they've been successfully dealt with. By encouraging editors to write encyclopedically and to source their information and to allow others to edit and to make them aware Misplaced Pages is a collaboration, we can avoid becoming a repository for fancruft. I tend to ignore stuff I don't like, as long as it is written per WP:V, WP:NPOV and WP:NOR. Hiding T 16:53, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I should point out that regarding radio stations, not everyone agrees that they have some kind of inherent notability. There's actually been a bit of a dispute about that lately. As far as physical places go, they do tend to have more leniency since they are a physical place that have existed for years upon years (sometimes in the hundreds). Even a town or a village with a small population has a much larger impact when you consider that population over the span of its existence. The thing here is that these towns and villages are the topic itself, rather than being stub-topics of a work of fiction, which is what we deal with. You can make an article about a tiny village, yes, but you can also make an article about a book that has been published, but that most people have never heard of. Where we come in is if there should be articles for every element of that book. Depending on your perspective those examples can be considered comparing apples with oranges. And like with radio stations, even physical places get questioned from time to time, and get updated notability requirements.

Some of those other examples are a bit odd. Living people have a pretty good criteria for inclusion, but anyone who has WP:BLP on their watchlists will tell you that there are constantly disagreements about the exact details of it. Species of beetle is another odd example, since that's fundamental information on a form of life. If you want to compare an article on a fictional character to a living species, then you're nuts. -- Ned Scott 21:59, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

My point is that beetle species articles are not subjected to this 'good/featured-or-annihilation' mentality. They're given the benefit of the doubt in the event of poor or non-existent sources. Fictional things don't get anything like that. Other controversial things, like bus routes, don't seem to attract time-bomb declarations like 'clean up or else' to the same extent that fiction does.--Nydas 22:38, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

What you are saying it true. People have a subjective opinion of what is notable that they then use the guidelines to remove. I think it's the word "encyclopedia" that makes people think fiction articles need to be held to a higher standard. It also seems like the hard core pedians are more likely to be into strict application of notability with regards to fiction. They hang out here and argue their case, while most of the people who have their content removed don't. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 00:51, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think people target fiction over other topics for any reason other than what they choose to work on. I don't edit articles about beetles because I'm not interested in articles about beetles. The reason there is such a focus on fiction-related articles is simply that a lot of people are interested in working on those articles. It makes sense, if you think about it, since it's easier for the general public to dive into such articles. Same for "hard core" Wikipedians, they're just as much fans of these shows as the people who are on the "other side" of the debate. It's a very common misconception that people who want to be tighter on article on fiction are not fans.

So in short, fiction is a high traffic area for Misplaced Pages, simply because that's what a lot of people choose to focus on. It's not because of double standards, or because people hate fiction, or anything like that. (at least not for the bulk of it, in my opinion.)

And beetle species self-regulate by their own existence. We can only write articles of beetle species that exist or have once existed. Fiction, on the other hand, has no physical limit for article creation. -- Ned Scott 07:16, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

That fiction articles attract a lot of interest is all the more reason to beware of fads and movements, especially when the hardcore Wikipedians are also 'fans'. That doesn't help. Most fiction does not have fans, yet the presumption here is that fans exist for everything.--Nydas 13:23, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're saying in this last response. If I understood your original comments correctly, my response was that people don't "go after" fiction more than another topic because it's fiction, but rather because they're simply interested in working on that area of Misplaced Pages. Wether or not people are fans was just a side comment, since it's often a misconception that people who "cut" or "delete" a lot of fiction articles are not fans and/or are "anti-fan". -- Ned Scott 04:30, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

That people who are deleting fiction are fans is not a factor that invites fairness or balance. In my experience people are rarely willing to tackle fiction they're fans of. In addition, I've already noted how the requirement for real-world info militates against fiction without special effects (in other words, fiction less likely to have a 'fanbase').--Nydas 09:02, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I guess I haven't observed the same trends you speak of for articles with special effects, since my focus is mostly on anime topics. I do understand what you mean when you say that some articles are kinda screwed for not having as large of a fanbase, and hopefully we can find ways to counter that. -- Ned Scott 05:09, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

The way to counter it is to move beyond thinking of fans as naturally connected to fiction. How many Nobel Prize in Literature winners have 'fans'? Crime, romance, historical, literary and general fiction rarely have 'fans'.--Nydas 22:01, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Re beetle species self-regulation: But is it not said in policy that merely existing does not make something noteable? Jtrainor (talk) 02:54, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if it's said in policy, but generally, yes. This is why we don't make articles for beetle species that have been recently discovered and have no published information on them yet. The scientific community will eventually review the discovery, give context to the information, and provide further information. -- Ned Scott 20:50, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

(indent)

I think you will find that in fact, we do. There are hundreds of stubs for all sorts of minor species with nothing to show that they are particularly noteable and little in the way of sourcing. For that matter, there are hundreds of one-liner articles about little villages all over Europe, for that matter... Jtrainor (talk) 22:11, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Being a living species is pretty damn notable. A little village that existed for a hundred or so years is also notable. Peter Griffin's fight with a giant chicken cannot compare to that. -- Ned Scott 02:05, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

The first house I lived in has existed for more than a hundred years. Yet, if I were to make an article about it, it would be deleted for lacking noteability. Age is not an indicator of noteability. Jtrainor (talk) 03:04, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

We're not talking about one house. I don't doubt there are articles for very small places that should be deleted or merged, which does happen. -- Ned Scott 03:12, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

No one knows where Boven Bolivia is, and it is apparently under 3km from my house.Kww (talk) 03:21, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Then take it to deletion. -- Ned Scott 03:41, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Draft #2

I've edited my draft to include some of the issues discussed above, to wit:

There's almost a class of sources between primary and secondary, while I will call "1.5 sources" - these are interviews, commentaries, and other materials generally by the creators, but typically made at some point after the release of the work, and generally not self-published. There is precedent in past consensus on AfD and other projects that these are acceptable to show real-world information and thus notability. I've worded parts of this to allow such aspects to be included.
I've tried to word more about deletion, being that you do NOT want to go there if you can take any other route as deletion means its gone forever. Discuss, merge, transwiki, all good options, but deletion has to be the last resort.
Strengthen that sub articles still need to meet V, OR, NPOV
Added FF8 characters as example, but we still need more (both good and bad ones).

I think we're getting closer to something that will help satisfy both sides and the middle ground. --MASEM 19:33, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the lead needs to be clearer: Something like Individual articles dealing with fictional works or topics need to demonstrate real-world notability, backed up by reliable secondary sources. The real world context of fictional topics should be the principle focus of the article. Articles written from an in-universe perspective, such as plot-summaries or character biographies & development are typically discouraged. Writing about such works is more fully defined in the Writing about Fiction manual of style. While fictional topics should provide readers with an appropriate context of their fictional setting, it is important to ensure that the main focus of the article remain its real-world impact. I know that's a bit repetitive, but I think we need the emphasis on real-world impact/notability. Eusebeus (talk) 20:42, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I haven't read the latest draft in detail yet, but before I go to work, I wanted to point out that I very much agree with the "1.5 sources" that Masem mentions. This is similar to the "dependent notability" that I mentioned a ways up in the discussion. -- Ned Scott 22:05, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

- Eusebius, as comment on your suggested lede, I am going to basically disagree that "Articles written from an in-universe perspective, such as plot-summaries or character biographies & development are typically discouraged. " They are to be 'encouraged, and written properly and proportionately. they are describing the nature of the artifact being discussed. It is as appropriate to describe the plot of fiction as the workings of a machine. The problems come when they are written over-long and incompetently, as is usually the case here, which has given them a deserved bad reputation. If we paid them proper attention , we would be able to do them better. I am also going to disagree with the focus on "article" the focus is on the article or articles on a work of fiction, seen together. The draft has it better. DGG (talk) 02:40, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
  - Agreed, plot information gives a description of what the character, episode, whatever is. We need to define what we're speaking about before launching into secondary data of rewards, popularity and marketting campaigns. Too much focus has been on trivial, secondary matters to the expense of the reader not having an understanding of what the article is about. Kyaa the Catlord (talk) 00:13, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
But in the draft, why in the second paragraph should plot take precedence over characters? Plot, characters, setting, theme--these are all relevant aspects and the article or relevant article must describe each of them. Whether it takes separate articles on the aspects depends on the importance of the work, which affects how much there is to say. DGG (talk) 02:38, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

By WP:WAF, it is a given that a good article on a fictional work will describe the plot. This plot, of course, will discuss characters, settings, and necessary aspects, as the plot is the overall embodiment of these elements. However, it is not always the case that it is necessary to describe the characters, setting, or the like in any depth outside of the plot - it can happen (and often does, and a case that we still want allowable by rewriting this), but not every piece of fiction (particularly one shot works like books or movies, or short lived TV shows) need to have a separate, called out character/setting/etc. section. Also, while characters, settings, etc can all be broken out from the article, it is never acceptable to remove the plot as describing what events take place during the work from the article about the work (that is, there is no allowable plot sub-article), thus it has to be treated more importantly than the other facets of the fictional universe, which all help to support it. --MASEM 08:12, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Would such things as mentions in "episode guides" count as establishing notability and verifiably under this? My position is that they should absolutely not, and only fictional topics with applicable real-world impact should have it. For instance, Leopold Bloom is notable, as is Doctor Who, but perhaps not Gowron or Elayne Trakand, as they have not had a real world impact. I think this is what you are trying to get at, but it could maybe be a little clearer. Lankiveil (talk) 06:51, 16 December 2007 (UTC).

An episode guide that does not point out anything else besides what happened in the episode is, IMO, not my "1.5" source but a pure primary source, even if written by a third party. If the guide did include additional details that help with real-world impact, it falls into my suggested "1.5" category and would be suitable for the notability demonstration (assuming it also reliable). --MASEM 08:12, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Per DGG's point above, his suggestion, as I understand it is: Articles written from an in-universe perspective, such as plot-summaries or character biographies & development, are typically encouraged, and written properly and proportionately. Are you asking, therefore, that the guideline be rewritten to promote coverage of in-universe topics and to diminish the importance of real-world significance? We would also need to rewrite WP:N#PLOT per your suggestion. That seems a bold proposal but one that I think we can certainly discuss. But you are in disagreement, therefore, with more than just my rewrite of the lead. Eusebeus (talk) 20:16, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure if his suggestion is that extreme, but I was also a bit unclear about it. I think what he means is that we don't discourage writing the proper amount of plot-summary information, which is true, but also kind of a given. -- Ned Scott 04:25, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I would definitely not include the word "encouraged". We don't want to make in-universe taboo, but we don't want these to flourish without rationale discussion and consensus by editors to make sure such articles are appropriate for the core material. --MASEM 04:30, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, DGG can answer for himself, but the statement: It is as appropriate to describe the plot of fiction as the workings of a machine. The problems come when they are written over-long and incompetently, as is usually the case here, which has given them a deserved bad reputation suggests that DGG believes the real-world significance of fictional topics is not important; hence his disagreement with my rewrite & apparent willingness to accept articles written from in-universe. I think that is a defensible position (one I disagree with of course), but it would change substantially the intent of the guideline, both as it exists now and as Masem has re-crafted it. Eusebeus (talk) 14:32, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

As for "It is as appropriate to describe the plot of fiction as the workings of a machine": In a way I agree; and I would definitely not want to read a technical manual or operating guide of a Nokia 8265i here. Of course, it is encouraged to write how a mobile phone works - there are plenty of independent sources about that -, but the same does not hold for a single model. Similarly, an encyclopedia should not retell the plot of a particular TV series or episode (while it should explain the characteristics of a soap opera).
I also think that the draft might make that even more clear - define what real-world content is (with examples), define what in-universe content is (with examples), state that real-world content is the goal for an encyclopedia, and in-universe information is supportive. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:17, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
Well, let's be clear about the choices being considered in the rewrite (and I salute Masem's efforts here). I think there is a legitimate concern that drive-by references to real world context (DVD commentary or a Nielsen rating, eg) can in turn justify extensive in-universe details. That invites gaming the system if consensus remains that Misplaced Pages is not a repository for fan-driven, in-universe content. Either we encourage the creation of individual articles on fictional topics that offer a wealth of in-universe content as encyclopedic (per DGG) or else we do not. And that needs to be made clear in the opening paragraph of the guideline. The rest is details. Eusebeus (talk) 17:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

depth of coverage?

Just to put it out there, since it crossed my mind today: what about instead of calling this "notability" we call it something like "fictional depth" or "depth of fiction coverage"? It's not really about what is notable or not, but rather how we organize it, and how much detail we place on it. It might help give some perspective on what we're trying to do. Just a thought. -- Ned Scott 07:31, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 15:17, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I think this still is a specific application of notability (and thus is still "Notability (fiction)"). And while I agree that, to some extent, we are talking about depth of coverage, we're not guidance directly related to that: we're not telling people exactly how deep in details they can go, but more that the depth of coverage they can provide is affected by a number of factors, with notability being one of the more critical ones. I do not want to say, explicitly, that a work of fiction can have an article about elements X, Y, and Z.

But it is still a good term to include, a section on it can't hurt. I think a lot of its discuss starts to fall out from WP:UNDUE in addition to other elements. --MASEM 15:27, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking that as well. How different factors determine the depth, etc. Even if the guideline itself stays at it's current title, giving some perspective as "depth" will help people understand that many of these characters/ elements are not black and white, totally include or totally exclude. -- Ned Scott 04:20, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Lack of participation

I read this on the Community Portal page today: "A proposal and discussion at Misplaced Pages:Notability (fiction) regarding where consensus lies is worried that there is a lack of participants in the debate. All participants in Misplaced Pages are welcome to engage in the debate and outline their position in the hope that broad community consensus will be found."

I am glad this topic is being considered here. I find entirely too many articles about minor characters in (to my mind) non-notable TV shows, computer games and faddish fantasy fiction fooferaw.

And I applaud those taking part in this conversation and wish you well. It is, however, very difficult to read through all the verbiage although some of you have made valiant effort over the past few weeks or so to boil it down. Good luck, and I really mean that!

Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 19:52, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I came here for the same reason, but this discussion is far too long and complicated for anyone to parachute in suddenly. All I can do is offer my general philosophy: it is clear from Misplaced Pages fancruft, the evening news, and world history, that people have a hard time distinguishing reality from fantasy. (E.g. pick whichever religious book or sect you hate most and look at how many people believe in it...) Bluring the line between fact and fiction in Misplaced Pages damages the educational mission of the project, and attempts to dilute the fiction notability guideline is the wrong way to go. If something wasn't notable enough to receive significant coverage in independent sources then it doesn't belong here regardless of how popular it was, and promotional material is not a good substitute for analysis. I'll vote for a proposal to that effect, even though we say we don't do votes, because we always wind up voting anyway. And I think that most people from outside the fiction community would vote the same way.--Yannick (talk) 04:27, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Ideally we'll take the proposals from Hiding and Masem and others, and come up with something that most of us on the talk page can agree with. Then we'll present the ideas to the greater community in a cleaner format, so that users new to this discussion can get a good feel for things without having to hunt through all the past discussion. -- Ned Scott 04:16, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Dear Ned Scott: This makes a lot of sense, and I thank you. Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 21:21, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Where people can help

While we're still editing the text, I think we're getting the spirit that (as I'm reading the room) seems agreeable to the present group of editors reading it. However, we really need both good and counter-examples to support this. Examples we'll need to agree on but examples nonetheless. I'm more concerned with good counter-examples - pages that are not written to this standard that are either being merged or AfD - specifically we want to "rescue" the text of those articles as subpages here so that we can point to them in the guideline. And it would be nice to have coverages of examples from movies, TV shows, and other literature in addition to what we presently cite, just so there's enough broadness to demonstrate how the guideline can apply. --MASEM 14:53, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand. Would you like to see more examples for a bad article that was turned into a GA with some effort (Boone Carlyle from old), many poor subarticles that, in a merged state, can establish notability (Races in Farscape, although the article still needs major trimming/cleanup, then major expansion), or poor subarticles that were merged and then improved to a state where they could be broken out again (Ben Hawkins and Brother Justin Crowe merged into Characters of Carnivàle, now)? Many merge discussions and AfDs, which I try to keep track of, have significantly improved the presentation of fiction-related material, so I may help here if I knew what you were looking for. – sgeureka 15:18, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Those would work too, where we have the before "unacceptable" versions and the final "acceptable" ones. We just need to make sure there's consensus on the examples that the "after" articles are meeting what we're trying to scope out. --MASEM 15:24, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

The notion that lists of fictional characters are a Good Idea should be de-emphasised. No-one seems to know whether they're notable or not, leaving us open to Final Fantasy good, Warcraft bad situations. The false sense of equality created by lists is also a problem, the guideline should mention this.--Nydas 15:57, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I may be misinterpreting what you're saying but this seems to go against what we've previously gotten as a good middle ground. Or are you saying that outright stating that "character lists without notability are acceptable" is a bad direction since it can bring on cruft, and that the language should be more about carefully considering the need for a character list that lacks notability before creating one? --MASEM 16:21, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

The ambiguous notability of character lists invites a biased approach, hence my comment about Final Fantasy good, Warcraft bad. There's no real difference in notability between List of Warcraft characters and Characters of Final Fantasy VIII, but one is deleted, the other is featured and (wrongly) used as a benchmark. The only difference is our bias.--Nydas 17:27, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately the Warcraft article has been deleted, but based on its 2nd AFD, there is a major difference between what is purported in Warcraft (all in-universe, no notability demonstration) and the FF8 one (which includes creation, reception, and other real world factors). But these still fall into different "classes" of fictional element articles and thus aren't comparable. Again, as the Warcraft article is gone, its impossible to judge if it would be the type of article that nicely fits as an acceptable list article in the new guideline we're trying to propose or not. It sounds like it was excessively plot heavy from the AfD, which would be problematic. --MASEM 20:30, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

If you look at the FFVIII characters article, the bulk of the out-of-universe stuff comes from a girl gamer site. If the FF franchise was lower on the pecking order, it'd be called a fansite. Similarly, the reception info would be declared 'redundant'.

