The other day there was a minor debate about how many pages should be devoted to fictional characters, and previously I've seen concern about people making these pages for fictional things, and not adding anything to differentiate them from the 'real world' articles. Sometimes it really can get confusing - you may not know whether say Gulliver was a real explorer or a fictional character.
In paper encyclopedias they often use colour to help distinguish sections, and I know that the new tables are going to use colour as a feature, and the user pages have a pale coloured background to differentiate them from the main articles. Why not make an option to put a coloured header, or a coloured border, or a pale coloured background onto the Fictional pages to help identify them? When you hit the random button and landed up on a fictional page you'd see instantly by the pale pink (or whatever colour was decided) background.
I know that's yet another feature that you may not want, but I could see it being very useful.
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
The other day there was a minor debate about how many pages should be devoted to fictional characters, and previously I've seen concern about people making these pages for fictional things, and not adding anything to differentiate them from the 'real world' articles. Sometimes it really can get confusing - you may not know whether say Gulliver was a real explorer or a fictional character.
I often edit articles so they say: "Homer Simpson is a fictional character in the television series [[The Simpsons]] ... etc
I've put something about that on the "establish context" policy page.
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
In paper encyclopedias they often use colour to help distinguish sections, and I know that the new tables are going to use colour as a feature, and the user pages have a pale coloured background to differentiate them from the main articles. Why not make an option to put a coloured header, or a coloured border, or a pale coloured background onto the Fictional pages to help identify them? When you hit the random button and landed up on a fictional page you'd see instantly by the pale pink (or whatever colour was decided) background.
IMHO (In my humble opinion)
It seems to me that in a well written "complete" article, fiction should be identified as such in the text. Also, references to the author or discussion of literary factors should provide clues that the article is about fictional characters or events vs. reality.
Casual readers who hit the random button and land on a fictional character or are looking at an article turned up in a search should not need to known a lot of specialized formatting or color codes to correctly understand the content.
Regards, mirwin
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