I've been, for a while, working on a way to codify existing best practice on writing articles on fictional topics, combined with a few ways to forge compromises between those who want Wikipedia to include all manner of information from within fictional worlds and those who consider such information fancruft.
There have been three main aspects of this work, all of which are now, I think, ready to go live.
I don't pretend that these are any sort of magic bullet for the problems surrounding fictional topics, since so many of those are social problems, not policy problems. But I think these do offer a way of fixing the underlying policy problems and of promoting a way of working on these topics that is less "us vs. them" and more just plain "us." I welcome any comments people have at the early stages of their deployment.
1) Sourcing
The blanket restriction on blogs, message boards, and Usenet that existed for some time was crippling to articles on fiction and particularly popular fiction. Too much high-quality information on these topics is self-published online, from blogs by creators to important fan debates. Such sources do need to be used with care, but they need to be allowed in, especially if we want our articles on fiction to be able to advance beyond pure plot summary.
Thankfully, [[WP:RS]] is clearly on its way to replacement by something, whether a revision of it or SlimVirgin's proposed Attribution policy. Either way, the consensus has clearly shifted towards an understanding that sources require a measure of case-by- case evaluation.
2) Coherent policy
Our policy on fictional topics is currently spread across an MOS page, a notability guideline, and [[WP:NOT]]. This meant that policy on fictional topics often had to be explained anew every time. Furthermore, the explanations at several points were less than satisfying, and did a poor job of showing why these policies are good ideas, making them seem arbitrary and ripe for ignoring.
To this end, I've, with the help of several people, worked on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Phil_Sandifer/Fiction_essay
It's a fairly compact proposed guideline that offers a good explanation of how to deal with fictional topics. Virtually everything in it comes from other guidelines, though the explanations are often redone. I'd like to move it into the Wikipedia namespace soon and get consensus as a guideline, so any comments before I do that would be appreciated. Expect it to exist as [[Wikipedia:Fictional topics]] soon - I'll post again here when it does.
3) Alternative Projects
There is clear demand for good in-universe guides for many fictional worlds, hence the large numbers of people trying to use Wikipedia for them. Thus we need to do more than just declare it forbidden - we need to create a viable alternative. Thankfully, Wikia and other projects have already made this possible.
In order to make this easier for Wikipedia, I've created this: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:FreeContentMeta
This is a meta-template that can be used to generate boxes that look like the existing sister-project boxes for other free-content sites running MediaWiki. So far I've created one: [[Template:Babylon Project]], which is only in place on [[David Sheridan]] at present. I intend to put it in place on some more Babylon 5 related articles over the next day or two, and then to start creating templates for other areas and taking them to the relevant WikiProjects so they can get wider adoption.
Since most of Wikia is GFDL, we can readily transclude our in- universe articles over there, and replace them with out-of-universe articles that contain boxes linking.
These boxes are also colored green to distinguish them from official sister projects.
As I said, I welcome any comments on any of these ideas and developments, particularly #2 and #3.
-Phil
On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
There is clear demand for good in-universe guides for many fictional worlds, hence the large numbers of people trying to use Wikipedia for them. Thus we need to do more than just declare it forbidden - we need to create a viable alternative. Thankfully, Wikia and other projects have already made this possible.
If this material is of value, wouldn't it be more sensible to create a WMF project for it? Outsourcing it to external sites seems like a rather roundabout way of keeping it around.
In order to make this easier for Wikipedia, I've created this: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:FreeContentMeta
This is a meta-template that can be used to generate boxes that look like the existing sister-project boxes for other free-content sites running MediaWiki. So far I've created one: [[Template:Babylon Project]], which is only in place on [[David Sheridan]] at present. I intend to put it in place on some more Babylon 5 related articles over the next day or two, and then to start creating templates for other areas and taking them to the relevant WikiProjects so they can get wider adoption.
Since most of Wikia is GFDL, we can readily transclude our in- universe articles over there, and replace them with out-of-universe articles that contain boxes linking.
I think that giving Wikia preferential treatment in terms of link placement and appearance - particularly using templates that might be readily confused with sister project ones by the casual visitor, but really by any means - isn't a very good idea. Despite the personal connections, Wikia isn't really an adjunct of Wikimedia; there's no reason to treat links there any differently than we would external links to any other non-Wikimedia site.
On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
I think that giving Wikia preferential treatment in terms of link placement and appearance - particularly using templates that might be readily confused with sister project ones by the casual visitor, but really by any means - isn't a very good idea. Despite the personal connections, Wikia isn't really an adjunct of Wikimedia; there's no reason to treat links there any differently than we would external links to any other non-Wikimedia site.