The Warcraft characters could conceivably be sourced to the same level as List of Halo characters: i.e. from spinoff novels and art books. That may not be very good, but it certainly exceeds the low standard set by the Pokemon lists and the Digimon articles.--Nydas 23:06, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Part of your complaint sounds like it points back to TTN and others that take the approach of AfD first, improve later, which as I think we agree, is the wrong approach to deleting with non-notable fictional articles. I will argue that while the most oft-cited ref on the FF8 page is that FLARE site, there's enough from other reliable sources to truly demonstrate notability of the characters. Can the Warcraft characters get this way? Maybe, I don't know enough of that game to be able to tell. I understand the concerns that there's an implicit hierarchy of information based on the size/makeup of the fanbase, but each article needs to be judged on its own, and if the notability information just wasn't there for the Warcraft article, I can understand why it was deleted.

However, and this goes to the larger debate (not just to Nydas): here is a case of an article where the editors were "notified" (via AfD) that notability wasn't demonstrated, and assuming good faith of the requesting editor, that no significant efforts were made within a month prior to the second AfD to correct the lack of notability. Now, I completely agree that this process (AfD, wait, AfD again) is not what we want to promote. However, assuming the first step a month before the second AfD was instead a message on the talk page and a notability tag, do people consider this a fair warning that something needs to be done about the notability of the article before other editors attempt to do something about it? Not sure AfD was the right (transwiki to delete would have been better), but certainly, in how I read the 2nd AfD arguments, it seems completely fair. --MASEM 23:31, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Articles 'standing on their own' invites special treatment for Wikipedians' favourite franchises. WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS should be ignored (and ideally, deleted), since it encourages and sustains violations of WP:NPOV, a core policy. The idea that 'a month went by with no improvement, therefore deletion' is another idea that applies only to fiction. Like OTHERSTUFF, it is an attitude that should be dispensed with for reasons of neutrality. Look at the J.R. Ewing article. It's terrible, and it won't be cleaned up in a month no matter how much it gets tarred and feathered, yet the character is indisputably important and iconic.--Nydas 21:45, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

3rd Draft

diff from 2nd

Not much in terms of approach, just many language, trying to be more guiding, less prescriptive. --MASEM 18:27, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

My comments re: this draft:

Individual articles dealing with fictional works - this would extend the current guideline to include e.g. episode articles or the TV show / video game itself.
Characters of Final Fantasy VIII, while describing the major characters through in-universe style, contains notability aspects discussing the creation and popularity of the entire character cast. - I recently had a character list being basically GA-quick-failed for having the (short) character descriptions written in a slight in-universe style
paragraph Notability for such topics is based on Misplaced Pages's general notability requirement... There is too much explanation. Rather give a Good/Featured example.
I also note that this draft is similar to the de:WP:AüF (Articles about fictional things) from the German wikipedia, which is known to be überstrict. The main difference is that they don't separate between WP:FICT and WP:WAF, and let WP:N take care of the notability. Another is that they basically say, every fictional element must be covered in the main article except for things that span many works by different authors, e.g. Superman, Robin Hood and Mickey Mouse; everything else (namely fictional characters, locations and things) can only be covered in detail in so called accumulative articles. They say nothing about significant coverage in reliable third-party sources for these accumulative articles.

Ridernyc just said something relevant about WP:PLOT being a major issue, not so much notability. This is especially true for main characters of popular shows. Take Jack Shephard from Lost, where about 70% of the article shouldn't be there. But there is also Boone Carlyle, a minor main character of Lost, and since he has established notability quite well (I often use him as a good example), a merge proposal for the other dozen of main Lost characters cannot be successful if we're talking about "notability". If we however care about the presentation of currently available information, then a guideline merge with WP:WAF will be quite interesting. (I know, this proposal is not new and I'm getting ahead of myself.) – sgeureka 15:53, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm thinking exactly in line with this. I have not added it (it will be 4th draft) but I want to add a para that outlines that 1) not all notable topics need an article 2) notability has to be appropriate for the scope of the article (notability on character cast does not imply notability of a single character) 3) grouping notable topics into a logical list/summary article may be much better than having several shorter (but still notable) articles on smaller topics. And I do agree, WP:PLOT is policy, WP:N is guideline, so the emphasis should be on keeping plot/in-universe details in line with PLOT while still demonstrating notability.

Which article failed GA due to having short in-universe items? Comparison always helps.

Please feel free to edit my draft if you have wording choice suggestions and improvements. --MASEM 17:49, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

The draft is too long and too harsh. You've not made the core concepts any less strict (softer wording will have no effect), so this will never get consensus. I would suggest restoring the assumption that major characters in major works are notable, as is standard practice for elected officials, coins, beetles, etc.--Nydas 18:26, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Which article failed GA due to having short in-universe items? - This revision, but I did a quick rewrite (basically the current version) and took it to GA Review so that it is a GA now. Maybe I just had bad luck with the reviewer, although I admit that the rewrite made the article better.

Please feel free to edit my draft - Will do. I don't like messing in other editor's userspace unless I know that I may. :-) – sgeureka 18:31, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

That's a weird GA failing/promotion but shows the system works :-) - and definitely between that, Chars of Kingdom Hearts, most of the GA Simpsons episodes, and even Spoo (!!) I'm pretty happy with interpreting the notability guideline when coupled with present discussions about what "primary" and "secondary" sources are to come to this "1.5 source" idea that (I believe) does not reduce the quality of WP but still allows fictional elements to be covered appropriately. --MASEM 18:49, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

More about notability of fictional concepts in general

moved to Misplaced Pages talk:Notability (fiction)/More about notability of fictional concepts in general 04:52, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

The bad thing, Ned, is that editors now have to go to a seperate page and add it to their watchlist if they want to keep up with this discussion. This section was in no way a "long rant" but, rather, a productive discussion about a facet of the guideline. I do believe we are making progress and both sides need to stop giving up on the process. Yes, there are parts that are repetitive, but that is always the case in a large debate. Ursasapien (talk) 07:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Please do not censor this page. Replace what I found to be a well formed argument and you found to be a "rant." - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 07:21, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

What's done is done. At this point, I think it would be more disruptive to move the discussion back to this page. However, I would encourage Ned to avoid moving discussions like this one in the future. Additionally, I would encourage all interested parties to watch the sub-page. Ursasapien (talk) 07:28, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

no what's done can be undone and I"m doing it now. Sorry Ned but stop trying to control the debate. Restored text below. Ridernyc (talk) 10:29, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

It's not censorship or trying to control the debate, nor is it disruptive. We've already had other people come here and explain how it was hard to follow the discussion going on. But thanks for assuming the worst of me. -- Ned Scott 20:42, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps it is the draft talk we should move to a subpage, then? It would allow for the focused discussion, without people assuming that every time a wall of text (and that was one heck of a wall of text) is moved it is because of a disagreement. -- Ned Scott 20:53, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

More about notability of fictional concepts in general

I wnat to address some of the points made earlier. Fictional characters and elements do exist in the real world. Sure, they exist as fictional concepts, but they exist just as surely as love, the Coriolis effect, and the number 593. Radio stations can and do spawn articles about individual shows and DJ's, but for those sub-topics which have little or no coverage in reliable independent sources, they are generally merged to their parent topics. Major radio stations and networks have spawned many notable shows and DJ's: e.g. The Howard Stern Show, Rick Dees, Wolfman Jack, Dr. Demento, and American Top 40. And the more notable shows have sub-topics of their own, e.g. see Template:Howard Stern Show. In the same way, while minor works of fiction might not need articles detailing every character and every element, major works (e.g. Star Trek, Star Wars, The Simpsons, South Park) do warrant extensive coverage. "Real world significance" is of course important for all articles, not just those on ficitional topics, but we seem to trying to set the bar higher for fictional topics by attempting to limit the type of coverage that is allowed to establish notability. Books, films, and television episodes exist in the real world, real people read and watch them, and various elements of them have various effects on varying numbers of people. Published books, films, television shows, articles, and papers which significantly cover those elements, created by people independent of the initial creators of those elements, establish a real world significance and notability, regardless of whether the coverage itself is from a "real-world" or "in-universe" perspective. We presume things are notable if they have been "noticed" (significantly) in published sources independent of the subject. We don't require sources to say they are notable, or important, or famous, or iconic, or outstanding, we simply require them to cover the subject non-trivially (i.e. more than a directory entry or a passing mention). We shouldn't require the sources to say that they had a certain "real-world" effect in order to document the real-world effect. The existence of hundreds of independently-written and published Star Trek novels, Star Wars novels, and Simpsons comics, establish, or ought to establish, the notability of their respective universes and major characters without even having to consult a single "real-world" source.

On the subject of original research, I see no reason why fictional topics would be more likely to attract original research than "real-world" topics. Surely primary sources such as the fossil record or the global temperature record are not less likely to attract original research than episodes of Star Trek or Star Wars films and novels, simply because one is a source for factual infomation and one is a source for fictional information. In my opinion it is actually the real-world primary sources which are more subject to original research, because primary sources for real-world information usually can only hope to be approximations and incomplete records of the actual real-world subjects, while the body of primary sources about fictional topics are the most accurate and reliable information about their subjects that could possibly exist. We often have to analyze and synthesize real-world data in order to extract the real-world information, and when that analysis requires special skill or training we need secondary sources to do that in order to avoid original research. On the other hand, elements of fictional works can usually be described and information extracted without needing any special skills or training, making the information exceedingly verifiable to anyone with access to those sources.

Now the copyright aspect might be the most convincing of any of the arguments for avoiding detailed plot summaries. However, I question that if copyright infringement is truly a concern, then how is shuffling off the more detailed articles to other sites going to help the problem? We might be saving the Wikimedia foundation from a lawsuit, but not we're not helping the authors of those detailed articles. And if Wookieepedia and Memory Alpha aren't getting sued, why do we expect Misplaced Pages to get sued? Really, if you're a copyright owner and you have a choice between going after the non-profit educational Wikimedia Foundation, or the for-profit commercial enterprise Wikia, which are you going to go after first, from a both a financial perspective and a public relations perspective?

Nevertheless, let's look at the copyright issue. The two copyright cases which were alluded to above were Twin Peaks v. Publications Int'l, Ltd. 996 F.2d 1366 (2d Cir. 1993), and Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publ. Group, 150 F.3d 132 (2d Cir. 1998). The first case was about a book which contained extensive quotes and paraphrases from Twin Peaks as well as detailed descriptions of plot, character, and setting. The second case was a book containing trivia questions about Seinfeld. These cases are well summarized at Stanford University's website. In the Twin Peaks case, the summary notes that the book was not a fair use because "the amount of the material taken was substantial and the publication adversely affected the potential market for authorized books about the program." In the Seinfeld case, "the book affected the owner's right to make derivative 'Seinfeld' works such as trivia books." In both cases the concern was the amount of content copied or derived from the original work (it was "substantial") and the effect on the market of derivative works. (Note that also both cases involved commercial works; non-profit educational uses are typically given more leeway in fair use case law.) In essence, then, any policy based on copyright should ensure that we don't go into so much detail that we essentially replace the market for the work or authorized derivatives.

But for topics where the body of work is so substantial, such as the Star Trek or Star Wars universes, or even lesser known fictional settings which still have a large body of published fiction, it is easy to go into much detail without "substantially" replacing the copyrighted works. We shouldn't try to replace in-universe reference works such as The Star Trek Encyclopedia but we ought to be able to use it as a source, as long as we don't "substantially" repeat all the fictional content, and we put what we do extract in a real-world context. We can do that by describing the fictional concepts in relation to the works which contain and describe them, rather than describing them in-universe as elements of larger fictional topics. Of course none of this is an issue for works out of copyright. We really should have no qualms about writing extensively about the characters of Shakespeare and Homer (the Greek writer, not the Simpson!) even from an entirely in-universe perspective. Though it would still probably be better encyclopedically to use real-world context, and document whatever real-world information is available; we shouldn't make it an absolute requirement and subject such articles to deletion simply because they lack "real-world" information.

The idea that fiction has no physical limit for article creation is not realistic. Our coverage fiction is limited by that which exists just as much as coverage of living species; "that which exists" meaning being documented in reliable published material. Misplaced Pages is not for things made up in school one day, so we don't expand our coverage to made-up Star Trek characters just because someone can imagine one (or even has written a self-published fan fiction article on the web about one). And our coverage of beetle species doesn't expand to coverage of the beetle scurrying across the sidewalk in front of my residence, even if it certainly exists. "Physical existence" is not a necessary nor sufficent condition for Misplaced Pages coverage. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but there is no guy who dresses up as Santa Claus in the local mall. There is a Kwik-E-Mart, but there is no Slurpee machine in the 7-Eleven at the corner of Main Street and First Street. I am becoming less and less convinced that the notability standards for fictional concepts need to be stricter than those for real-world objects. I can see a need to limit excessive plot detail for copyright reasons, but that should be covered by WP:NOT#PLOT alone, not a separate notability guideline. It seems that in all other cases, the subject-specific cases usually expand the notability criteria to cover topics where reliable sources might be difficult to find or have minimal coverage, because of systemic bias or FUTON bias, but fiction seems to be the only area where we try to restrict the general notabilty criteria.

Not to say that a notability guideline for fiction should not exist, but it should be a place which explains the general notability guideline and plot summary policy and gives general guidance when someone wants to understand what should be done when someone says that something is a "non-notable fictional <whatever>". What it should definitely not do is encourage more AfD nominations and arguments of the "Delete, per WP:FICT, WP:N, and WP:FANCRUFT" type. I think the present draft is going a long way towards this, but I still want to be careful that it doesn't encourage eliminating significant information simply because of lack of "real-world information" found in "reliable secondary sources", in cases where notability might be reasonably be established by a plethora of independent primary sources, which exist in the real-world, which cover "in-universe" information. (I'm defining "primary sources" here as it seems to be defined in the context of this discussion; in-universe sources. Some might consider Star Trek novels or The Star Trek Encyclopedia to be "secondary sources" for information on the Star Trek universe, as they are independent of the original creators of the fictional setting). DHowell (talk) 01:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

You pretty much missed the point. It's not that you're wrong, and you are right about some of that stuff, but that you don't seem to understand the reality of the situation. We're not speculating about fiction being magnets for OR; it actually happens. I'm also wondering if you even bothered to read the article Santa Claus. There's also a difference in "existing in the real world" (about perspective) and writing things relevant and connected to the real world.

