Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ArgentiumOutlaw (talk | contribs) at 07:51, 13 July 2006 (→Welcome!). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Welcome!

Thank you all for agreeing to mediate this issue at hand, which is namely to find consensus on how the episodes of Lost should be written about. From what I can tell, the two opposing viewpoints are basically whether each episode should have its own article, or be grouped with other articles from the same season. Currently, I've seen it done both ways on Misplaced Pages. However, I saw a proposal before (I cannot seem to find it now, and I've been looking for about 30 minutes), which I find to be very relevant to this discussion. Basically, it proposed that TV articles should expand as such: At first, only have an article about the show. However, if the "Episodes" section becomes too long, then expand into seasons. However, if the seasons article becomes too long, then expand into individual episode articles. I've seen lists done two ways, with List of SHOW Episodes and List of SHOW Episodes (Season X), but the former is more prevalant across Misplaced Pages, as far as I can tell. Thoughts? Concerns? -^demon /11:19, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Just to start out, one of the arguments being size, I point out that the Season 2 episode summaries is 159 kilobytes long; but Misplaced Pages:Article_size says 32 KB is strongly recommended as the maximum. I also find it somewhat difficult to scroll down that page and look for specific info, which is a "readability issue" and one of the reasons to consider dividing up a page according to Misplaced Pages:Article_size. Since one of the few exceptions on that guideline page is that there might not be a natural point to cut up large lists, I say that dividing up into individual ep summaries is pretty natural, highly organized, and very useful. ArgentiumOutlaw 01:41, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree with ArgentiumOutlaw. When there is a great deal of information on one page, then it makes sense to break the long page up into shorter pages. In the case of Lost, where the mystery behind the show makes it difficult to create short summaries (since we're never sure which details in a particular episode are most relevant), having all episodes on one page is excessive. I believe that polls have been conducted on this issue, and the majority consensus was that there should be separate episode pages, but the main stakeholders refused to accept consensus, saying that only those who regularly edited the articles should really have deciding votes. --Elonka 23:25, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I apologize for my late reply. This issue has been discussed so much that it's difficult to keep talking about it without repeating yourself. Are the article sizes a problem? Yes, of course. But one thing we have seen with the individual articles is they tend to include more fancruft, speculation, and information that has no relevance to the recurring story lines. So we have to make a trade off: either one long article that contains synoptic information about each episode, or many, shorter episode articles that contain a lot of crap. You'll notice that after the episode guidelines agreed upon in that discussion were adopted, the episode summaries did a 180 . As a result, the entire first season was summarized in 75kb, which is quite small considering what an involved show Lost is. I know we can do the same with season 2. One thing that really concerns me about the individual articles is that they are so long and in-depth that an argument can be made that they violate copyright law because some of them give a blow by blow recap of everything that happened in an episode. So reading one of those episode summaries could arguably replace the need to watch an episode, causing ABC to lose money. Jtrost ( | C | _#) 01:44, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I believe the reason that the individual articles arent that great right now (eg too long, scattered fancruft), is that people dont want to work on something that will potentially be deleted, merged or lost in these discussions. The reason that I don't edit any of these pages is because they might be deleted by a discussion similar to what we're having now. If the editors for both the long page and the individual eps came together and worked on the individual articles, it would solve the size/clarity problem, and it would eventually remove all of the fancruft and lengthy details. Also, I dont believe that organizing these pages with the editors' convenience in removing fancruft in mind is a good idea. These pages should be organized so that the reader can benefit, not the editors; but I am not suggesting that it is ok to have organized pages at the cost of fancruft, I am merely saying that we should organize the pages with the reader in mind (like all wikipedia pages should be), and then work on fancruft as a seperate problem. To organize by the editors convenience in this case, is similar (but exagerated) to suggesting that we merge all television shows together so that it's easier for us to remove fancruft that sneaks in. One final comment, I don't believe that saying ABC will lose money if we create individual articles is a useful or relevent argument for putting everything on one page. ArgentiumOutlaw 07:51, 13 July 2006 (UTC)