I disagree with the plan as it is. Since Wiki is not paper, I think forcing every character into a single page is going to make it look ugly (look at Minor characters from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!) I think every character, every concept, every idea, every pebble referred to by name in a fictional series ought to have a page of its own. Also, I'd vote for putting avoiding headers as much as possible - they look ugly! Even if we go for your plan, I'd suggest something like a paragraph on each character, with the character's name in bold the first time it's mentioned, so it's easy to find. Of course, we lose the ability to link to the character directly, but then again, I believe they should have their own pages. Even if we do it this way, we'd have half-a-dozen redirects into the large articles anyway, which I think is just a waste of page-space. -- Gaurav 10:43, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Additional note: We're going to have to come up with a format for ... (series) pages as well as the pages in the series (how do they refer back to the series page for instance; also issues such as "Should the Harry Potter series page be at Harry Potter, since most people go there for the series, with the boy wizard himself at Harry Potter (character) ... "). This is going to be fun! -- Gaurav 11:22, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I'm going to suggest that we construct a framework which can be expanded as necessary, but can also be compacted. I envisage a minimal article on a series with Headings for ==Books in the Series==, ==Characters in the Series==, ==Places in the Series==, ==Concepts in the Series==. (Possibly people would be happier abbreviating these to ==Books==, Characters==, ==Places==, ==Concepts==.) Should it prove necessary, separate pages could be constructed with similar titles and referred to in the appropriate section.
To use the Artemis Fowl example, the Artemis Fowl (series) article could be restructured as above with Headings for ==Books==, ==Characters==, ==Places==, ==Concepts==. If one of the sections, say ==Characters==, got large, we could then construct a page for Characters in the Artemis Fowl Series and move the content there; the main page would refer to this page. It would be possible for major characters to be listed on the main page as references into the Characters page, eg:
Major Characters
As regards the structure of each subordinate page, I envisage using Headings again for each item so that the reference would work properly. There should be no problem nesting Headings so we can group characters together on the page, eg:
==Humans== ===Artemis Fowl=== ===Butler=== ===Juliette=== ==Fairies== ===Holly=== ===Captain Root===
That's me done for today, I'm going home before I start typing pure gibberish. Someone please wrestle this into a proper framework; I will be as un-offended as you want :-)
My proposal is to organise it as much like a real encyclopedia/wikipedia article, without loosing the point that what is being described here is an entire universe. For instance, my structure of a (series) page would be:
Should we set up the character pages, etc. as subpages? For instance, should we have The_Lord_of_the_Rings/Aragon? Or just leave it as Aragorn with disambiguation links if needed?
Just asked in the Village pump about a very similar question, and it seems to me that this is one of the very few circumstances in which subpages would be valuable. Articles on Hermione Granger or Legolas sitting next to Herman Melville and Loki just don't sit right at all with me. But... if this is done, it should be done very carefully, with only a specified list of universes allowed to generate subpages (those universes which generate *hundreds* of articles, e.g. LotR, Star Trek, etc). At the same time, efforts should be taken to make those articles that do have broader cultural significance (e.g. Mr. Spock) are expanded to comments on that significance. But it only really makes sense to do so with *large*, complex, intricate fictional universes, not small ones (Gulliver's Travels, Earthsea), otherwise we're back to the whole problem of proliferating and inappropriate subpages again. - Seth Ilys 01:57, 28 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Please don't make them subpages!!!!! RickK 02:44, 28 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Perhaps something functionally similar, but differently notated, would work, given the almost-fanatical aversion to subpages around here. FWIW, only two of the argument against subpages really apply (all of the others are essentially negated by the fact that these are fictional universes we're dealing with), and those ("The slash has an ordinary meaning that subpages co-opt" and "Subpage titles are ugly") are a matter of notation, not concept. What about using, say, a colon or double-dash? (The Lord of the Rings -- Aragorn or The Lord of the Rings : Aragorn Of course, the more I think about it, the more unwieldy it seems to unify in format *all* of the articles under a particular fictional universe. Ah, well, at least it's an interesting thought experiment... - Seth Ilys 03:06, 28 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Most people if they're going to see the article on Legolas will just type Legolas, not Lord of the Rings/Legolas, so there would have to be lots of redirects anyway, not to confuse the readers. Ausir 14:27, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
User:HappyDog just separated the plot from Harry Potter to Harry Potter (plot). I think it's a brilliant idea! Gaurav 10:50, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)
This is getting nowhere. I have a proposal. Instead of arguing it out, let's choose one series - say Harry Potter - and we have an edit-a-thon on it? We just attack every single article on Harry Potter and change it into whatever format we like, using a page here to coordinate/argue/flame war about why our options are best. When the smoke clears, we should have a whole lotta pages, and a much better idea about the kinda community decision about what to do. Of course, we'll probably have to go back and clean up any waste pages (i.e. if the decision is, we go with one page for all the minor characters, etc, we'll have to delete redirect it out).