Notability for works of fiction is not what we are discussing here, but instead we are talking about elements of fiction. So while something as a work of fiction might be obviously notable, that doesn't mean there's any real value to an encyclopedia (grounded in the real world) to go into depth on everything about it, and there are several reasons why it can be a problem. But at this point, we're just repeating ourselves. -- Ned Scott 01:36, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Ned, you are probably right--we are repeating ourselves and we will not solve it. the only rational procedure is to mark the guideline as rejected. DGG (talk) 01:55, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

No, we don't bend to the extremists and the pessimists. Considering the positive direction things have been taking, I'm surprised that even you would still make such a statement. -- Ned Scott 01:59, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

FICT should be a guideline that reasonably lessens NOTE like other subject specific notability guidelines (as a guick view of actual editing practices backs this up), not one that is more exclusionary. Barring that, it should be marked as rejected. Thousands of editors and their edits have rejected it so far. Because one editor can redirect and then keep redirected the work of thousands shows that the way we make/use guidelines isn't working. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:19, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

so you had some tv episode articles deleted and/or redirected? Let me ask you this The X-man have had 1000's of comic books published using them, should every one of those issues be notable and have an article that is nothing more then a plot summary and random trivia?Ridernyc (talk) 02:27, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Have each of the thousands of comic books been viewed by millions of people, as is the case of each and every episode of many prime-time TV shows, for example? Have each of the thousands of comics, or even a significant percentage of them, been the subject of reviews in national magazines? If so, then perhaps they are all notable and should have an article. The content of those articles should be decided by those who have an interest in maintaining them; plot summaries can be trimmed to avoid copyright infringement and real-world context and information can be added where available to bolster fair-use claims. Now whether each of the thousands of X-men comics are notable themselves is a different question as to whether the existence of those comics prove the notability of the fictional characters, settings, and other elements which transcend any of the individual comic books; I say that it does. DHowell (talk)

Even if WP:FICT didn't exist, those articles would be cited as AfD by WP:N. We are trying to stress that more in the case of fictional articles, there are better routes than straight AfD. We are trying to correct the deletionist trend. --MASEM 02:35, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I work on comics related articles, and a large number of editors have decided not to create articles on individual comics, even when they can have their notability established. A small group of people working on FICT arent' needed to tell us what is reasonable. If you want to include a description of that practice here, that would be fine.

As mentioned, other nobaility sub guidelines expand what is considered notable to bring it in line with what a majority of editors feel is reasonable. FICT is the exact opposite: a small group of editors saying the much larger group is wrong. Describe vs. prescribe and all that. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:42, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

There's no problem with stating what you did for comics: not every notable topic needs an article; we're trying to say through WP:N that every article needs to be about at least one notable topic (excluding what is written for summary style). We want a guideline that is a starting point for separate projects that may not more specific rules to start, and ones that be expanded upon more to meet the project's consensus, as long as they don't supercede/undermind WP:N/WP:FICT. --MASEM 02:54, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

As has been stated before Fiction has it's own set of rules unique to it. WP:Plot outweighs notability and is the reason real reason 99% of fictional articles get deleted. When some says notability in an AFD debate they are really saying "Fails WP:Plot, WP:RS, WP:OR, and WP:V." you can claim this guideline is exclusionary but really if it was not here you would have a much harder time trying to keep articles. Ridernyc (talk) 03:24, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Except that deletion arguments like that are usually based on interpretations of those policies which are not supported by the consensus which put them into place, and are also "just a policy" arguments. And none of these policies or guidelines say that the only or best way to deal with articles that "fail" them is to delete them. DHowell (talk) 04:02, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Ned, I think you are missing the point, and it's perhaps because you have been so focused on articles about fiction that you don't see that the same problems you describe exist in every other area of Misplaced Pages. Articles about schools, small towns, local broadcast stations, and sports teams can attract just as much original research and "fancruft" as articles on fictional characters and settings. But we don't (or we shouldn't) solve the problem by simply deleting or redirecting large numbers of subtopic articles; we get rid of the original research and make sure the facts are verifiable to published sources, and merge and redirect if the content makes sense in a larger context. Also the content of the Santa Claus article is not the issue, the issue is that we shouldn't give special treatment to fictional topics just because they "don't physically exist". Things can be proven to be relevant and connected to the real world if real people write and publish material about them, and it shouldn't matter whether they do it creatively, in a documentary fashion, or analytically, as long as we recognize the real-world perspective appropriate for each type of coverage.

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Atlanta in fiction is a good example of an unfortunate casualty of this bias towards requiring "real-world" coverage from sources. I made the argument that an encyclopedic article could have been written (and if I had enough spare time, I probably could do it) about the concept of Atlanta as it is portrayed in various works of fiction. I even gave one academic source which could have been used in such an article. While the list may not have been that article, it would have served as a starting point for people willing to contribute towards writing that article. As it has been deleted, however, it is unlikely that a good article on this topic will ever form, unless I or someone else is willing to take the extensive effort to write an article which will pass the "recreation of deleted material" barrier. The wiki process is supposed to take imperfect articles and turn them, eventually, into quality content, but this process is hindered by inappropriate deletion of useful content. The closer's offer to userfy the content doesn't really help, as the wiki process just doesn't produce the kind of content in userspace that it would in mainspace articles.

No one is arguing that we go into depth on everything about every notable work of fiction. But we don't go into depth on everything about real-world items such as cities, towns, schools, companies, broadcast stations, and sports teams, either; we go into as much depth as would be appropriate based on the amount of published material there is available on the topic, with appropriate attempts to correct for systemic and FUTON biases. But we should not be restrictive the "types" of published material we can use, other than to say that material which is self-published or promotional is only appropriate in very limited contexts. DHowell (talk) 03:35, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Again fiction has it's own set of rules that don't apply to other articles. See WP:Plot. Ridernyc (talk) 03:50, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Living people have a set of rules that don't apply to other articles. I'm not sure the point of noting topic-specific guidelines and policies. -- Ned Scott 04:05, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I tend to get myself into hot water living persons articles lately.

"But we should not be restrictive the "types" of published material we can use," You are at the wrong talk page. You want WP:V or WP:RS. It sucks, I know, there's a lot of stuff I want to write about, but without sources it would be either original research or unverifiable by our standards. -- Ned Scott 04:05, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

If this article is just parroting PLOT and RS, then it's unecessary as a stop on the way to RS and PLOT and we should deprecate it. This page is a pet for people who don't like the way the larger community deals with fictional works. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 04:41, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Great idea in theory, but leaves a huge hole to be filled. And this certainly is not a "pet" for one side of a dispute or another. -- Ned Scott 04:50, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you think that I'm suggesting a change in V and RS, Ned. I acknowledged that self-published sources get special treatment, and that is grounded in the existing verifiability policy and reliable sources guideline. An example of a "questionable source" as it relates to fictional topics, in my mind, might be a homoerotic story about James T. Kirk and Spock, even if it was published in a notable magazine or by a notable publishing house. Such a source could not be used to claim that Kirk and Spock are gay, but they still could be used as a source for the claim that Kirk and Spock have been the subject of homoerotic fiction, if there are many such published stories and they have been read by a significant audience. When talking about fictional topics, I believe that fictional sources are "reliable sources", especially if they are authorized by the creators of the fictional elements. Fictional topics are defined by the fictional sources which write about them, making them the most reliable sources available. And mainstream published companion guides, articles, and papers which analyze or criticize plots (even without without noting any "real-world" information or context) should also be considered reliable sources for Misplaced Pages articles. The essay describing examples of reliable sources, which I think has far more consensus then any of the recent versions of the fiction notability guideline, even suggests a looser, not stricter, application of WP:RS for fictional topics: it acknowleges that articles related to popular culture and fiction may be backed up by sources that in other contexts would be considered "unreliable sources" and, "When a substantial body of material is available the best material available is acceptable, especially when comments on its reliability are included." DHowell (talk) 04:57, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you're getting at. Though many would still consider that "real-world" information, because we're talking about how someone made those works because of their experience with the original work of fiction. Adaptations and inspiration into other works do rightly help indicate notability. I have no problem with such sources (provided it's more than a passing reference to pop-culture). -- Ned Scott 05:02, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I do feel we can allow "1.5 sources" that are primary sources but that give insight into development and reception and other real-world topics. But even if such "1.5 sources" go into extensive plot details, WP is not a place for detailed plot information. We can summarize enough to understand the real-world notability (which as we are writing, includes discussion at a low depth of coverage the characters, settings and other aspects), and we can use such materials as additional references or external links, but we cannot build extensive plot sections based off that information without violating WP:PLOT (which is policy, not guideline). But as Ned states above, we can talk about influences, we can talk about notable critical commentary, and the like, for fictional elements. --MASEM 05:09, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Currently, the guideline suggests that sources must specifically discuss "information such as sales figures, critical and popular reception, development, cultural impact, and merchandise", and that sources which demonstrate critical and popular reception and cultural impact without discussing it are forbidden. I think one of the problems we are having (demonstrated by your "1.5" designation) is confusing the distinction between "primary" and "secondary" sources with the distinction between "in-universe" and "out-of-universe" sources. What you call "1.5 sources" I would simply call "primary sources covering out-of-universe information". What many are calling "primary souces" (e.g. derivative fiction, companion guides), I might call "secondary sources covering in-universe information". With these definitions, the general notability guideline can be satisified by in-universe secondary sources, and the plot policy can be satisfied by real-world out-of-universe primary sources. The absolute demand for secondary real-world sources is what I am generally objecting to, even though I agree that they should certainly be used if available. DHowell (talk) 05:32, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree (and as you see in my present rewrite) that secondary and primary sources that discuss real-world aspects are appropriate to demonstrate notability (reading the current mess going on at WP:NOR and WP:PSTS and considering WP:N as guideline, there's certainly leaway for this aspect in there). And while I certainly recommend sourcing the secondary guides to help support the plot, if these only covered the plot, they do not help to demonstrate real-world notability. (Mind you, it is very likely that if a work of fiction has a non-self-published guide, it is likely a notable work of fiction). --MASEM 05:49, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I concur, and i think other perspectives are much too narrow. Such things as sales figures and publication history are to my mind interesting bibliographic trivia. The important things about fiction are what is in the fiction. that's why people want to read or view it in the first place--otherwise the whole general topic would be of no interest, encyclopedic or otherwise. But I disagree with even the use of the primary-secondary distinction, and I think the discussion about it in WP generally is that there is not all that much for which the traditional WP distinction is applicable. What we want is the best source to provide the information that belongs in WP. the real question which we can not settle by verbal distinctions is what belongs in WP.

The only consistent meaning of in-=universe is that it represents the way in which fan fiction discusses the work as if the fictional universe were real--the way Tolkien presents his languages in the appendixes to the Ring. If we had to describe it in the categories used above, it would be secondary in-universe discussion--from an unquestionably reliable source. When Rowlands discusses what alternative plots there could have been, it's not in-universe, nor is it when we discuss what the plot is. When someone writes a biography of one of the characters as if it were a part of the series, that's in-universe. Quidditch Through the Ages is in-universe. A discussion of Quiddich treating it as a fictional game is not in-universe. The distinction is merely a guide to how to write the articles.

What matters is that we treat the major fictional concepts fully, depending on the importance of the work, and the importance of the concepts in the work. the main ones are plot, characters, theme, and setting. The subsidiary ones are authorship, publication, derivatives, and influence. that's what I propose as the basic guideline. DGG (talk) 05:56, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I am pretty confident that that statement will not fly - given both PLOT and NOT, and that this is meant to be a general encyclopedia written for all readers, and not those that may have an interest in the work, plot details must always be secondary to the real-world aspects and influence of the work. You may consider those trivial bibliographic details, but in reality, that is what cements the work or fictional concept to the real world. Articles should first and foremost be based on these elements, and appropriate plot details can follow, but once again, there's issues of undue weight that means we need to stick to enough plot details to allow comprehension of the article otherwise. --MASEM 06:12, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Agree with Masem. No way should we adopt such an open-ended position. Real-world significance is a major pillar. Eusebeus (talk) 14:52, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

and yet again, If you want to change WP:Plot change the policy, don't write a guideline that tries to weaken the policy. Again this is the problem with this guideline. People keep talking about notability and that's not the issue at all. We all agree what is notable. What people don't like is WP:Plot. This guideline is just clouding the larger issue. I also think it is becoming clear there will never be consensus on this guideline. Even if we all manage to agree to something now, someone will just come along and change it in a week. At this point we can't even agree on what we disagree on. Ridernyc (talk) 10:39, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

In response to a few comments here, you are correct in that it isn't directly notability (to include or not include) that we're talking about, but rather the depth of information, a point I mentioned above in another thread. There's a general depth of information, as well as other factors that can justify further information. There also seems to be some confusion on what we think is "in-universe" or not. I noticed DGG's comment "When Rowlands discusses what alternative plots there could have been, it's not in-universe,..." Who said it was? WP:WAF#Primary and secondary information might help people understand how we are defining things. -- Ned Scott 21:03, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Three steps toward a consensus solution

1) ARCHIVE This page is far too long. No one coming to this debate will ever bother to contribute, since who has the time to wade through all the back and forth above. We need to archive it and provide a brief summary of the main points. Keeping all this is cliquish. Can we agree?

2) !VOTE Time draws near for an up or down on Masem's latest proposal (#3). This not voting, it's !voting. But we have descended into a mediaeval, scholastic disputatio that serves only to limit the level of participation, with people simply restating their positions. I suggest that if we do wish to thrash out argument further (and why not), Masem divide up his latest into specific sections and the debate be focused on specific aspects of his proposal and placed into relevant subpages.

3) INPUT. Once this hydra has been archived, we need wider input from editors, especially those familiar with policy and practices, by posting at the relevant policy pages, AfD's, and merge debates.

So Proposed. Eusebeus (talk) 14:48, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

We do have this auto-archived - it will happen next Monday though (best I can tell). I don't know if manual archiving breaks it.

Also, given the holidays, I think we won't necessarily have resolution on the issues until 08, but you're absolutely right that we're trying to get constructive input and instead seem to be rehashing the same arguments over and over.--MASEM 17:58, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 18:01, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

This entire thing has been an by a dozen people to change the wording but not the meaning or rules of a guideline at least 90% of Misplaced Pages's userbase doesn't even know exists, yet is one of the main reasons why casual browsers and editors are getting more and more angry that they can't find any well-written Internet-based information on their favorite fictional works. This entire discussion in summary:

Hey, let's systematically remove all the information that lead to Misplaced Pages being popular and enjoyed in the first place.
- No let's be bureaucratic about it, change a guideline to appease people mildly over a short period of time without changing or improving anything in the long run.
  - Sounds good.
Don't you think we should appease the fanbase who outnumbers us thousands to one instead of our own selfish views?
- No, get out. And take your garbage with you to Wikia.
  - Maybe, let's add a "if" somewhere in the guideline.
We should respect what people want from this website instead of removing information a few people and policy do not like.
- No, that would be against Misplaced Pages policy.
  - But that isn't morally or logically correct.
    - It is according to Misplaced Pages policy.

Repeat for 3000+ lines and you get a Tower of Babble. Ending this discussion won't get anyone anywhere, just like starting it didn't. Excuse me if I sound noncivil, but I thought I'd just put the situation in perspective. - The Norse (talk) 23:39, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

All true, but this is the only framework we have. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 01:03, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I have replaced the original wording with to help maintain decorum. - Jehochman 17:03, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Why? If The Norse wants to make a jackass, unhelpful, childish comment like that, tampering it to remove his "idiotic circle jerk" is unwarranted. If anything, it is a good reminder that engagement, not smears, are helpful in advancing the debate. Eusebeus (talk) 18:56, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Please remain civil Norse and Eusebeus. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 19:02, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

A banal and pointless comment. I see you didn't call Norse out when he referred to your participation here as an idiotic circle jerk. Or is that because you happen to agree with his position? Anyway, calling such comments for what they are is not incivility. Eusebeus (talk) 19:12, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

"Jackass, unhelpful, childish comment?" I dare you to find more than a handful of statements in this discussion that don't fall into that category from the perspective of any person who avidly browses the fiction articles of Misplaced Pages(Yours don't fall into that handful btw). Ironically, even when not seen from such a perspective my comment was far more constructive and mature than yours was. Please try to set a better example for those you look down upon. - The Norse (talk) 19:17, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

You are so right. I humbly apologise. I guess being in a full-on circle jerk gets us all a little confused, so thanks for sorting it out for us there partner. And keep those helpful, well-expressed comments coming - wouldn't want to miss out on more of your eloquent, thoughtful pearls of wisdom. Eusebeus (talk) 19:24, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Your humble apology is accepted. I too humbly apologise for deeming you "idiotic". Idiots can't use sarcasm as superbly as you have done just now, fine sir. - The Norse (talk) 20:08, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Draft #4 - ready for more...

Diff from #3

Ok, so here's what I'm thinking. WP:FICT is (based on all input to this point) is nothing more than saying "Follow PLOT and follow N; PLOT (being policy) is more important than N". Technically, this guideline doesn't need to exist.

However, I have tried to outline that this is truly a "guide"line, to help people to determine how to approach articles on fictional topics - we're not giving them special treatment but its the fact that there's so much of it out there that could be included that we have to fall back to PLOT and N for WP and say there is a limit to what really can be put on the site. (Compared to, say, the number of county lanes in the US or the number of towns in Ireland, the amount of possible plot information for fictional works is near infinite.) I've tried to outline this in "Reasoning behind this guideline".

