Forum:Temporary forums/Subpages 2.0/Biography

This is the big one. This is the main reason why I proposed Tardis:Subpage policy in the first place. According to Fandom's Editor Experience team,

"While there is both clear and unclear research on the topic, an informational article should likely take about 7 minutes to read, and be somewhere between 1000 and 2500 words (not bytes). There are legitimate reasons for individual articles with 4000–5000 words of prose if they engage the reader and stay on-topic; beyond 5000 words, contributors should review a body of text for opportunities to summarize and break out potentially independent text into new articles."Articles on Fandom

Currently, we fall utterly, hilariously short of this standard. Our pages Tenth Doctor and Eleventh Doctor are both over 60,000 words long, requiring (according to WordCounter.net) over 3 hours of reading time each. A version of Fandom's "don't make pages too long" guideline was established as a local rule years ago in Thread:264489#9, and {{cleanup}} templates have been gathering dust at the top of every Doctor incarnation page ever since, but no one has actually acted on this because there's no clear path forward. I believe subpages are that path.

In cases where an article egregiously exceeds Fandom's length guidelines, we can move a lengthy Biography section to [[/Biography]] subpage and replace it on the main page with a shorter summary. On Tenth Doctor/Biography, we can go into as much detail as we like, with up to dozens of sentences dedicated to each appearance. At Tenth Doctor#Biography, we present a {{main}} link to the subpage alongside a shorter summary of the content on Tenth Doctor/Biography, just as every article's lead section already presents a short summary of its contents. Here's how all this would look on Tardis:Subpage policy:

After moving material to a new page or subpage, you have to fill the gap on the root page. The Editor Experience team explains the {{Main|/Subpage}} + Summary method in this way:

"When a basic article becomes long enough, it could have long chunks that could reasonably be split into their own independent articles. […] The base article could then replace a long section with a spoiler-free summary with the most important points, linked by a context-link hatnote above it (such as {{Main|/Subpage}})."Categories and navigation on Fandom

In other words, replace the copied text with a shorter summary of the new subpage's contents and a {{main}} link. In exactly the same way that a lead section summarises the contents of its page, this summary should give a broad-strokes overview of the subpage's contents, with a particular emphasis on the details most relevant to readers. Like a lead paragraph, a well-written summary should "lead" its readers to want to learn more by clicking through to the subpage.

Note the Editor Experience team's emphasis on a summary being "spoiler-free". While this may not be possible in some circumstances, ideally a new fan should be able to read the summary of a character's biography without having the experience of the stories being totally spoiled for them. For example, a summary of Twelfth Doctor/Biography might mention that his travels with Bill, Nardole, and Missy concluded in TV: The Doctor Falls during an encounter with an old enemy, without explicitly spelling out that enemy's identity or the specific details of Bill's fate. A well-written summary should "lead" its readers to want to learn more – including actually experiencing the stories in question!

[[/Biography]] was the proposal which received the most pushback in the previous subpage thread. There were two main concerns:

• Firstly, that edit wars might break out if editors disagree on what material belongs in the main page's summary section. I don't think this concern is warranted, since we don't often see edit wars over article leads across the wiki, even on highly-viewed and important pages like Tenth Doctor.

• Secondly, that judging some stories to be more or less relevant to our users violates the "neutral point of view" policy. I don't think this is an accurate reading of the policy, given that we already make this judgment in every lead section, not to mention infobox variables like "main actor" which privilege some sources over others as a matter of course. As a corollary to this part of the proposal, language should be added to T:NPOV to clarify this concern.

• Thirdly, that biography summaries for main pages might be written with a bias against non-TV material. To help ameliorate this concern, I'll commit to writing the new biography summaries for the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors if this part of the proposal passes, setting a precedent for a design inclusive of non-TV material: on Tenth Doctor#Biography, there will be one section each for series 2, 3, 4, his gap year, and his regeneration, each including paragraphs surveying tie-in material set in those periods of his life; and on Eighth Doctor#Biography, there will be one section each for comics, prose, audios, and Time War stuff, as well as a paragraph briefly discussing how those chunks and continuities do or do not intersect and overlap. Whether language should be added to the text of T:SUBPAGE to make this kind of inclusion explicit is something we can discuss below.

I hope that by spelling out these concerns and implications explicitly from the start, we can address them head-on and come to some sort of resolution in the "Discussion: [[/Biography]]" section below. – n8 (☎) 21:09, 14 March 2023 (UTC)