[WikiEN-l] WP:EPISODE

[Oldak Quill]

On 21/12/2007, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bryan Derksen wrote:
> > Nathan Awrich wrote:
> >
> >> Really? Scholarly treatment of Buffy? Oy. Actually now that you
> >> mention it, I vaguely recall such a thing. Alright, next time I'll
> >> use... "Kyle XY" instead? Don't tell me he's in some Harvard journal.
> >>
> >
> > You're holding the subject area to ludicrously inappropriate standards.
> > "Reliable sources" are not one-size-fits-all; what's a "reliable source"
> > for an article about a blood protein is completely different from what's
> > a "reliable source" for a sports figure or a TV show or a medieval monk.
> > This sort of robotic following of guidelines outside their areas of
> > applicability as if they were rigid laws is the basic cause of the
> > problem here.
> >
> >
> >> More seriously - I think you are absolutely correct, there is no point
> >> in having episode articles if you aren't going to have articles on all
> >> the episodes. Practically speaking, it would be impossible to ever
> >> adequately reference the majority of them anyway. I think a single
> >> article per popular series, at the most, could be acceptable (to me).
> >> Unless somehow a particular episode gets huge coverage (like the final
> >> 'reveal' episode of "Ellen").
> >>
> >
> > This is a fully volunteer project. If you tell people they aren't
> > allowed to work on the areas that interest them, they're just going to
> > go away. If you don't want to write more than one article on a show,
> > then don't - choose some subject that you're more interested in. But
> > don't tell other people where they should be putting their own efforts.
> >
> > There's an article for every named crater on the Moon. How do you think
> > it would go over if I went to WikiProject Moon and told them "I'm not a
> > selenologist or anything but I've decided this subject's only worth one
> > article of coverage, I'm going to merge these all into [[Craters on the
> > Moon]] per the WP:CRATERSARENTINTERESTING guideline you've never heard
> > of before. You're not allowed to revert me until you can overturn it"?
> > More importantly, why on Earth would I do that in the first place? How
> > does it _hurt_ Wikipedia to have such extensive coverage?
> >
> >
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> >
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> Cruft. Disorganization. Lack of context. If we're to be writing an
> -encyclopedia-, it needs to have certain standards. We don't for example
> cover every living person in the world, because the vast majority of
> them are not notable. Let Myspace do that. Similarly, let All Music
> Guide cover the two-bit bands and tv.com cover every episode of every
> show. We're supposed to be distilling, not replicating.

You have mischaracterised this issue as binary: your standards or no
standards at all. No one has suggested we have an article on every
living person in the world (a problem for reliable sources, surely?)

To use All Music Guide or tv.com as a source in a band or television
episode article would not be replication - the information presented
by those sites and the information presented by Wikipedia is
completely different. Some information those sites contain will
necessarily be excluded from Wikipedia and some information we contain
will be excluded from their sites. The information shared between both
will be presented in a different ways.

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)