Elsewhere, I've tried to stress WP:PLOT over WP:N (though it's still a notability guideline). I've included a section of what to do with excessive plot articles which included no recommendation for deletion barring lack of notability.

I've also tried to include some (recently passed) FA/GAs for examples. I can actually feel confident that Spoo is sufficiently notable if we consider the "1.5 sources" approach (a stance I felt much different a month ago). This may or may not be an intended result (as I previously though Spoo to be an exception of a rule).

I think we're getting to something that melds with all current policies/guidelines, and incorporates past consensus - it's not exactly the deletion policy on minor characters, but nearly every step in that old list follows from what's presented here, and so on. Again, I strongly believe this guideline as written doesn't change was is a notable/non-notable fictional article, but instead helps editor understand and guide them better when writing and working with such articles.

Comments or please edit directly. --MASEM 01:51, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Not sure whether to comment here or on the user talkpage, but should Articles on fictional elements with undue weight of in-universe information be moved to WP:WAF? This is really good, but I wonder if we are getting into too many details regarding manuscript style in this "notability" guidline. Ursasapien (talk) 07:22, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

The '1.5' sources idea is just an acceleration of everything that's wrong with this guideline. What's the betting that it will only apply to Wikipedians' favourite franchises? If it 'allows' a piece of utter, utter dreck like Spoo whilst still allowing the deletion of major characters from popular sitcoms or soap operas, then we might as well mark WP:NPOV historical.--Nydas 09:48, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

The idea is not to give every fictional element (e.g. characters) the same weight, but to weight them by available real-world information (backed up by a short plot summary for context). Exactly like WP:NPOV#Undue weight wants. – sgeureka 10:04, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

To Ursasapien: there's no reason it couldn't, or at least redirect it to there; it may be excessive, but I wanted to make sure that for fictional elements, PLOT and NOTE go hand in hand, its almost impossible to separate them.

To Nydas - PLOT and NOTE are tied through UNDUE for fictional articles. No one is saying you cannot talk about major characters in a sitcom or soap opera, but if no sourced demonstration of notability exists regarding that character, then one cannot go into excessive fictional details save to establish the character's role in the overall (presumably notable) work. --MASEM 14:28, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Do you support the deletion of J.R. Ewing then? Never mind that finding information on pre-Internet TV shows is difficult, or that the viewing demographic is under-represented on Misplaced Pages.

Demanding ultra-punishing standards for major fiction characters from important franchises is a violation of WP:NPOV, which states that popularity of a viewpoint is critical to deciding our weighing of it. If no sources can be googled, we should assume they exist, like we do for everything else. No reason for the ultra-punishment of fiction has yet been advanced apart from scaremonging about encouraging fancruft.

The real kicker is that these ultra-punishing standards will never be employed against Wikipedians' favourite fiction, especially with '1.5 sources' ready to spring into action.--Nydas 09:27, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I support this version. Eusebeus (talk) 17:41, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
Oppose - doesn't address fundamental problems with this page. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:39, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Can I ask which problems those are? Based on your comments in the present discussion, you're concerned about FICT restricting beyond what WP:NOTE allows, but as I point out, there is not here that neither strengthen nor relaxes from NOTE considering the policy of WP:PLOT, and we can't change PLOT. Please let us know what you think is wrong so we can address it. --MASEM 20:51, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

If it isn't changing NOTE or PLOT, then I don't see any use for this page. I would like it to weaken NOTE (not PLOT), but I don't think the current group of editors who frequent this page will allow it. Se la vi. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:46, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

If there is no conflict with NOTE or PLOT then why have an issue with it? If anything, the draft (and even the current version, to a lesser extent) do help to soften NOTE by pointing out how articles can be a part of a larger topic. -- Ned Scott 03:11, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Question. Can we fold the episode guidline into this guideline (perhaps as a subheading)? WP:EPISODE has always seemed a little redundant and micro-focused for me. Ursasapien (talk) 06:50, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

The mass exodus of fiction content and Wikia

It's a shrewd business move actually. The television episode articles aren't making any money for Jimbo while they sit here on Misplaced Pages. But on Wikia, the episode article becomes a moneymaker. The revenue pours in from AdSense and Fastclick. One easy way to drive webtraffic to the site is declaring fictional topics on Misplaced Pages no longer notable. Delete articles, redirect articles and tell editors to start "volunteering" for Wikia. There's nothing better than free labor. I hope no Wikia employee is behind WP:FICT or WP:EPISODE because that would look pretty bad in my opinion. How fortuitous if the mass exodus happens to align with their bottom line. Topic not notable enough for Misplaced Pages, the 💕? Wikia will take you in. You're always welcome at Wikia, the for-profit wiki that anyone can edit. --Pixelface (talk) 05:02, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I take it you don't know about how we also promote non-Wikia wikis? -- Ned Scott 05:28, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, enough with the "profit bad" bull. -- Ned Scott 05:28, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I never said "profit bad." I said it's in Wikia's financial interest to have articles about fiction that Misplaced Pages doesn't have and it's in Wikia's financial interest to attract people to the site who will work for free. It's in Wikia's financial interest to take content from Misplaced Pages. It's good for their bottom line. --Pixelface (talk) 05:37, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

It is, but those who are encouraging people to use Wikia on Misplaced Pages are independent 3rd parties that don't make any money from Wikia. This is why it's not considered a conflict of interest, and we've talked about this issue time and time again. -- Ned Scott 05:44, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

RfC: Acceptable direction for WP:FICT guideline

Template:RFCpolicy

The previous version of WP:FICT has been heavily cited as a common reason for deletion of fictional content articles without giving the article's editors a good faith chance to demonstrate notability or merge or transwiki the material appropriately. While there is general consensus based on the results of these deletions and through both What Misplaced Pages is not#PLOT and notability that non-notable, heavily in-universe style fiction articles are not appropriate for Misplaced Pages, it is also argued that such content should not be immediately removed. This has lead to so called "inclusionists" vs "deletionists" edit conflicts. This has possibly been mitigated due to changes earlier this year in WP:NOTE that provided a brighter line for what material can be included, which many fictional articles cannot easily meet.

The proposed version of WP:FICT is not an attempt to limit or expand what notability means for topics on fiction beyond that this reflects on their real-world aspects: development, reception, and so-forth. The proposed version also heavily includes concerns with WP:PLOT and by association, WP:UNDUE. The proposed version is more of a true "guideline" in that it is meant to help both editors that want to write about fiction, and editors that are worried about encyclopedic quality, provided suggestions for approaching articles from either direction.

At time point, those that have provided comments for the article seem to either be mostly for it, or mostly against it and we seem to be running into the same walls over and over, and need fresh eyes to help work this out. This is not a consensus to approve this guideline but instead an RfC to see if there is any additional improvements that could be made or any addition concerns that we have not addressed or that may be raised by this version. --MASEM 21:21, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I think this is a misleading statement of the problem. The WP:NOTE changes do not provide a bright line for anything, as the discussions about the fiction articles demonstrate. The consensus in the first paragraph does not exist, except among a small group of deletionists. The dissatisfaction with the guideline is an attempt to prevent the interpretation of WP:NOTE in a way inappropriate to fictional content. It is not true that development and reception are the only important real-wordld concerns about fiction, or perhaps even the most important, and there is no consensus to that except among those who want to delete articles on other aspects. The rest of us feel that the plot characters and setting, being part of the real world work, as read by real world readers, also have a real world significance., and that in-universe should be interpreted narrowly to exclude only works written entirely from a fan fiction perspective.

But the last paragraph of the RfC is appropriate--we are not likely to resolve these differences by continued discussion here among the present participants. Masem and I are not likely to convince each other, and there is no point in our attempting to wear each other out. There probably is some consensus--that the way fiction articles were written a year ago was immature and inappropriate. How to translate that into a set of guidelines that most people concerned with these articles can live with probably does need some new ideas. (Or perhaps it will be the case that the WP community in general does agree with one position of other, and that either of the two views are in fact in a small minority.) DGG (talk) 09:06, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I think what this present guideline does is some line in the sand that reflect an estimated middle point between all parties concerned and past consensus, and we're at a point we need to get the general communities input, not just through this RFC (to catch glaring problems or to address areas we're mision), but then (likely at the start of 08) to take the proposal to the body at large for consensus. It's a line in the sand because when we put this to consensus, it may be rejected but it is hoped that the rejection does not mean throwing out the entire guideline but simply tweaking a paragraph here and there, rubbing out that line and moving it a little bit in one direction or another. ---MASEM

I think the notability section of WP:EPISODE should be folded into the proposed new guideline. Ursasapien (talk) 09:28, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Nevermind . . . It appears that most of the information is already contained in this proposal (and stated more clearly for that matter. Ursasapien (talk) 09:39, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the note at the bottom could motivate more "Great Purge"s rather than encourage editors to improve articles or not create bad ones in the first place. Could we discuss softening it a bit? Ursasapien (talk) 10:26, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Suggestions? ( not I say nothing about deletion, I just want to make sure that it is clear articles should not be allowed to be indefinitely left in a state that the editors have been told to improve notability and nothing has happened for a "reasonable" amount of time. Again, the hope is that we direct more people to merge or transwiki, which means the information isn't lost such that if new notability information is found, we can just restore the article easily. --MASEM 14:47, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to leave the note off too. Anyone wanting to claim an article can stay indefinitely will get short shrift at an afd. Maybe just amend the sentence to read as Please note that the lack of demonstrated notability is not a criteria for speedy deletion, nor is there any deadline to improve such articles, although improvement is an expected part of the editing process. Maybe a wordsmith can tweak a little better. Just make the point that whilst there is no deadline, improvement is expected. That way there is no need for the note. Hiding T 22:04, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and taken out that footnote and replaced it with the above (adding in "good faith" qualification for any improvements). I think that still stresses that you can't sit on it when you've been told, but should avoid mass deletion rushes because editors aren't fast enough. --MASEM 22:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I've been fond of the idea that we should view sub-articles as if they were still in parent articles, as a way to guide people on how much content might be too much on a sub-article (if that makes sense). An idea for one of the sections (with italics noting the new addition):

"* They should concisely provide details of the topic or topics covered in the work - just because the sub-article is given more space to grow does not mean that excessive plot summaries or fictional character biographies are appropriate. The sub-articles and parent article should be evaluated over-all, as if they were a single document, and trimmed as needed."

My wording isn't that great, but hopefully people will understand what I'm getting at. Something like this, or some other method of helping bring to context what is too much and what is justified when we have sub-articles that are lacking in real-world information. -- Ned Scott 09:08, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Memory Alpha template deletion notice

{{Memory Alpha}}, an external wiki link template, has been listed for deletion at Misplaced Pages:Templates for deletion/Log/2007 December 17#Template:Memory Alpha. Since we often talk about liking to external wikis for fiction-related articles, I thought people here might want to know. Note the discussion is not about whether or not to link, but how the link appears. -- Ned Scott 21:42, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Secondary sources for in-universe information

I'm still concerned that the new draft of the guideline still doesn't seem to allow for secondary sources providing in-universe information to establish notablity. An argument I see repeatedly on AfD is that published companion guides or derivative novels don't count as secondary sources to establish notability, if they don't give any "real-world information". But if this guideline is not meant to be more restrictive than the general notability guideline and the policy on plot summary, then this is an inappropriate reason to reject such sources. The notabiliy guideline asks for "significant coverage in reliable sources", but nothing in that guideline requires the coverage to be about "real-world information" or the coverage to be from a real-world perspective. Similarly, the plot policy requires real-world context and information, but nothing in that policy requires that information has to come from secondary or independent sources. Also, nothing in the plot policy or notability policy says we can't comment about what secondary sources say about plot elements. That is real-world information and real-world context, even if it is all sourced to "in-universe" secondary sources. DHowell (talk) 01:13, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

What makes a "derivative novel" a secondary source at all? Could you, for example, consider a volume in "The Man-Kzin Wars" to contain commentary on "Ringworld"? A "Star Trek" novel to contain commentary on a Star Trek episode? Where would you draw the line?Kww (talk) 01:17, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

This echoes my concern: derivative works are somewhere between primary and secondary, but do no support real-world notability (on the other hand, the existence (but not information from) of a large line of derivative works such as tie-in novels can help demonstrate notability.) Companion guides can be used but they have to go beyond just reiterating the plot and talk about real-world notability of the work to be usable (several do). Of course, I would also argue that if a work has either derivative works or companion guides, the work is already notable somehow.

If you're talking support of a fictional element, such as a character, then unless there is additional mention of real-world notability, both these types of sources are going to be primarily in-universe, which can be used for support there, but alone don't establish the level for real-world notability. Say a Trek: TNG book has a character "Q42" that is the main character in the book and appears nowhere else, it's pretty much all about him in the TNG universe. Assuming the books were even canon, the need to mention this character would be unlikely since it's limited to one appearance - maybe if the plots of books are briefly summarized (like episode lists) he'd appeared there. Now, on the other hand, say this character was so popular despite one appearance that the books sold like hotcakes and that fans wanted to see him again. Now we're back to talking about the real-world aspects, and assuming there are reliable sources to show that, then great, we can give the book its own article with a good amount devoted to the fan favoritism of the character.

Remember that this guideline is more about following WP:PLOT with WP:N in mind - in-universe information is not discourage but should be the last thing to be added to the article once notability is established. --MASEM 01:47, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

If it is true that "if a work has either derivative works or companion guides, the work is already notable somehow", then why not make that a notability criterion? That's what is typically done in other subject-specific notability guidelines—when an objective criterion that is a likely indicator of notability is found, and may be easier to prove than the often-elusive "significant coverage in secondary sources" (e.g. when those sources are off-line and not in the posession of involved Misplaced Pages editors), we allow it as a criterion and assume that better sources will be found eventually. DHowell (talk) 03:18, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, I'm not concerned about a minor character that appears in one book and nowhere else. But if "Q42" were a minor character which made a short appearance in a single episode of TNG, and this character was expanded upon in several novels, I would say that makes the "Q42" character notable. Do you agree or disagree? DHowell (talk) 03:22, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Notable to be included in a list of minor characters (using said works to state why its notable in-universe), but not as its own article - as there's no discussion of the real-world notability of the character. Real-world notably is pretty much a requirement for an article that covers only one character or a fictional element.--MASEM 04:02, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

The existence of several published novels going into depth on what started out as a minor character in a television series is not real-world information? Descriptive commentary on how each of the novels' authors expanded on the character is not real-world information? If a character is important enough that a mainstream publisher felt that several novels about the character were worth publishing, why does that not establish "real-world notability"? Do publishers and novel authors not exist in the real world? DHowell (talk) 04:44, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

This starts getting into a sliding slope problem: how many such novels are needed to make it "notable"? Now, hypothetically, if the publisher really wanted to explore this minor character further, they may have likely made a statement or something equivalent to say that this line of books were to be made to follow more about this character; that's real-world notability without question.

