On 23/07/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
G'day Peter,
On 21/07/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
Any article on a fictional subject written largely as if the author were living in the fictional universe in question is fancruft.
Encyclopedic articles should not be in the first person though, and hence the position of the author should not be identifiable. Still seems like a roundabout definition to me. Also, what policy requires that the author be living in the "real universe" for their contribution to be accepted.
Fuck policy. Policy is just a stick to beat those people silly enough to refuse to do the Right Thing until we can point out "what policy requires that" ... oh, I see. Ho hum.
There's three approaches I've seen taken towards fictional worlds:
The GUNDAM approach. This is: "Here, have some stastistics about our ships. which are really cool. They do 120 points of damage each throw!"
The STAR WARS approach. This is: "Okay, we all know that /Star Wars/ isn't real, and our guidelines on context and dealing with fiction oblige us to tell you that. Nevertheless, we'll pretend that it is, so you will not be able to understand this article unless you're prepared for that. Now, here's what the books tell you about /Star Wars/ --- what, you didn't know the books were more important than the films? You silly sausage! What follows is a biography of Wedge Antilles, who you've probably never even heard of, you prat."
The DOCTOR WHO approach. This is: "/Doctor Who/ is a television programme. One of its fictional creatures is a Dalek. The Dalek design was inspired by a pepper pot, or something, I dunno, and it's significant in the real world for <X reasons/>. In the /Doctor Who/ universe, the Dalek is <explain Dalek on-show/>."
Now, the GUNDAM approach is impossible to understand if you aren't already a die-hard freak. The STAR WARS approach meets our guidelines (therefore, your "what policy?" approach is well satisfied) but is bloody difficult for someone who hasn't read the novels, watched the cartoons, and studied the website as if prospecting for gold, to understand --- imagine a /Star Trek/ article that gave Captain Kirk's birth and time-of-thriving only as stardates and based his early life "biography" on obscure comments from Gene Roddenberry. The DOCTOR WHO approach is *exactly* what we want to see: non-fans are able to find out what the hell is going on, and not required to live in the fictional universe the article describes, but those who want to read about the Fourth Doctor's exploits on the planet QXYTWLAZZXYX, where he first uncovered F9, his purrfect robot companion, may also do so.
The approach names, of course, aren't meant as (much of) a slur on the authors of the respective universe articles. There's presumably one or two decent /Gundam/ articles around the place (it's rather improbable we could have so many, and all be crap), I just haven't seen them. And the /Star Wars/ folk are at least trying, but I'm sure they have the wrong approach (particularly when they spend ages arguing over how to list the credits for one movie, or adding screenshots to articles not to improve the articles but to Prove A Point). Finally, of course, there *are* crap /Doctor Who/ articles out there --- but on the whole, when someone gets it right, it's /Doctor Who/. (I note /Star Wars/ had an FA recently, and it was decent, too; good stuff --- now let's see "Lightsabre" raised to something approaching that.)
Thanks for the rather lengthy reply. I was more or less being a devils advocate to get something constructive from the other side of the argumentm which you did quite well with your approaches to different fan orientated subjects.
However... I do not see why a user has to be able to read an article without knowing any of the background. Isn't that the purpose of the Simple English wikipedia? The background to an article about the real world is their experience... so what! I always thought an encyclopedia was for things you had not got around to experiencing in real life, and as usual, learning them online requires some initiative to learn the basics first, ie, the basic universe structures in fiction.
Peter Ansell