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