See, I'm having problems with this idea of a secondary source providing in-universe information and thus making it real-world notable. Let's take the "Lifes of Dax" book in the Dax article. I am not familiar with the book, but based on what the page states, I'm going to guess that it involves using known info about Dax from the show (primary in-universe), and appropriate extrapolation to fill in missing details. This makes it immediately its own primary source in addition to the Trek source because it is creating new information (not analysis or critical commentary on it). This would also apply to the possible Q42 case (barring direct real-world evidence), since the novels would also be creating new information. Basically, I'd be worried allowing this pass because I would not be surprised if such individual articles that only use that type of information will be quickly sent to AfD (even if we tried spelling it out in here). I want to try to figure this out, but I cannot envision a case where such a work does already add in appropriate secondary real-world information and thus isn't necessary to prove out the in-universe stuff, or it basically acts as more primary work and doesn't help demonstrate notability. --MASEM 05:24, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

In reply to Kww, I would absolutely consider those works to be secondary sources. They are primary sources in relation to the stories contained within them, but they are secondary in relation to the original works and the referenced elements contained within Niven's original Known Space stories and novels and the original Star Trek series. Where I would draw the line is somewhere above non-notable self-published works of fan fiction, and below clearly notable works such as the Man-Kzin Wars and several Star Trek novels. DHowell (talk) 03:32, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

From what I understand, the problem here is that DHowell doesn't think that these sources are considered "real world information". When someone references another work, such as a theatrical adaptation of a TV show (it's happened in anime a bunch of times), that is considered real world information. -- Ned Scott 02:46, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

It's not me that doesn't think that, it's based on comments I see in AfD: e.g. this comment or this comment for attempts to dismiss these types of sources as establishing notability. DHowell (talk) 03:18, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I see. You are very correct, those are two good examples of things that do help to establish notability. Maybe we should put something in here to clarify this. -- Ned Scott 03:38, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Do that adequately in Masem's draft and I will support it as a guideline. I will enthusiastically support it if the availability of published derivative novels or companion guides which significantly cover the subject (real-world or in-universe) is added as a notability critierion explicitly. DHowell (talk) 03:55, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

This is my line of thinking when I look at the Dax example: We have an entry for Dax with basic information in DS9. Then we also say that the character(s) of Dax is also the subject of a novel, and give additional summary of the novel. Then, while being careful of OR, we can even give very basic comparisons such as a few sentences like "in the book Dax differs from the show.. " And since there is a book, there's a chance there might be a review on the book that can also be used. All said in and done, look at the amount of information, and if it can justify its own article. I suspect yes, since this is also a character played by more than one actor, and because of the Star Trek fanbase there's likely to at least be some interviews with them or some comment from them, and possibly the writers as well, etc. Although I do see that specific Daxs have their own articles, so my example might not be ideal, but you get the general idea. -- Ned Scott 05:43, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, secondary published sources like this can help support notability. However, one has to be careful about the nature an extent — simply being in a derivative work, like a novel or comic book, does help with real-world notability. However, if they are a significant part — like a main character, then there should be press material about this, and you can mesh it together into something which indicates notability. One just wants to avoid something like "Minor character 15 appears in episode 7 of season 3 and in the novels X and Y". --Haemo (talk) 08:42, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

and if its major character, it will always be at least mentioned in the reviews, even if the ref has not yet been put in the article. Some of the people we rely on for adding information on these topics are not very good at sourcing. They should certainly be taught how to do it, but the way is not bey deleting he information they contribute. When the references are found, we can add them, and we'd have more time to do so if we didnt have to continually defend the articles' or the contents very existence. DGG (talk) 08:52, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

there is plenty of time during the AFD debate to show sources. People do this all the time. Ridernyc (talk) 08:58, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm broadly in agreement with DHowell here, so am keeping my distance but want my opinion noted for consensus building. Hiding T 21:52, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Inconsistent treatment of fiction compared to other topics

Ostensibly, the recent 'fiction purges' have come about as the result of efforts to bring notability standards on fictional topics in line with those for other subjects. However, if we apply the standards which are being argued for on fictional topics to other subjects we find that they are not consistent with existing practice there either. For example:

List of tallest buildings in Providence (and eight other 'tallest buildings in ...' type featured lists) - Is sourced almost entirely to 'building fan' websites. Provides no articles in major papers indicating that tall buildings in Providence are 'notable'. Cites no figures of how many people care that these buildings are tall, have modeled other buildings after them, or otherwise shown 'independent notability'. If the standards being pushed for fiction were applied to these nine articles they would go from 'featured lists' to 'deleted'.
Coconut crab - A featured article which provides no evidence of notability outside a small circle of academics. No press coverage. No citations of the annual tourism figures to see these crabs. Nothing which would meet the notability requirements suggested on this page for fiction.
ISO 3166-1 - Not a single source independent of the subject. All the references used come from the ISO itself. No newspaper articles. No external usage/notability information analogous to 'sales figures'. Nothing establishing independent notability. Again, this is featured content.

And those articles are the best of the best. "Featured". There are thousands of others in non-fiction topics which have even less referencing... yet in most cases notability is simply assumed. This isn't about consistent standards of notability. If it were we'd be having the same deletion wars on everything in the encyclopedia. The real issue here is that some people believe that fiction, specifically modern popular fiction, is not 'important' enough for inclusion in Misplaced Pages... at least not at the same level of detail as non-fiction. A 'general encyclopedia' like Brittanica might have an article on 'Mammals' and one on 'Cartoons', but it wouldn't have an article on the Ja Slit-Faced Bat or Spontaneous Combustion (South Park episode)... in the 'anti-fiction' view Misplaced Pages can have articles on each and every one of the nearly 200 species of bats (not to mention all rodents, insects, fish, et cetera...), but not each and every episode of South Park. One is 'more important' than the other. Never mind that there will probably be more people looking for information on the 'Spontaneous Combustion' episode than the 'Ja Slit-Faced Bat'. Never mind that the television episode is actually more likely to have been discussed by independent media. Living species trump cartoons. Subjective 'importance' over 'notability' established by sources. Misplaced Pages isn't an encyclopedic compendium of all knowledge people are interested in... just the knowledge which we contributors decide is 'important' enough to provide to them. --CBD 15:36, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

The list of tallest buildings may be one for deletion, but be aware that by both WP:N and WP:RS/WP:V, secondary sources to demonstrate notability are generally more aimed to come from academics and more traditional peer-reviewed sources in the first place. The coconut crab uses appropriate academic resources to demonstrate notability; the ISO standard uses the information on its development in the computer field to demonstrate it (also, because WP uses that standard for country codes, it needs to be here no matter what its notability may be). Since for fictional works we would almost never be able to demonstrate notability in academic and scholarly resources, we turn to the next best sources: press, reviews, development history, critical reception, and the like, areas that actually cover this information. Notability can be demonstrated from any type of source as long as it is reliable and sufficiently independent of the original sources: that's why the new version suggests the use of post-release commentary and interviews in addition to other sources for fictional items. We are not treating works of fiction any differently from any other topic.

"Importance" is not a good standard. I think my left toenail is important, there should be an article about it. Ok, that's an extreme case, but without a standard like WP's notability, we would have tons of articles about items that have no references, would be highly original research and would be likely not written in a POV statement. This requirement seems to affect fiction more because WP is presently unbalanced towards lots of articles on fictional works - that demonstrates the "importance" of that area, but for that same reason, Misplaced Pages cannot meet its goals of being a reliable, verifiable, truthworthy free (beer/thought) online encyclopedia. The extent which we take fictional works to, at times devoting pages to minor characters with no outside sources beyond the fictional work itself, gives WP a stigma of being a fan encyclopedia and not a real one. Policies like WP:PLOT and overarcing WP:NOT are what we have to guide how fictional articles (or any article) should be properly developed - we don't prevent them from being created, and we should not be rapidly deleting existing ones without trying to recover content elsewhere, but instead we need to take a direction that is somewhat less than what has been allowed to languish up until recently, and move the extra parts to other wiki projects as to provide readers more information. We can be more than Encyclopedia Brittanica because we can talk more about fictional works and elements in them, but we need to still approach every article from the complete layman's point-of-view - real-world impact and a 60,000 ft overview of the fictional plot, with links to appropriate places for additional information. This is the same for non-fiction articles too - there's science/math cruft that must be kept down just in the same fashion as fictional articles, and that external links and references are exactly used for getting more information. --MASEM 16:13, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I'll also add this bit of advice:

If you think an article should truly be deleted or delisted from featured because of non-notability, go ahead and put it up for deletion - yes, you have to avoid trying to prove a WP:POINT when doing this though.
If you think "importance" is more important than "notability", then I recommend bringing this to WP:N, where that criteria is defined.
If you think that fictional aspects are more important than real-world aspects, I recommend bringing that point to WP:NOT where limited plot summaries are required.
If you think there's an imbalance with how fictional works are being treated relative to other topics, then Village Pump (policy) is probably a better venue since it spans multiple policy issues.

The reasons I say this is because on WP:FICT, we've been through all these arguments before , we're at an impasse at my present draft of what else can be added: we don't what to make it any more restrictive than what WP:PLOT and WP:N state, but we can't loosen it pass these points either. We have an RFC for the policy draft out but obviously it hasn't gotten a lot of attention (I'm figuring the holidays have something to do with this). This is a WP-wide issue, not just WP:FICT, so that's why I recommended trying to discuss this on the bigger policy/guideline pages at large to get more of an audience to discuss your concerns. Arguing it here is likely not going to change anyone's minds. --MASEM 16:37, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

We're comparing Coconut crab with fictional characters? That's insane. "no evidence of notability outside a small circle of academics"? WHAT? No, really, if you guys are going to continue to make such absurd examples, then there's no point in discussing this. Notability is NOT popularity. There are multiple sources for coconut crab, all with real world information (since it is real). Misplaced Pages does not care if this crab is popular on MTV. The issue has never been "who is this notable for", but whether or not real-world information exists to support an article.

Plus, it completely misses the point in that all of these examples are things that are non-fictional; they're real. Of course, a work of fiction is real as well, but we're not talking about the main articles in WP:FICT. Notability has nothing to do with popularity, which is what all three of these examples try to imply. -- Ned Scott 16:32, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

And if individual elements of fiction have been discussed by independent media more than coconut crab, which apparently you believe that no one but stereotypical nerdy scientists care about, then it likely passes WP:FICT, and there still wouldn't be a disagreement with what the guideline says. There might be a disagreement in how people handle those situations, like showing potential for sources, but that's still not a WP:FICT issue (though we do have a strong desire to include advice on how to properly fix things, which will be included in FICT.) -- Ned Scott 16:37, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree that 'importance' is not a good standard... I am saying that it is the standard being advanced here. It is "insane" to compare Coconut crab with fictional characters... one is taken to be more important than the other. There are multiple sources for coconut crabs with real world information. True. There are also multiple sources for Eric Cartman with real world information. The fact that Eric Cartman is a fictional character doesn't make the information about him any less 'real world'... it is all found in the real world. People talk about him in the real world. He is every bit as 'notable', indeed vastly moreso, as the 'coconut crab'. Not because he is more 'popular'... but because he is more extensively discussed and analyzed.

BTW, the attacks, assumptions of bad faith, straw men, et cetera really aren't helping. 90% of the above is disputing things I never said and do not agree with. I "apparently believe that no one but stereotypical nerdy scientists" care about coconut crabs? This is 'apparent' based on what exactly? Assumption of bad faith? I brought up the articles on individual species of bats because I have worked on alot of them. I didn't work on the crab article, but I used it because none of the bats have made it to 'featured' yet.

The standards applied are blatantly and obviously different. Material from websites can't be used to show that fiction is notable... but it can be used to reference NINE featured articles on tallest buildings. If an article on a fictional subject doesn't have references from independent secondary sources then it shows no evidence of notability and should be deleted... but ISO 3166-1 being sourced entirely to the ISO itself is just fine. You keep harping about how these are "real world" things. Is everything in the 'real world' (except fiction obviously) "notable"? The piece of lint on my coffee table is notable? No? Then why are the notability requirements so very different for fiction? --CBD 16:59, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I, for one, would definitely agree that Eric Cartman has enough real-world information available to have an article, and would even call it independently notable based on the criteria of WP:N. I'm sorry for the accusation of bad faith, as you viewed it, but in the past some people really have tried to assert that species can be compared to fictional characters, so it's sometimes hard to tell when someone is making a literal statement, or using it as an example for something else (as you were doing).

There's also wide agreement here that requiring independent secondary sources isn't really needed for most of these articles, so long as there is real-world information about them, and the sources are still reliable. Once that basic requirement is met, we'd probably even be a bit more flexible about some sources, depending on the claim that source is backing up.

Notability for fiction is harder to show than something that does exist in the real world, but that's more often simply because of the nature of things. Never is the reality of something enough to justify notability alone, and I don't think anyone is making that claim. There is always context to these things.

As far as things like websources being used, do you have any examples? Many of our fiction FAs also use web sources, so I'm a bit confused by your statement there. -- Ned Scott 17:15, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

(ec)The 'tallest buildings' articles are sourced to two websites which are essentially databases for 'building fans'. If a 'List of fictional characters in <Whatever>' article were sourced exclusively to two fan sites which provided detailed info on each character would that be sufficient to establish notability? Based on past discussions I'd think most 'anti-fiction' people would say not... so why is the same type of source ok for buildings? Likewise, I believe you put Porthos (Star Trek) up for deletion (ended up being merged)... that character is certainly included in each of half a dozen or so 'Star Trek encyclopedias' on the market. Why would those not constitute sufficient 'secondary source' material to establish notability? And why is the Ja Slit-Faced Bat, which like 'Porthos' is only going to appear in very specialized encyclopedias and few other sources, notable if the fictional character is not? Exactly the same kinds of sources... establish notability for non-fiction, do not establish notability for fiction. You say above that notability is harder to establish for fiction than 'real world' topics... but why? To me it all seems to come down to, 'fiction is less notable... because it is fiction'... which just goes back to 'fiction is not important enough for inclusion'. --CBD 17:28, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Porthos (Star Trek) was nominated with the intention on getting it merged. While I don't like using AfD to make some kind of "formal merge" discussion, I thought it was required based on what I anticipated from other parties involved. (I did the same thing to several Pushing Daisies articles at this AfD, in a more calm and thought out situation.) Porthos was also nominated in a time of frustration with another editor, and wasn't my finest hour.

"Notability" is also only part of the issue, with the other being information organization. If there is enough information on the dog as a subtopic, then it should be split on it's own, but it can also make sense for it to share a parent article, even with some real-world information. This is something I tried to get across to many people on Talk:Wikiality back when Colbert first started using the word. We sometimes have things that are very important and notable, but that share another article because it makes sense from an organizational standpoint. This is also why ratings information alone shouldn't justify an episode article, even if it is real-world information that applies in a per-episode format.

Fansites, on their own, are not bad. I do not doubt that there are many that would be seen as reliable sources, but it's just that most fan websites aren't reliable sources. So it's not because it's a fan site that something might not be used.

Elements within fiction are less likely to be notable than living species, or famous buildings, or historic events, because it's easier to identify why they are more notable, and it's easier to find sources. It's also a safer bet on incomplete articles, simply based on past experiences. You see this as bias, but most people see this as common sense. It's not a blanket rationale, and there will obviously be exceptions. Not to mention that most of us are fans, and we love writing about fiction. However, WP:FICT does not make any such statements, so this is just an observation of common behavior on the wiki. It's unrelated. Believe me, I'd like to change a lot of people's attitudes of things on Misplaced Pages, but I don't blame a guideline because someone else has a bug up their butt. -- Ned Scott 17:52, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

No one said you can't use websites as reliable sources, just that the websites have to be an appropriate reliable source, and primarily here are those that are considered self-published (personal website, blogs, etc.). Each Wikiproject will likely develop a list of appropriate online sites that are known to be reliable and thus can be used for notability. For video games, for example, IGN, 1up, and Gamespot are all considered such.

If "everyone" is talking about a character in the pop culture , there is likely some printed or online reliable source that says this. Taking assumption of word-of-mouth that a character is popular is original research and cannot be used. (And I would argue Eric Cartman is a bad example, because there is a well-source notable article about him. I see no evidence that people want to get rid of it either). -- —Preceding unsigned comment added by Masem (talk • contribs) 17:23, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

CBD is mostly right. Fiction (well, most fiction) seems to be unique for the punishing standards demanded of it. If I made a stub about the tallest building in a city, it would be left untargetted, free to grow naturally. If it were nominated for deletion, and kept, I could be sure that it would be unlikely to be targetted again. If I made a stub about the main character in a fictional work, I would expect it to targetted relentlessly, redirected (often without warning) and the usual suspects swamping the talk page. If it were nominated for deletion and kept, I would expect it to be re-nominated on a monthly basis, with time-bomb declarations of 'clean up or else' and so on. All of this malarky seems to be unique to fiction.