To be clear, the boxes are not inherently tied to Wikia, though one imagines that Wikia would form the majority of such links just by virtue of its role as the main hoster of free content wikis. The template does favor MediaWiki, but this is mostly because it was easy for me to code that way. And, actually, I still needed help getting it to work right. If there are resources done in other software besides MediaWiki that we should be linking to, someone should make a box that works for them.
This is not, to my mind, a bias towards Wikia, but towards free content in general. I think it is perfectly reasonable for us to provide prominant links to other free content resources - particularly ones that cover substantially different types of material from Wikipedia. Especially if doing so helps to alleviate a fundamental schism within the community that we currently are suffering.
-Phil
On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
I think that giving Wikia preferential treatment in terms of link placement and appearance - particularly using templates that might be readily confused with sister project ones by the casual visitor, but really by any means - isn't a very good idea. Despite the personal connections, Wikia isn't really an adjunct of Wikimedia; there's no reason to treat links there any differently than we would external links to any other non-Wikimedia site.
To be clear, the boxes are not inherently tied to Wikia, though one imagines that Wikia would form the majority of such links just by virtue of its role as the main hoster of free content wikis. The template does favor MediaWiki, but this is mostly because it was easy for me to code that way. And, actually, I still needed help getting it to work right. If there are resources done in other software besides MediaWiki that we should be linking to, someone should make a box that works for them.
This is not, to my mind, a bias towards Wikia, but towards free content in general. I think it is perfectly reasonable for us to provide prominant links to other free content resources - particularly ones that cover substantially different types of material from Wikipedia. Especially if doing so helps to alleviate a fundamental schism within the community that we currently are suffering.
While the boxes may not be Wikia-oriented in design, their _practical_ effect will primarily be to add prominent links to Wikia. Better access to a useful free content resource is good, of course, but we ought to be very careful about avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest in how we present Wikia to readers.
(This would get much worse, incidentally, if we were actually to adopt a policy of moving material from Wikipedia to Wikia in a forcible manner.)
As far as alleviating the schism: while driving the contributors interested in adding in-universe coverage of fiction off to another site would, indeed, get rid of the dispute, I'm not sure that it would be a particularly good solution. For one thing, we can expect that a significant portion of the potential Wikipedia contributors on a topic will refuse to become Wikia contributors on that topic because of the differences between the two.
On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
While the boxes may not be Wikia-oriented in design, their _practical_ effect will primarily be to add prominent links to Wikia. Better access to a useful free content resource is good, of course, but we ought to be very careful about avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest in how we present Wikia to readers.
I think we have a much greater conflict of interest presenting other Wikimedia projects than we do presenting a project that comes from an unrelated group that shares only a founder. Certainly I have nothing to gain by directing traffic to Wikia. Nobody but Jimbo does, and he's not come anywhere near this issue. I will admit, should Jimbo start plastering Wikia links all over, there's a conflict of interest. But Jimbo is not the author or director of Wikipedia.
As far as alleviating the schism: while driving the contributors interested in adding in-universe coverage of fiction off to another site would, indeed, get rid of the dispute, I'm not sure that it would be a particularly good solution. For one thing, we can expect that a significant portion of the potential Wikipedia contributors on a topic will refuse to become Wikia contributors on that topic because of the differences between the two.
I think this misunderstands the nature of the dispute. It is not, I think, people who want to contribute in-universe stuff and people who don't. It's a dispute between people who think that in-universe stuff is important to have and people who don't. I suspect that if we give a clear indication of where in-universe material should go, people who are knowledgeable about fictional universes will start to offer their in-universe material to fan-run projects, and their out-of-universe material to Wikipedia.
On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
While the boxes may not be Wikia-oriented in design, their _practical_ effect will primarily be to add prominent links to Wikia. Better access to a useful free content resource is good, of course, but we ought to be very careful about avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest in how we present Wikia to readers.
I think we have a much greater conflict of interest presenting other Wikimedia projects than we do presenting a project that comes from an unrelated group that shares only a founder. Certainly I have nothing to gain by directing traffic to Wikia. Nobody but Jimbo does, and he's not come anywhere near this issue. I will admit, should Jimbo start plastering Wikia links all over, there's a conflict of interest. But Jimbo is not the author or director of Wikipedia.