If you guys agree, sign up here Wikipedia:WikiProject Fictional Series/Editathon. Tell me why you thinks this sucks on the associated Talk page. Editathon starts whenever atleast five people ratify any one series. It ends 15th March. Gentlemen, start your browsers! (p.s. Should this be going on on MetaWikipedia instead? Or should it be here since it's - for now - an English-Wiki-only project?)
Hey, I don't know if anyone is still involved in this or not (if everyone has disappeared, I'm going to take it over and trash just about everything except what I think are good ideas), but I think what needs to be done before anything else is to decide what main points need to be included on each series' page. I've been doing some thinking and these are the primary characteristics of series' that I've come up with.
Oh and the series' that I can think of right of hand are Dune universe, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, Wheel of Time, Sword of Truth, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Foundation Series, Ender's Game Series (and Shadow), Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earthsea, Chronicles of Narnia, and Riverworld. Several of these probably already have projects/standardized themes to their related pages (like Harry Potter), and that's ok, but they should be referenced by this project, and then have people involved in this project focus on the series' that haven't received as much attention. Bornyesterday 17:23, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)
To continue, the overall goal of this project should be to establish a format for presenting the series' that don't already have their own format. Things like Harry Potter and LotR already have pretty decent coverage. We should let the folks working on those keep at it, and give other series' their due.
I have been working some on Category:Fantasy book stubs trying to reduce the number of stubs by expanding articles. I found several cases where there were stubs for several books in a series, but a good page for the sereis as a whole. I have merged the subs into the series page for The Dark Is Rising and The Wheel of Time, and I am planning to do so for The Belgariad. Perhaps we should have some discussion as to when such a merge is a good idea? DES 21:16, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I have recently been trying to clean up Category:Fantasy book stubs a bit. In the process I had several thoughts that are relevant to this project, particualrly since do many fantasy and SF works are parts of series.
First of all, I am making a point to use ((isfdb series)) on all series pages, and ((isfdb title)) on all pages for a specific work, for all Fantasy and SF works I edit. (Of course ((isfdb name)) should be used on the relavant page about the author, if it exists.)
Secondly i have created and I am starting to populate Category:Fantasy series, and i recomend that this or a simialr appropriate category be used on all series entries. I also find that the existing Category:Fantasy novels is not on many articles where it should be. Again similar categories should be applied to articles about other fictional works. DES 29 June 2005 15:07 (UTC)
Hello - is anybody still on this project? Categories for "sequels" (as opposed to the original work) have lately been created and discussed at CFDs. Looks like there is some category wrangling in order, and this project seems like the place/people to do it. I posted Qs for discussion at Category talk:Sequels. --lquilter 19:55, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I just took a look at the list of Young Adult Novel Stubs and was shocked to find that there were 311. Shouldn't we start expanding them? What is the use of having those articles in Wikipedia if they don't provide encyclopaedic coverage? We should be concerned about them because some of them are about the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books.--Vaishu2 08:27, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
There are also some 600 fictional character stubs that might need looking into. Vaishu2 08:32, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
template set that accesses the proper page. [See ((16char))]