A lot of (if not all) of our fiction deletionists seem to believe that fiction has fans as naturally as birds have beaks, even though this is not the case. This may lead them to wrongly conclude that threatening fiction articles will always be enough to wring any possible real-world info out of it.--Nydas 20:13, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

if you don't like WP:Plot I suggest you go there and try to change it. Ridernyc (talk) 21:28, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Don't have to. WP:NPOV supersedes WP:PLOT. Is J.R. Ewing going to go through the 'clean-up-or-else' wringer, or are we going to accept that sometimes, Google just isn't enough?--Nydas 21:51, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

NPOV and NOT/PLOt are of equal weight, both being policy. One doesn't override the other. --MASEM 22:00, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

No, neutrality is an absolute and fundamental principle. WP:PLOT isn't.--Nydas 22:15, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

NPOV has nothing to do with it. Also, it is not "punishing standards" to cleanup what shouldn't be there, for any topic. -- Ned Scott 00:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Neutrality is critical to everything we do. If the punishing standards were applied to any topic, that'd be fine. But they're not. They're not even applied evenly to fiction; the standards are relaxed for fiction Wikipedians like.--Nydas 11:30, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

This is starting to smack of wikilawyering. Seems to me Masem is right: go change WP:NOT#PLOT if there is a desire to accommodate the kind of content that fiction (TV) fans are looking for in Misplaced Pages, namely trivia, plot summaries and in-universe details. Eusebeus (talk) 22:31, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

This conversation illustrates why this guideline needs to be deprecated. It's an effective tool for deletionists, but doesn't really follow the wiki spirit. This guideine is used to back up content removal, and when someone complains, they are told to go elsewhere with their complaints. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 00:26, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Remove this guideline, and you will still have stuff deleted, now citing WP:N and WP:PLOT instead of WP:FICT. Nothing will change. The proposed guideline is supposed to be aimed to help people to writing content in the first place that won't be deleted in the long term, and in the case of fiction when many external wiki's exist, to help suggest better alternatives to deletion. --MASEM 00:30, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I people want to change things, they'll be going to the right place. We already have a page telling them how to write about fiction. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 00:39, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and this is a page to tell people how much fictional detail should be written when it comes to sub-articles. -- Ned Scott 00:45, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. The mass deletion of articles is what started discussions for WP:FICT in the first place. -- Ned Scott 00:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Exactly, then people are told to go elsewhere. It seems like writing about fiction should be the place to cover the amount of detail. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 00:52, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

If you want to add travel guide content to Misplaced Pages, someone will tell you to add that information somewhere else. There is nothing wrong with that. Misplaced Pages is not an episode guide, it's not an abridged version of a movie, it's not solely a plot summary. -- Ned Scott 00:58, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it's a "wannabe Brittanica" that only wants scholarly articles despite the fact it'll never be a scholarly source. - The Norse (talk) 01:44, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I really wish I could disagree with that. --Kizor _{is in a constant state of flux} 01:59, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

So your thinking is that we should be a shitty website, because we'll never be Brittanica? I don't care what Brittanica does, I only care about what Misplaced Pages does. And to say that because we have some standards for inclusion means we're going for an extreme is just silly and immature. -- Ned Scott 07:14, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

The remarkable thing about the tidal wave of AfDs is that there seems to be so little consensus for the underlying policy other than a small handful of stubborn deletionists. The same crew has effectively divided and conquered to push their disruptive biases and an unjustifiably narrow misinterpretation of the relevant policy. It probably is time that those who see ample justification for a broader and more inclusive interpretation policy to start making changes. Count me in. Alansohn (talk) 04:28, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

As I've mentioned above, if you want to change how fiction is handled on WP, please go to WP:NOT and argue your case against current WP policy (specifically WP:PLOT) or at WP:N which is an established guideline. We're trying to develop a policy to bridge the gap between inclusionists and deletionists, but we're not vearing from what either of these policies or guideline states; neither is what is happening over at WP:EPISODE, where that guideline is based on PLOT and NOTE.

I understand the concerns that there seems to be this shift away from highly detailed fictional works, but its basically a self-correction in the way Misplaced Pages was going; such detailed works without demonstration of notability goes against the five pillars of what Misplaced Pages is (and which WP:NOT and WP:N extend from). I know WP:FICT is oft-sighted as the reason for deletion, but again, even the present rewrite (which is not perfect and what we're trying to improve to avoid AfDs), but WP:FICT is not the root cause - your concerns need to be directed to either WP:NOT/WP:PLOT or WP:N, as WP:FICT is only restating how these apply to fictional works and neither strengths or weakens those policies/guidelines. You take away WP:FICT or WP:EPISODE, and the AfD reasons will just shift over to NOT/PLOT/N.

We don't need, at least here, more complaints about fiction is being handled on WP; the whole reason I've offered four drafts now and that other editors continually are trying to improve this is that this issue has been growing out of control and needs to be resolved ASAP, as it is making the generally editing climate harmful by polarizing groups of editors. We need constructive input, to make sure WP:FICT is working with the aforementioned other policies and guidelines on the presumption those policies and guidelines are immutable. If you feel those guidelines are wrong, help try to correct them at those talk pages. We've been through this machination... nearly 6 months now? we need to get some conclusion to the issue of WP:FICT (which then should help resolve some issues of WP:EPISODE by nature). --MASEM 04:54, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

The problem with this argument is that you are conflating two different things... 'notability' and 'depth of coverage'. Misplaced Pages has always had standards of notability, and most of the articles being targeted conform to them as they have been commonly understood until recently. However, Misplaced Pages has never had any solid standards on 'depth of coverage'... and it is this which the fiction deletions are really based on.

You claim that the deletion of fiction just follows notability standards. However, even setting aside that this is a new 'interpretation' of notability and the examples I provided of articles on other topics not being subjected to the same 'notability' requirements - the deletion efforts are going after clearly notable fiction. Going back to Porthos (Star Trek), and ignoring for the moment the independent sources on that character, the Star Trek franchise is clearly notable. The notability guidelines have, per common sense, long included statements to the effect of: "The particular topics and facts within an article are not each required to meet the standards of the notability guidelines." Thus, in theory, the Star Trek article could be a gigantic monstrosity covering every aspect of the franchise right down to Porthos... with all of it covered by the easily established notability of the whole. That doesn't happen because it is poor article design and we long ago agreed that different topics should be split out into sub-articles. Some people objected to having individual articles on every minor character and two years ago an agreement was worked out that, if the main article was too long, major characters should have articles and minor characters be included in lists. That compromise was broken by the recent idea that these sub-articles should then each need to establish notability independent of the main article... starting the current deletion wars. This view essentially says that information which would be fine in the 'Star Trek' article becomes deletable if it is split out to a sub-article... which, in obvious contradiction, users are encouraged to do as part of good article design. That's not a 'notability' issue. The exact same information could be merged back into the main article and be free of notability concerns. Deleting it based on 'geography' is, frankly, perverse... and likely to lead only to poor article design in the long run.

What the fiction deletionists are really looking for is a limit on depth of coverage... which doesn't exist. If someone wanted to include every Ja Slit-Faced Bat ever given a name in that article there is nothing in our policies or guidelines preventing it so long as sources can be found. If they wanted to add the complete life history of each there is nothing stopping that either. Those bats aren't as popular as 'Star Trek' and thus there are not as many people working on them and they haven't gotten to that level of detail, but there is nothing in our guidelines preventing it... and that's the essential fact at the heart of this war. The deletionists are 're-interpreting' notability in an effort to introduce depth of content controls, but realistically this is pointless in the long run because the content can always just be put back into whatever level of article currently has 'bullet-proof' notability (hence Porthos is covered in Jonathan Archer). When Misplaced Pages was starting out there was no need to limit depth of content... our coverage was minimal and anything people did to expand it was a good thing. If we have reached the point where coverage on some topics exceeds what people think the encyclopedia should hold then what we really need are new guidelines on depth of coverage... whether in sub-articles or the main article. Until Misplaced Pages settles on some sort of new standards for that this war will inevitably continue, because it is inherently an effort to control depth... using 'notability' as an ill-fitting bludgeon for the claim that a standard already exists. --CBD 10:24, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

While I agree that limiting the depth of coverage is neither the goal of this guideline nor wikipedia, enforcing WP:PLOT to the best of our ability is. When people talk about articles failing WP:Notability (fiction), they (and I) often mean that an excessive violation of WP:PLOT is a major issue. Going into detail of Padmé's costumes is perfectly fine as long as there are sources, but describing how Johne Locke arrives on the beach in time for Boone's funeral is unnecessary and can/should be cut without much discussion. If what is left is just three paragraphs of (still) plot, then there are the options to let the trimmed article be to encourage the addition of real-world stuff (but we all know that plot will take over immediately again), or merge what's there to prevent more plot additions, and wait until an experienced editor comes by and thinks, hey, I'd like to make my fave character a Good/Featured Article. Two birds with one stone with little to no effort. – sgeureka 11:04, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Alansohn, would you like to give any evidence to back up those claims? Is this really about some "cabal" out there to delete these articles, or is it that Misplaced Pages is not a place to dump pure plot summary, and people are cleaning it up? If you just want to drive by, without even giving a single comment about how the guideline is worded, or what it says that you disagree with, then you're not helping anyone. -- Ned Scott 07:14, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

i'm still not hearing why we need this guideline when the info is covered in the higher up poiicies. I think the reason is that it acts as a good bottleneck for the deletionists to stop any changes on how we handle fiction. Makes sense they wouldn' want to give that up. i've heard that it's supposed to do the job of writing about fiction, in which case that guideline should just be pasted over this page. I've also heard you can't change this one because it restates higher up policies, which seems like another reason to deprecate this, not keep it. Why do we need this, beyond helping deletions? - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 07:30, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

These "deletionists" are removing excessive plot articles because they shouldn't be there. Sorry, but trying to paint that as a negative action isn't going to work anymore. You're not hearing why we need this guideline because you're only hearing what you want to hear. You only want to think of people as deletionists, and you don't want to discuss the rationale for why they do these things, or why Misplaced Pages is not a place for excessive plot summary. I'm really getting tired of being painted the "bad guy" because other people refuse to accept that we're not a damn TV guide. Now excuse me while I go clean up someone else's mess, so we have a better focus on good information, that thousands of readers come here every day, expecting to find. -- Ned Scott 07:45, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Ned, thousands of people come here every day expecting to find the stuff you are trying to remove. Misplaced Pages has included information about fiction and television shows since the beginning. That information has been a big part of what has made Misplaced Pages a success. Denounce 'popularity' all you like, but if Misplaced Pages only covered unpopular topics nobody would pay any attention to it. Attempting to take away that popular coverage inevitably makes you the 'bad guy' to those 'thousands' (read: millions) of people who are interested in it. --CBD 10:24, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that "success" is countering what WP wants to be : a verified, reliable, free (beer/thought) tertiary encyclopedia; this may be "only cover(ing) unpopular topics" but that's what encyclopedias are for. While many may find the fictional coverage exactly what they are looking for, this has given WP a bad stigma at large that the only place that its relevant is in popular culture. Again, its not that we can't cover popular culture, but the overall depth of coverage that we give it compared to historical and scientific topics is incredible outweighed simply due to where the present balance of all WP editors' interests are. Of course you can't deny that there are readers that also come because of the fictional areas, and that's why we encourage the use of external wikis where many of the strict rules about what WP may include can be given all the attention they want, we can link and reference those from the main articles in WP, and make sure that interested readers know they can turn there as well. At the end of the day, we will still have a line, that pages living at "en.wikipedia.com" will follow the Five Pillars (being V/NPOV/NOR etc.) and all other pages going as they want to with otherwise no restriction on content. We meet the goals of WP's, we meet the goals of readers interested in pop culture, and the desires of many editors to met.

(We of course just need to make the wiki transfer process one of crystal-clear clarity to make sure its a viable option; it needs to be much easier than this.) --MASEM 13:46, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Your opinion. That's not what the creators of Misplaced Pages apparently wanted it to be and not IMO what the vast majority of the contributors and readers want it to be. You think detailed coverage of popular culture gives Misplaced Pages a "bad stigma". I think it gives Misplaced Pages what credence it has. Popular culture is one of the few areas where Misplaced Pages has begun to come close to fulfilling its promise. That other areas lag behind is NOT a reason to cut back in the most developed area of the encyclopedia. --CBD 18:41, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

There's no reason WP can't continue to have popular culture - the problem is that to make sure that the same standards for verifiable, reliable, neutral non-original research across any topic covered on WP, some of the depth with which we take fictional topics is too excessive because highly detailed coverage of non-notable fictional elements is often difficult to verify save from a single primary source (the work itself). (There is also the potential that such detailed coverage leads to OR and POV issues and makes maintenance of WP a large issue, but I don't believe that should be deciding factor whether we do or don't cover certain topics). This still leaves a large of popular culture that can be covered, and some even at great depth as long as there's plenty of reliable sources outside of the main work to draw from, but it also makes sure that fictional works aren't given leeway that cannot be given to scientific and historical topics.

I will point out that I personally have nothing against fictional stuff - most of my edits are in fictional works, and if I felt that both the general consensus and policy would allow fine detail of aspects of fictional works, I'd be right there to add in my fair share; right now, the policy and guideline pages, and various discussions throughout, don't support that that is the consensus (which I admit is counter to the majority). I just feel that from the goals of WP for trying to provide encyclopedic coverage of topics means that we do need to set a bar to how deep we cover fiction, and that the notability requirement is the best standard we have that still ties in back to the core policies of V/NOR/NPOV. The methods of late to rid WP of fictional stuff are highly questionable and don't support the spirit of WP, but the fact that while these AfD's shouldn't have been placed in the first place as aggressively as they have , they still are closed generally in favor of deletion, showing that there is, to some extent, consensus for how PLOT and NOTE are being applied. That's why I feel I'm trying to help here as much as possible - I see what both sides are saying, I am not set on either way, but unless larger policy is changed, we have to try to work out something that goes along with that.

We (as in all Misplaced Pages editors) need to work this out and i think it's a much larger scale than WP:FICT. TTN's arbcom case appears to agree with most that rapid-fire deletion is not appropriate at all, but they carefully kept out of the content dispute. We need to either get an ArbCom resolution on this, or other (preferably) decide, as a community, exactly to what detail we can take fictional works while still working to the ideals of Misplaced Pages and update WP:PLOT, WP:FICT, and related policies or guidelines that result. --MASEM 19:27, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

CBD, I can't even begin to tell you how flawed your argument is. Thousands of people every day want Misplaced Pages to directly include travel guide-content, and want Misplaced Pages to embed youtube videos, and allow more liberal use of copyrighted images. What people want, as odd as this is going to sound, does not dictate what we do. This is a very big reason of why we are not a democracy. Popular demand means nothing in this situation, and that goes both ways. Importance and popularity do not dictate what we include or not include. Your arguments based on this line of thinking show that you do not understand some of the very basic principals that Misplaced Pages uses to operate.

You're making a strawman's argument regarding our depth of TV coverage. Misplaced Pages has no problem on covering the little things, but those little things need some basis in the real world. That is a fact that you cannot change no matter how many dispute tags you slap on these guidelines. -- Ned Scott 05:13, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Still no reply why we need this guideline if it's just trying to do what is done with by much broader poloicies and guidelines. When I try and play devil's advocate, I get nothing. Again, the only reason I can see is that it's a loved pet of the deletionists. Also, no one is trying to deny V, RS, or freeness, although we aren't really free since we include fair use. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 14:18, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

My opinion on this is that you're exactly right: logically WP:PLOT and WP:NOTE give what the guideline states, we aren't changing anything. I don't deny that. However, and here's the key point, is that sometimes even if you mark where the dots (PLOT/NOTE) are for people about how they should write for WP, we need to actually draw in the lines for them as well to make it very clear how the policies and guidelines work together. Its meant to help assist newer editors who are not aware of all relevant policy to be to learn what notability means for fictional works so they can write better and know the processes by which such non-notable works are dealt with; same with those newer editors that are less inclined to write but want to participate by helping to clean up. It helps to define specifically for fictional works what notability means and where it can come from (cases that are unique to fiction and not to other topics at large) as well, information that would not be present in the general WP:NOTE guideline.

We do have to avoid instruction creep and that would be a reason to avoid a new guideline if that was the case. I don't believe (in my revisions) this is the case; the primary thing is that we offer more options for what to do about fictional works but its certainly adding any more steps to the process. It's trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. --MASEM 14:44, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like an argument to let writing about fiction handle it. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:39, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

But you are not objecting to how we organize the guidelines, you are objecting to what the guidelines say. -- Ned Scott 05:19, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

The reasons why we need this guideline have been repeated to you many times. It's understandable if you disagree with that, but do not say that the reason has not been stated. -- Ned Scott 05:19, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Understanding the anger

For those who don't understand the anger directed at the 'fiction deletionist' claims that they are 'the good guys defending Misplaced Pages from the excesses of fictionalists' it might be good to review the past: meta:Wiki is not paper.

Note that on that page people were (and indeed, still are) encouraged to create individual articles for each character. Told that they SHOULD have articles on every episode... and indeed links therein to sub-articles for reviews of each episode and trivia about it. A 100 page poker guide is described as a good thing entirely in keeping with Misplaced Pages's mission. Sub-articles were encouraged to organize the information logically and people were actively encouraged to assume there were NO limits on the level of detail they should pursue. Further, if you trace back, those statements were directly endorsed by Jimbo.

In short, the things which the deletionists are saying are 'bad' and against what Misplaced Pages stands for are, in fact, exactly what people were told to do. The claims that notability has always barred these things... that people have been mis-using Misplaced Pages and now are standing in the way of returning to what it was 'supposed to be'... these are revisionist history, pure and simple.

