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