I was actually referring to the fact that Wikimedia as a whole stands to benefit from Wikia's financial success, both directly (e.g. Wikia's sponsorship of Wikimania) and indirectly (e.g. Wikia employees working on MediaWiki). I think the relationship is significant enough that directing traffict to Wikia in a different way than to other sites could be viewed as a conflict of interest; but if people don't see that as an issue, fair enough.
As far as alleviating the schism: while driving the contributors interested in adding in-universe coverage of fiction off to another site would, indeed, get rid of the dispute, I'm not sure that it would be a particularly good solution. For one thing, we can expect that a significant portion of the potential Wikipedia contributors on a topic will refuse to become Wikia contributors on that topic because of the differences between the two.
I think this misunderstands the nature of the dispute. It is not, I think, people who want to contribute in-universe stuff and people who don't. It's a dispute between people who think that in-universe stuff is important to have and people who don't. I suspect that if we give a clear indication of where in-universe material should go, people who are knowledgeable about fictional universes will start to offer their in-universe material to fan-run projects, and their out-of-universe material to Wikipedia.
Or, perhaps, a dispute between people who want to contribute in-universe stuff and people who don't want them to? (Admittedly omitting the role of those people who want to see in-universe material contributed, but aren't going to do it themselves.)
I think there's good reason to believe that a significant number of people who might be inclined to contribute to Wikipedia would refuse to contribute to a Wikia project (see the various debates over ads on Wikipedia, etc.). Thus, two questions: 1. Is the primary goal here to remove in-universe content from Wikipedia - without too much thought being given to where exactly it ends up - or to create a well-defined off-Wikipedia place for in-universe content, with the associated removal of such material from Wikipedia being merely a side effect? 2. If the goal is the latter, how significant are the drawbacks of using Wikia (as opposed to a Wikimedia project) as a place to move the material? (In particular, how likely is the appearance of forks over financial issues, and how harmful would the resulting divisions in the community of contributors be?)
On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
I think there's good reason to believe that a significant number of people who might be inclined to contribute to Wikipedia would refuse to contribute to a Wikia project (see the various debates over ads on Wikipedia, etc.). Thus, two questions:
- Is the primary goal here to remove in-universe content from
Wikipedia - without too much thought being given to where exactly it ends up - or to create a well-defined off-Wikipedia place for in-universe content, with the associated removal of such material from Wikipedia being merely a side effect?
The latter - the goal of removing in-universe content does not work - too many people are too willing to revert such material, and attempts to fix these articles rarely stand.
- If the goal is the latter, how significant are the drawbacks of
using Wikia (as opposed to a Wikimedia project) as a place to move the material? (In particular, how likely is the appearance of forks over financial issues, and how harmful would the resulting divisions in the community of contributors be?)
Because it's easier to create the box than to fly another Wikimedia project. Furthermore, despite the possibilities of a conflict of interest, I, at least, would have serious issues with creating a Wikimedia project that competed with a number of projects on Wikia. There are good free content resources for fictional universes - we have very little to gain by throwing our weight around to compete with them.
-Phil
On 16/11/06, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I think this misunderstands the nature of the dispute. It is not, I think, people who want to contribute in-universe stuff and people who don't. It's a dispute between people who think that in-universe stuff is important to have and people who don't. I suspect that if we give a clear indication of where in-universe material should go, people who are knowledgeable about fictional universes will start to offer their in-universe material to fan-run projects, and their out-of-universe material to Wikipedia.
This trick has been tried before, e.g. trying to get amazingly trivial Star Trek cruft moved to Memory Alpha. Pretty much none of the actual contributors of such material were happy with the idea and it died. Possibly because it was approached through deletion discussions, which are a proven way to get people to the discussion already upset ...
- d.
On Nov 17, 2006, at 7:07 AM, David Gerard wrote:
This trick has been tried before, e.g. trying to get amazingly trivial Star Trek cruft moved to Memory Alpha. Pretty much none of the actual contributors of such material were happy with the idea and it died. Possibly because it was approached through deletion discussions, which are a proven way to get people to the discussion already upset ...
Memory Alpha is also hard because it's license is incompatible. We can interlink, but we can't transwiki the same way we can with, say, Babylon 5 (Where I'm currently moving stuff over, starting with the easiest for me to rewrite.)
There are a couple of things that will make it easier: Not transplanting articles without a replacement is one. It looks one way to dump an entire article over at another wiki and just reduce the Wikipedia one to a stub. It looks another to replace the Wikipedia one with something that is clearly recognizable as an article.