Episode guides, articles on each character, detailed trivia sections... people built these things because they were told that they should. At the highest levels. That is what Misplaced Pages WAS about. The claim that Misplaced Pages is NOT about these things is of newer vintage. And there is inevitable disagreement with the change. Especially when the revisionists claim over and over again that 'it has always been this way'. It hasn't. Stop treating the people who disagree with you as 'those who are mis-using Misplaced Pages'. They aren't. At least not by the standards it was founded and long run under. --CBD 10:48, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I know that statement has been around from the start, but as consensus can change as well as what changes that the Wikimedia Foundation may issue affect how WP has developed. Unfortunately, without a lot of effect, trying to track exactly when and where such changes occurred as to provide a clear idea of how these principles have come about to include on this or any other relevant pages is pretty much impossible (I know WP:NOTE was changed in May 07, and likely actions by TTN and other such editors started this ticking time bomb regarding fiction on WP, but even before the WP:NOTE change, it still suggests fictional works should not be covered as much as we give them without notability demonstrations). I think adding something that explains this change (in particular for fiction in WP:FICT) to the proposed guideline will help to allow editors to understand that WP's under constant change. If tomorrow, consensus was reached that fictional topics are unbound by WP:PLOT/WP:NOTE, we adopt.

And I hate to sound like I'm repeating myself but we also need to make clear that other wikis are a perfect home for information that has existed for a long time on the site and make sure that those new homes are well stated so people can still find them. Given that we've had that option for a while, the deletion of long-standing pages without appropriate relocation is very disconcerting because while those articles may not be appropriate in WP per PLOT/NOTE, they have probably been perfected in all other aspects, and overzealousness wipes them out. Again why there's a strong emphasis that deletion should be the very last resort for non-notable articles in my present rewrite.

It is interesting to note that the part about having an article for every Simpsons episode and character is close to true. We do have that, and nearly all of them meet the notability/plot requirements. I know other media cannot get there, but that is unfortunately the nature of how those two policies interact and the relative popularity of such fictional works. Maybe we'll have a policy some day that you can only have an article that describes the published work, and any discussion of plot or characters or episodes or whatnot must be moved off WP (one article per work, effectively, to remove the "popularity" bias), but I very much doubt this will happen nor do I think it's appropriate. --MASEM 14:15, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

The GNU may allow commercial use, but using ad supported wikis for content written for WP is far from perfect. If we had a sister project like wikibooks for fiction, no one would complain. This is a decision that needed to be made at the highest level, and they decided to create a for profit spin off. Regardless of intentions, they have an apparent confict of interest and we need to work out something free, like Ned and others have mentioned. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 14:24, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

See this Villiage Pump discussion of recent. There's no clear answer, but it does sound like it's been brought up several times before and the consensus is that it is not a COI to take content from WP and put on Wikia despite what Jimbo Wales owns. But, however, there's no clear written out "why this is the case" decision page on that, and it might be a good thing to have (whether its a consensus or higher-up decision) I've been more careful to state transwiki to "other wikis" without implying Wikia, as long as the other wiki is GFDL. --MASEM 14:53, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

People should also bear in mind that it is policy that information contained on Misplaced Pages be preserved, unless it is misleading, unverifiable (not unverified), redundant or irrelevant. The issues a lot of people have with this guidance is that it declares the opposite. Notability was not introduced to combat articles at the level under discussion here. It was discussed to prevent articles on every concept ever conceived, and to prevent a bias towards self published sources as sole sources for an article. It was an outgrowth of WP:NPOV, WP:V and WP:NOR. It was never intended that notability guidance supersede them. If an article complies with our three policies, the default should be keep. That needs to be a lot clearer in notability. It's pretty clear in our deletion policy, but not so clear in these guidelines. Hiding T 15:50, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

That's why we should deprecate this page and lrt the higher up poloicies and guidelines cover all articles. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:38, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

It still bears out that there is also WP:NOT policy that, even if content can be written to meet all three other major policies, it is not appropriate for WP, which includes the issues with fiction but also includes real world topics too. I can write an article that tells one how to make a spice rack, citing woodwooking books and other craftsman for the instructions, but that is not appropriate info to be included. WP:NOTE is thus borne out of that to set some expected level of notability that can support verifibility, reliable sourcing, and no original research. But preservation is a key word here and that's why I do agree that the mentality of most deletionists (delete first, ask later) is not the right way to go and that's why its important to open up as many options both those editing and those wanting to clean up can explore before completely losing that information forever. --MASEM 16:36, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Draft #5

Diff from #4 full draft

Given that I'm offline for a few days, I'll put up my current draft to solicit more comments and suggestions (and please feel free to edit despite it being in my userspace). Main changes are changing the nutshell to completely remove "deletion", adding a para on the historical nature of how fiction has been dealt with per discussion above (if only to give a perspective of what's been happening), and softening that footnote so that we don't encourage purges. --MASEM 14:58, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

WP:PLOT was not based on the five pillars. It was based on the consensus that Misplaced Pages articles should do more than simply retell the story, and was actually based in part on the section of m:Wiki is not paper that you assert it contradicts. WP:PLOT was written to encourage editors to add the real world context. In fact, if anything, this guidance in part contradicts the five pillars, which tells us that:

“

Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia written for the benefit of its readers. It includes elements of general encyclopedias, specialized encyclopedias, and almanacs. All articles must follow our no original research policy and editors must strive for accuracy (unreferenced material may be removed, so please provide references); Misplaced Pages is not the place to insert personal opinions, experiences, or arguments. Misplaced Pages is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Misplaced Pages is not a soapbox, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, or a web directory, nor is Misplaced Pages a dictionary, a newspaper, or a collection of source documents; these kinds of content should be contributed to the Wikimedia sister projects.

”

My emphasis. When policy and guidance conflict, policy supersedes. If we all agree on the goal of Misplaced Pages, we should be able to work towards a guideline that supports it. Hiding T 16:25, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I didn't say (wiki is not paper) contradicted present, I just stated that the general approach has changed, but I do some of the added language that makes this stronger which I've adjusted. True, it's more that we require plot and real-world information to work side by side, not that we just get rid of plot information, but this language still means that we can only cover the details of fictional works to a degree that notability lets us.

I will argue that you need to include the world "elements" in the above - that is, we can include parts of specialized encyclopedias, but not every element. We can provide episode lists based on primary sources (a typical part of a specialized encyclopedia for a work of fiction) because we can usually also included real aspects like production codes and dates of first airings, but we can't included detailed plot information of every episode, something that would also be in an specialized encyclopedia, if the episode lacks any demonstrated connection to the real world. --MASEM 16:50, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

You can argue that we can include parts of specialised encyclopedia, but that is a point of contention, and whilst it is a point of contention we shouldn't be writing it into guidance. It is a principle on Misplaced Pages that we can write articles which meet WP:V, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV. When we are unsure whether they are within our remit, we debate that at WP:AFD. If that's all this page is trying to tell us, do we really need it? Hiding T 13:46, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Given the AfDs for the last year, and other articles that haven't been brought to AfD yet, I think we do. -- Ned Scott 04:10, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we do. I'm happy to let AFD do its job. Hiding T 11:22, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

The entire point of a guideline is to guide editors on how to do things, so they don't end up at AfD. You might be fine with wasting other people's time, but I prefer to help them out before they invest all that time. -- Ned Scott 23:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Not that I believe you are actually implying that you would want to waste anyone's time. I just think that we should try to help editors before AfD is needed, and that would be a more useful lesson than what would be learned at AfD (and would be a more efficient use of everyone's time). -- Ned Scott 00:24, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Somewhere, it needs to be pointed out that TV Guide episode summaries and similar items are not independent sources. The production company releases a short summary and a long summary for use in guides, and each guide chooses the appropriate one for its own needs. The existence of a plot summary in every TV section of every newspaper in the US is not 357 independent sources, it's just the production company being parroted 357 times.

Also, I think we need to strongly discourage generating a plot summary by watching the episode and writing about it. It is easy to wander into OR with that technique (is the character a "deluded religious fanatic" or a "driven man of God"? A "street-weary police officer" or a "brutal cop"?). It is best to reference summaries written by independent sources. This not only avoids OR, it serves to ensure notability: if there is an independently created summary, there is a better chance of finding the other required information.Kww (talk) 17:10, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Somewhere, it needs to be pointed out that TV Guide and other publications receive review copies of television programs. The fact that different publications have different descriptions and reviews of the same episode is indicative of an editorial process that is the prime characteristic of reliable news sources. Press releases are sent out by production companies, Fortune 500 companies and political candidates, and are a common practice in the news media. The presence of a byline in an article should more than satisfy any concerns as would evidence of differing descriptions of the same series, episode or character across different publications. Alansohn (talk) 18:16, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I didn't state that reviews by those organizations weren't independent. The summary listing in the program guide is not.Kww (talk) 18:21, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Right now independant reliable plot summaries are not counted towards notability, although I think they should be. If we could agree that they do, you would doing a lot to bring me on board. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:33, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Never going to happen. It would allow creation/coverage without context. Anyone could argue for any element, no matter how small, as long as it was also summarized by someone else. -- Ned Scott 05:04, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

but that is exactly what is meant by Notability = 2 reliable sources. Anything covered by them in a substantial way is notable, unless we want to change the basic WP policy. . How important you or I think it is has nothing whatever to do with it. How small it is isnt relevant either. There are about a half-million things on which WP has articles which i think totally unimportant. We each do, but they won't overlap. As the policy wisely says, Notability is not importance. I can, do, and will continue to argue for any element that has sources. And I'm pretty open about what I mean by reliable, which i take as the meaning reliable as appropriate to the subject, to independent as meaning not prepared by the subject on his own authority--TV guide,etc. is edited, as alansohn says --their reputation depends on accurate characterisation & on including in the descriptions what is notable to the audience. . -- and substantial, which I take to indicate what is being talked about more than bare existence. DGG (talk) 06:41, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

WP:N is a guideline, not a policy. WP:PLOT is a policy. If these other sources are commenting on the plot, that would be real-world information (reception), and that would be ok. But if we are just talking about other summaries that are nothing more than summaries, that does not justify making a summary of similar depth on Misplaced Pages. -- Ned Scott 07:13, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure how WP:PLOT applies here. Hiding T 13:42, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Because even if you have an article on something, WP:PLOT will tell us to not have it simply be a plot summary. You take one problem out, and come to another one. WP:N is not a policy, as DGG said, it's a guideline. So regardless if you believe that summary of a plot indicates notability (which I certainly do not believe) you still run into the main problem, excessive plot summary. However, real-world information can be used to justify additional plot-summary. It's different from making it notable or not, but that's because we're not using the word "notability" in the correct sense in these guidelines. -- Ned Scott 18:26, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

If you have an article on something that's all plot, you add verifiable information which provides real world context to it so that it meets WP:NOT, retaining as much information within the article as possible per editing policy. Check you aren't violating WP:NPOV, and then move on to the next article. WP:N doesn't factor into it. WP:N is just a reason for listing things at WP:AFD. Hiding T 11:40, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

To address DGG's earlier point, notability is not just "2" reliable sources. First "significant coverage" is a very nebulous term that includes the meaning "more than one". Arguably two work, but it depends on the strength of those two works. But we also have to address what is "significant", and this goes to the idea that just listing out actors that appear in roles or who produced the work is not considered "significant coverage" (and also tends to violate WP:DIR). For the same reason, even if through a reliable source, a restatement of the work's plot without added commentary or analysis falls into the same problem: it is not "significant coverage". (This does not mean we can't use that source as a source to back up the plot section). While WP:N doesn't go into a lot of detail of what "significant coverage" is, the general feeling that seems to exist is that the coverage has to include some analysis and synthesis of thought above what is present in the primary works, or information that is connected to the real-world development of the plot (why an actor was used for a specific role, how this plot appears to mirror that of another work). --MASEM 13:22, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

(To Hiding) That's kind of a backwards way to make an article. One can't assume that the summary, as written, is the summary you even want, and that's just assuming there are real-world things to say about that character/episode/whatever. It is not practical to assume that there is real-world information simply because someone wrote a summary about something. Even when you do have real-world information, you have to look at how it's organized. If the same real-world fact applies to a general element, like all characters, then it would make more sense to have that info on a list page, or on a section on the main article, rather than repeating the same info, as if it were unique when it's not, on each individual character page.

It's bad advice to say that to fix the problem all you do is add information, which might not even be there, and might be better presented in another format, and doesn't necessarily justify the amount of summary used on an article. -- Ned Scott 23:39, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to note that WP:5P is not a policy page itself, but a summary page. -- Ned Scott 07:17, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for the obtuseness, but I'm coming home late from a bar. What is the reasoning that keeps this page around, again? We obviously have a lot of dicusssion going on, but I would like a succinct reason. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 08:02, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

This is the third time you've asked this question, and I'm not going to repeat myself. Masem had a really good response, let me dig up the diff. -- Ned Scott 05:40, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

OK - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 09:17, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to note that WP:5P describes Misplaced Pages's fundamental principles. It is above policy. If you really want to contradict the fundamental principles of Misplaced Pages, I'm really going to stand here and point out the fundamental flaw in that approach. Hiding T 13:39, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

It's not "above policy", nor is it really comparable to policy. BLP does a lot of things that conflict with the 5P, using the same logic you used for PLOT. And again, what about the travel guide example? Thousands of readers want us to have travel guide content, and yet we don't do that. Being specialized does not mean bending to any demands of the user. We're also not a directory of weblinks, and many articles are very hard on that rule, watching what links are added, and trying to make sure that some links are not in excess. But having weblinks for any and everything, like youtube videos on a list of episodes, is no doubt something a ton of readers would just love.

We're still benefiting the readers, and we're still a specialized encyclopedia wrapped in a general encyclopedia. We just don't contain complete summaries of fiction, and our content is in context to the real world. Now, if you're going to stand there and try to use a general statement of spirit to back up a specific view that it doesn't that doesn't actually conflict with this guideline, I'm going to sit here and show you the fundamental flaw in trying to use the "omg-ancient scrolls" out of context. -- Ned Scott 18:36, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

It is above policy. I suggest you familiarise yourself better with the way Misplaced Pages was built and works. The fundamental principles are upheld by the foundation, and they state that people who strongly disagree with them sometimes end up leaving the project. BLP was an edict from the board and Jimbo, so they get to contradict the foundation principles. It's not best to use that as an example. As to bending to any demands of the user, I'm not sure where you get that that was my point. My point is that we build a consensus, and per WP:CONSENSUS we do that through editing. If a large number of people are editing an article to include stuff, that demonstrates a consensus that it should be included. I'm at a loss as to how you believe I am defending complete summaries of works of fiction. You are welcome to show me whatever you like, but at least do me the honour of attacking points I make, not the points you wish to make. Now my original point was this: WP:PLOT was not based on the five pillars. It was based on the consensus that Misplaced Pages articles should do more than simply retell the story, and was actually based in part on the section of m:Wiki is not paper that you (Masem) assert it contradicts. WP:PLOT was written to encourage editors to add the real world context. What within that do you disagree with? Hiding T 11:40, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm very familiar with the way Misplaced Pages was build and how it currently works, and that should be pretty obvious. I'm not saying the 5P doesn't have authority or a place, but it's not what one would consider "policy" by our own definitions. A principal is something that needs context or perspective, so just as one can assert that PLOT contradicts the 5P, someone else can conclude that it doesn't.

A consensus (Misplaced Pages's definition of it, at least) means also including the strength of an argument, and/or considering things that other users might not have considered, etc. This is why I don't think "default behavior" alone justifies consensus, so a large number of editors making an edit to a page doesn't always mean we should include what they are trying to include.

"You are welcome to show me whatever you like, but at least do me the honour of attacking points I make, not the points you wish to make." That was not my intention. It's very possible I've misunderstood you, but I honestly believed I was responding to the points you made.

The only thing I can really dispute on your original point is the last part "WP:PLOT was written to encourage editors to add the real world context". It's true that WP:PLOT was written to encourage editors to add real-world context, but that doesn't mean that all plot summary can be saved as it is written and/or organized. Sometimes this means removing some summary, re-wording it, or trimming it. I'm not really sure if you mean that WP:PLOT can't call for the removal, only the addition, of information, or if you mean something else. -- Ned Scott 00:22, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Did you find that link? Anyways, when you use this page to redirect/delete thousands of articles then say this page isn't the one that's actually being used to back up deletions, that seems like an important thing that at the least should be stated in the first sentence of this "guideline," or the quideline should just be deprecated and whatever is really being relied upon should be used. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 19:30, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Turns out I was thinking of his reply on WT:WAF regarding WP:EPISODE. His "connecting the dots" comment was what I was thinking of. So while it turns out he wasn't talking about FICT, I think the same can be said for FICT.

As far as the mass redirect/merges, this principal looks like it will pass in the related arbcom case: "Editors who are collectively or individually making large numbers of similar edits and are apprised that those edits are controversial or disputed, are expected to attempt to resolve the dispute through discussion. It is inappropriate to use repetition or volume in order to present opponents with a fait accompli or to exhaust their ability to contest the change. This applies to many editors making a few edits, as well as a few editors making many edits."

