On Jul 11, 2008, at 10:30 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
I'm probably not alone in finding a degree of
distastefulness in an
article who's only reference to non reality is a single mention in the
lead. You don't want to qualify every sentence with "this is
fiction", but there should be a balance. I worry about the
encyclopedic merit of articles with such a small amount of
meta-analysis that they don't naturally indicate the fictional nature
of the subject fairly often.
The infuriating thing about such articles is mostly a lack of
referencing and context. The Nyriandol article, for instance, doesn't
necessarily need to cover real world information more, but it sure
would help to at least say what books the damn thing appears in, and
to spell out what its role in the larger plot is.
But that's not a fact/fiction difference as such, and that, I think,
is an important distinction to make.
-Phil