The biggest complaint I've gotten in practice (It's still very early in the experiment) is that The Babylon Project is a basically inactive wiki with inadequate coverage. Thankfully, that won't be the case for too long, since other than the featured [[Spoo]], B5 articles on Wikipedia are pretty much all in-universe. So after a few weeks of moving articles, they'll be at least a good wiki, if still an inactive one.
-Phil
There is some good stuff in your fiction essay, but I would rather see it incorporated (along with the fiction notability guideline) into the existing WP:WAF; I think support is building for combining WP:FICT and WP:WAF (and to whatever extent it isn't already covered, WP:NOT) into a general guide for writing about fiction.
I don't particularly like the way the issue is framed in your essay (diegetic vs. non-diegetic). Even aside from the jargon aspect, I think that talking about this issue in terms of in-universe and out-of-universe perspective better captures the spirit of what a Wikipedia article on fiction should be like. Diegetic information can be legitimate encyclopedic content on its own in some circumstances; your framing of the issue implies that plot summaries are generally inappropriate, except as background or support for specific non-diegetic information. Unless we think that (as some have argued) plot summaries are inherently a copyright violation, I'm opposed to trying to kick plot summaries out of Wikipedia. Limiting them, as WP:WAF advocates, seems like the most sensible approach.
Focusing on diegesis also emphasizes the text or artifact of the fiction, to the seeming neglect of broader out-of-universe context (e.g., the contexts of creation and reception, related works, etc.). At least according to the article "Diegesis" and as described in your essay, non-diegetic means aspects of the fiction itself that is not diegetic; i.e., the extradiegetic and metadiegetic levels, the domains of literary criticism and interpretation.
On the other hand, I love the Captain Kirk paragraph; that might make a better first section for WP:WAF than the current one.
Yours in discourse, ragesoss
On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
- Coherent policy
Our policy on fictional topics is currently spread across an MOS page, a notability guideline, and [[WP:NOT]]. This meant that policy on fictional topics often had to be explained anew every time. Furthermore, the explanations at several points were less than satisfying, and did a poor job of showing why these policies are good ideas, making them seem arbitrary and ripe for ignoring.
To this end, I've, with the help of several people, worked on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Phil_Sandifer/Fiction_essay
It's a fairly compact proposed guideline that offers a good explanation of how to deal with fictional topics. Virtually everything in it comes from other guidelines, though the explanations are often redone. I'd like to move it into the Wikipedia namespace soon and get consensus as a guideline, so any comments before I do that would be appreciated. Expect it to exist as [[Wikipedia:Fictional topics]] soon - I'll post again here when it does.
On Nov 16, 2006, at 11:30 PM, Sage Ross wrote:
There is some good stuff in your fiction essay, but I would rather see it incorporated (along with the fiction notability guideline) into the existing WP:WAF; I think support is building for combining WP:FICT and WP:WAF (and to whatever extent it isn't already covered, WP:NOT) into a general guide for writing about fiction.
My problem with incorporating it into WAF is that WAF is a MoS page, and while it is far and away the best part of the MoS, it is still MoS, and the MoS is a disaster area that nobody has cleared up yet.
I don't particularly like the way the issue is framed in your essay (diegetic vs. non-diegetic). Even aside from the jargon aspect, I think that talking about this issue in terms of in-universe and out-of-universe perspective better captures the spirit of what a Wikipedia article on fiction should be like. Diegetic information can be legitimate encyclopedic content on its own in some circumstances; your framing of the issue implies that plot summaries are generally inappropriate, except as background or support for specific non-diegetic information. Unless we think that (as some have argued) plot summaries are inherently a copyright violation, I'm opposed to trying to kick plot summaries out of Wikipedia. Limiting them, as WP:WAF advocates, seems like the most sensible approach.
Though in this case, WAF is in contradiction with WP:NOT, which states "Wikipedia articles on works of fiction should contain real- world context and sourced analysis, offering detail on a work's achievements, impact or historical significance, not solely a summary of that work's plot. A plot summary may be appropriate as an aspect of a larger topic." NOT is policy, so WAF is currently a bit in the wrong here.
Focusing on diegesis also emphasizes the text or artifact of the fiction, to the seeming neglect of broader out-of-universe context (e.g., the contexts of creation and reception, related works, etc.). At least according to the article "Diegesis" and as described in your essay, non-diegetic means aspects of the fiction itself that is not diegetic; i.e., the extradiegetic and metadiegetic levels, the domains of literary criticism and interpretation.
That's fair - I liked diegetic because it wasn't a term we made up, but I agree, I'm not using it with absolute precision.
-Phil