And "Like many editing guidelines, Misplaced Pages:Television episodes is applied inconsistently. For example, see List of South Park episodes and note that there is an article for each episode. An ideal response to such situations would be broader discussion of the guideline among editors with varying editing interest, with consensus achieved prior to widespread changes."

So it's likely that the results of the arbcom case will help with the mass actions you speak of. Making a note about this in the guidelines might be a good idea. -- Ned Scott 06:18, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

It's ironic (or something) that the comment you were looking for was from WAF. How many of these pages are needed? It seems to illustrate my point that this page should be deprecated and WAF should be the guideline, or maybe that page should redirect here. I prefer the former, but I could be convinced of the latter. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 07:57, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I never disputed the idea of reorganizing our fictional guidelines, and actually would like to explore that idea more. However, you clearly are not disputing the organization, but what is said on the guidelines. If we want to make the wording different, and make it on a single document, that alone is not a bad idea, and could very well be a great improvement. I'm more concerned with the advice contained on the page, and the spirit of it. -- Ned Scott 22:39, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

My argument again why WP:FICT needs to exist is that while it is not meant to change any existing guideline, the interaction of PLOT, V, RS, OR, NPOV, and NOTE when it comes to fictional topics is a very convoluted maze. A very logical person could likely figure it all out by looking at all the various pages, but (and this is by no means to slight WP editors), most editors do not take the time or have the patience to figure that logic out. WP:FICT is a transparency that goes over a complex map to help you clearly identify all routes one should take with fictional concept articles.

And do note that WP:WAF is a Manual of Style - it is meant to address how to present and organize content in articles discussing a fictional work, not a fictional element of a fictional work. (In other words, most fictional works will have plot, as well as sections for development, reception, and the like). There is convolutions between WAF and FICT by necessity, but once we polish and agree to some WP:FICT language, we can make sure that there's a bit more deferrence to this in WAF. --MASEM 22:48, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Masem: I don't think this makes it any clearer myself. It basically tells people to go read the other policies and guidelines, anyways. Less rules is better than more, in my opinion, especially if it isn't changing any rules, which is what I'm hearing on this talk page. Not sure if that's really true, since this page changes so often. We get rid of this page, and then we'll always be in sinc with what's going on if we don't add anything about notability (other than a link to NOTE) in WAF.

Ned: While it's true I don't like how this page or NOTE is written, I'm not concentrating on changing that right now. Once we each page doing what it should be doing, I can see if people actually want to change anything, and I'll abide by that decision. Until then, we should streamline our guidelines. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 01:41, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

What I've been trying to propose is less a guideline to be used via Wikilawyers to support the inclusion or removal of pages - you are absolutely right we don't want to make this just more rules to follow and more red tape for article creation.

So let's discuss the arguments to put this into WP:WAF. I understand the intent - less guidelines is always a good thing. But the way I see it, most editors don't read the guidelines until their content is directly affected by it, and then only read the guidelines that directly apply. If we left it WAF and NOTE only, it's not very clear why certain fictional elements articles are being merged or deleted, though with more in depth reading of related guidelines, it becomes clear. But even then, the interaction of all those guidelines based on past deletion arguments, consensus, and a lot more really can't be well represented in either WAF or NOTE. (remember, WAF is designated as a MOS, and already a bit lengthy). If there was a project that covered all of fiction, this could be more a specific guideline within that project, but there isn't such.

Basically, when helping to advise a new editor when they add something that goes beyond how we want to handle plot vs real-world, it is much easier to point them to a guideline that may reiterate all the relevant guidelines than to several guidelines that may be difficult to learn at first. --MASEM 02:31, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

We're not adding more rules by making a topic-focused guideline. Before we can reorganize, we need to know the direction we are heading with the spirit and advice, because that's the main issue right now. -- Ned Scott 04:04, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Masem: I think it's really summed up nicely in the NOTE nutshell: "A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject." It seems like that's almost all that is needed for new users. If this page could be made much smaller saying the above, plus lists of episodes and characters are OK, I guess I could live with that. That's only a compromise I like because it says something I like, not because I think it's the best organization of our guidelines. It would make it similar to other NOTE sub-guidelines, which carve out exceptions based on consensus. If it doesn't effect NOTE or anything else, then I think it's unneeded. I think we'd be better of without this page, though, since it's just the (roughly) 10 of us debating things. If we got rid of this page and moved the discussion up to NOTE, we'd have a lot more input, and I'd personally feel any consensus' we reach would be more "true." I don't think we can decide this amongst ourselves, and doing RfCs isn't really bringing people in in droves. Let's put it on NOTE and PLOT for two reasones, simplified rules and increased participation.

Ned: I think we are adding rules when we repeat rules on a page that changes frequently, but I agree that we probably need to judge our direction. If we are loosening or tightening the rules, then I can see a place for this page. Even though I prefer loosening, tightening would be a legitimate reason for a sub-guideline. It seems like our latest direction, and a direction with a bit more consensus that usual, is to follow the rules above us, in which case I think this page is unnecessary. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 06:48, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

The rules above us don't say much about subpages. Sure, there is WP:SS, but these are general guidelines that are not clear about how they apply in certain situations. I think things would actually be harsher for fictional pages without having WP:FICT. -- Ned Scott 07:04, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

(reset indent) I think it would be harsher for the character pages and easier on the episode pages, but at least we'd have a larger group of editors working on it. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 07:08, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

basic disagreement with #5

Starting from the top. "The real world context of fictional topics should be the principle focus of the article. Articles written from an in-universe perspective, such as plot-summaries or character biographies are typically discouraged."

I simply disagree with this, and I think many others do also. People come to WP in particular for exactly this information. (Yes, the treatment should be from an out-of-universe perspective, making it clear these are fictional characters. not "Frodo lives in a hole in the ground' but "In the Ring, the character of Frodo is presented as living in a hole in the ground. The hole resembles...." (I oversimplify). Fan fiction is fiction written to read like fiction, and is not what we're doing here. that's what goes elsewhere. And yes, there are articles in WP written so you wouldnt guess that the characters were fictional unless you knew that previously. )

I am tired of arguments that try to evade this or make it a matter of concession. To anyone but a book-keeper or a librarian, the important thing about fiction is not whether it gets on the best-seller list, or when the parts appeared, but what happens in the fiction. The publication details are of subsidiary interest, except for people who keep box scores. The fiction is the subject of the article, not the physical objects in the bookstore. We are interested about them to a certain extent, because that's how the fiction is distributed. (I use books as the example, but the same goes for film or video. Are we writing about video series, or the production of video series? ) if it takes changing the wording of NOT PLOT to do it, let's change it. . DGG (talk) 20:04, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

There is a place for basic plot summary, but the real world context is completely true. I very much disagree with DGG's view, and I believe most Wikipedians would as well (even many that are currently disputing this guideline). We are not an abridged version of TV shows and novels, we are not a recap episode, we are not here to fill you in on what happened last week on "Heroes" (side note, hoping that writers strike gets taken care of so there will be future episodes..), we are an encyclopedia grounded in the real world, not a fictional one. -- Ned Scott 22:35, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Again if you disagree with WP:Plot go there and try to change to it. How many times do we have to go over the same points for for the same 3 people. Ridernyc (talk) 02:06, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I've always thought of WP:NOT as a page that summarizes, rather than "sets" these policies. So it's fine if he wants to discuss it here, but it's something that needs a lot of attention to change it. -- Ned Scott 04:07, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Ah, that's one reason why we're disagreeing. WP:NOT is not a summary page. It is the page which sets the policies. That's why it is a policy, and a lot of the sub-pages are only guidance. WP:NOT defines Misplaced Pages through describing the things the community agrees we are not. We have a lot of other pages that seek to expand upon those set policy wordings, but only WP:NOT has the widest consensus and is the policy. Hiding T 11:26, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

You misunderstand me. The page itself is policy, but we developed those conclusions based on things from all over Misplaced Pages. I was trying to say to Ridernyc that it didn't really matter what exact talk page the discussion was on (though, when it comes time to propose the more specific wording, then one would use WT:NOT). -- Ned Scott 23:32, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Hiding on the relative role of WP:NOT and this page ,as currently situated. But if Ned wants to deprecate it from a policy, to a guideline, then i do agree with doing that. As I said, i think it might be the most realistic thing to do. But let's see what we can agree on here.

Actually, i agree with Ned that many of the plot summaries in the past have been over long. a frame by frame description is not a usable summary--it confuses,rather than explains, and is not useful to the ordinary reader coming to a WP article on fiction. I think, however, he has over-reacted, and the current ones in combined articles are too brief, much too far in the opposite direction. : We should be able to achieve a median. Actually, we have only two choice,agree on a compromise way of doing things, or fight this indefinitely. I do not think either side is going to be convinced, or to abandon the issue.

I also think that character is not plot. though of course the fiction connects them, they are different elements. But in the present wording as a policy, WP:NOT doesn't discuss character: "Misplaced Pages articles on published works (such as fictional stories) should cover their real-world context and sourced analysis, offering detail on a work's development, impact or historical significance, not solely a detailed summary of that work's plot." It doesnt mention plot, or setting. So it is irrelevant to articles about characters or objects in fiction, and does not support the proposed wording. I further notice that it says what an article should contain, and I agree, it should contain information about the development impact and and significance. It should also contain plot, and the policy does not say otherwise--it says it should not only contain plot--and it says so in the content of the article on the published work as a whole, not on individual subarticles. It says nothing about setting or character. I assume then that by default they should be included to a moderate degree in the overall discussion of the fiction. Taken literally, it doesn;t say they have to be included. It certainly doesnt say they should be omitted. It doesnt even say they cant be the focus of the article.

So as a suggested rewording of the sentence quoted above:

"Articles on fiction should contain a balanced treatment of all aspects. They should include treatment of the development reception, and critical analysis, as available, with a sufficient description of the plot, characters and setting. " —Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs)

I think this meets a good balance that's we've been advocating. I would suggest the following rewording (plus addressing notability):

"Articles and sub-articles on fictional works and their elements should strive to contain a balanced treatment of both real-world aspects from reliable sources, such as development, reception, and critical analysis, with sufficient descriptions of in-universe concepts, such as plot, characters, and setting. When in-universe content outweighs any available real-world content, such content should be trimmed, merged, or moves to an appropriate wiki."

Same spirit, adds in the sub-article issue (which I do note that a discussion on WP:NOTE's talk page agrees are appropriate when done via summary style), and readdress the non-deletion approach to handling in-universe material. --MASEM 04:11, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

(To DGG) "But if Ned wants to deprecate it from a policy, to a guideline, then i do agree with doing that." I'm not sure I understand this.. WP:FICT is a guideline, not a policy. I'm also not sure why you believe I have over-reacted, since I usually trim articles little bit by little bit. But I do understand your concern, and like Masem, would not have a problem having mentioning this. I don't really see it as a big problem, but if we word it correctly, it shouldn't hurt to add a note in WP:FICT. - Ned Scott 04:46, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Notability sections from WP:EPISODE added to Misplaced Pages:Notability (fiction) proposal #5

I have added some specific information on determining the notability of television episodes to the newest proposal for WP:FICT. See what you think and adjust as you feel necessary. Ursasapien (talk) 08:09, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Could use some tweaking, but I think you have the right idea here. -- Ned Scott 08:10, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Diff please. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 08:14, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Here you go: diff. I basically cut and pasted sections from WP:EPISODE. Ursasapien (talk) 08:17, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I expanded this a bit to include any episodic work - comic books would be the next that come to mind but could also include radio dramas possibly and other yet-conceived works. --MASEM 13:01, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I understand what is trying to be done with User:Masem/wp-fict-proposed#Reasoning behind this guideline, but I can't say that I'm wild about that section.. (trying to think of a way to describe my impression of it. hmm. let me get back to you on this one.) -- Ned Scott 00:29, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Seems like instruction creep to me. Of course I'm all about streamlining, not expanding our NOTE guidelines. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:13, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Ye Art Cordially Invited to the Annex

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, and All Ye blessed Folk in between, gather round and I shalt telleth Ye a Tale of a Wiki that well comes All Manner of Articles relating to Fiction. What is This wonderful Place of Fantasy, You ask? It is the Annex, Haven to All fiction-related Refugee Articles from Misplaced Pages.

Before nominating or proposing a fiction-related Article for Deletion, It is My sincerest Hope that Ye import It to the Annex. Why do This, You wonder? Individuals have dedicated an enormous Amount of Time to writing These Articles, and ’twould be a Pity for the Information to Vanish unto the Oblivion where only Administrators could see Them.

Here is a Step-by-Step Process of how to Bringeth Articles into the Annex:

Ye shall need at least three Browser Tabs or Windows open. For the first Tab or Window, go to Special:Export. For the second, go here. (If Ye have not an Account at Wikia, then create One.) Do whatever Ye want for the third.
Next, open the Program known as Notepad. If Ye haveth It not, then open WordPad. Go to “Save as,” and for “Encoding,” select either “Unicode” or “UTF-8.” For “Save as type,” select “All Files.” For “File name,” input “export.xml” and save It. Leave the Window open.
Next, go to the Special:Export Window at Misplaced Pages, and un-check the two small Boxes near the “Export” Button. Input the Name of the Misplaced Pages Article which Ye wish to import to the Annex into the large Field, and click “Export.”
Right-click on the Page full of Code which appears, and clicketh on “View Source” or “View Page Source” or any Option with similar Wording. A new Notepad Window called “index” or Something similar should appear. Press Ctrl+A to highlight All the Text then Ctrl+C to copy It. Close yon “index” Window, and go to the Notepad “export.xml” Window. Press Ctrl+V to pasteth the Text There, and then save It by pressing Ctrl+S.
Now go to the Special:Import Window over at the Annex. Clicketh on “Browse…” and select the “export.xml” File. At last, click on “Upload file,” and Thou art done, My Friend! However, if It says 100 Revisions be imported, Ye be not quite finished just yet. Go back to Misplaced Pages’s Special:Export, and leave only the “Include only the current revision, not the full history” Box checked. Export That, copy the Page Source, close the “index” Window, and go to the “export.xml” Window. Press Ctrl+A to highlight the Code all ready There, press “backspace” to erase It, and press Ctrl+V to pasteth the new Code There. Press Ctrl+S to save It, then upload once more to the Annex. Paste {{Misplaced Pages|{{PAGENAME}}}} at the Bottom of the imported Article at the Annex, and Ye art now finally done! Keepeth the “export.xml” File for future Use.

Thank Ye for using the Annex, My Friends, The Annex Hath Spoken (talk) 04:31, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually, a better idea would be to not use Special:Export. Instead, use this URL http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Special:Export&pages=NAME_OF_ARTICLE&history=1&action=submit . This will export an entire copy of the article, and not just the last 100 versions. After doing this, use a text program's find/replace feature and find all "</username>" and replace it with "@en.wikipedia.org</username>". -- Ned Scott 04:50, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Ah, thank Ye for That helpful Advice, good Sir. — The Annex Hath Spoken (talk) 04:57, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, the document encoding might change things, at least it did on my mac running 10.5. Using some text encoding options for the file format would mess up Japanese characters for anime articles. Not sure the specifics on it. Have you had any problems like this? -- Ned Scott 05:09, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Once, I was about to save with the default ANSI Encoding, but a small Message popped up, warning Me that That might changeth the Code. Now, I saveth the Files in Unicode or UTF-8, and the Code is not altered. — the Annex Hath Spoken 05:19, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

We probably want to make sure that the various COI issues with Annex/Wikia are resolved, but I strongly urge that these instructions be made into a page about transwiking (better than help:transwiki, with shortcuts of WP:ANNEX / WP:WIKIA. A big problem with the transwiki option is that the method is very mystical to many people and a good page of instructions would help. --MASEM 04:55, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about the COI issues, as long as the editors themselves are not on anyone's payroll for Misplaced Pages or Wikia. It seems the Wikia Annex is doing some new things that will make this process even easier than our friend leads on, but the feature doesn't seem to be working yet: wikia:annex:Special:Import seems to be developing a fool-proof method of simply typing in the article, selecting Misplaced Pages, and poof, you're done. From that point, even if you use another Wikia wiki, you can cite the history on the Annex incase the Misplaced Pages copy is ever deleted. Even with that feature not yet working, it appears that non-admins are able to import articles to there, using the advice above (remember to do the find/replace for the usernames, to avoid possible username conflicts, cross-project). This is very exciting. -- Ned Scott 05:07, 29 December 2007 (UTC)