I have never defended "all" episode articles. Don't know anyone who has. Some of them are really minor and well worth merging; one of the factors is the importance of t he show. I usually word it as defending the defensible ones, I see I forgot he adjective this time.
And I agree with you that they do not necessarily need separate articles. It depends on the importance and the amount of material available; both real-world, and plot worth summarizing.
And I agree with including as much important real-world information as we can get, and, like you, I do expect to see more--though it typically takes a year or two for academic work to be published. But the plot and character and setting content is equally important.
Why should we look for another wiki? fiction is important, and plot is after all the basis of it. A fiction is fundamentally a story. I think in wanting appropriately full inclusion of this material I share the consensus of ordinary wpedians, as will be confirmed when we get a broad enough forum. But if not, not.
DGG
On 12/30/07, Ned Scott ned@nedscott.com wrote:
You're welcome to try, but I'm not sure how successful that will be for -all- of them. You can't blindly defend all episode articles and expect them to all have the same conditions. Personally, I do think we are in a time where real-world information is growing about entertainment, and we will get more real-world information about TV shows. But even then, it doesn't always mean that information is best represented in a per-episode format. For example, if that information can apply to more than one episode, or is more about a character than a specific episode, etc.
Still, that's not to say that it isn't possible. The series of The Simpsons episode articles continue to surprise me. I think they have something like 60 GA articles, and a hand full of FAs. However, even if every episode of a show has shown reasonable potential, that doesn't always mean that the existing summary is even worth saving. Some of them are nothing more than a few sentences that are copied off the List_of article.
Recently, since I've become more familiar with moving stuff over to external wikis (mainly Wikia), I've realized there should be extra care taken when you have something that people have worked on for a while. There really isn't any reason why we can't have a place for everything. (and in a perfect world, the Wikimedia Foundation would have some kind of fiction-wiki, given how high-traffic those articles are.) When I come across articles that have a reasonable number of edits, and good quality summaries, I myself will not take those to AfD (unless a total transwiki, with article history, is possible and done).
If you want to establish that a group of articles should remain, then the best way to do that is to show reasonable potential for real-world information that would justify those articles. The "cabal" is only trying to improve our coverage on fiction, rather than being buried under a sea of summary that does a poor job compared to the show itself.
-- Ned Scott
On Dec 29, 2007, at 8:27 PM, David Goodman wrote:
Yes. Nathan is right that the better strategy is to defend the existing articles, and so establish that such articles should remain on wikipedia. A more widespread intelligent selective good-faith participation in afds is the ordinary wikipedians defense against cabals. And the best of all is to improve existing articles so people will be ashamed even to nominate them--or if they still do, we will establish a solid pattern of snow keep closes.
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