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Forum:Temporary forums/Non-narrative fiction and Rule 1: Difference between revisions
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Forum:Temporary forums/Non-narrative fiction and Rule 1 (view source)
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{{retitle|{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}[[Category:Temporary forums]] | {{retitle|{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}{{archive}}[[Category:Temporary forums archives]][[Category:Policy changers]] | ||
==Opening post== | ==Opening post== | ||
Alright. So. I'm going to be approaching this in a bit of a weird direction, attempting to build a historical case for a re-examination of this rule, where some of the history, is uh, not ''precisely'' available to us because it's in the deleted forums. With that said I think most of the ''relevant'' history takes place before the switch, so there's not much of a barrier here. | Alright. So. I'm going to be approaching this in a bit of a weird direction, attempting to build a historical case for a re-examination of this rule, where some of the history, is uh, not ''precisely'' available to us because it's in the deleted forums. With that said I think most of the ''relevant'' history takes place before the switch, so there's not much of a barrier here. | ||
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:::Every policy is going to have edge cases. That sounds like something that should be considered in regard to that individual work. [[User:Schreibenheimer|Schreibenheimer]] [[User talk:Schreibenheimer|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 15:05, 24 February 2023 (UTC) | :::Every policy is going to have edge cases. That sounds like something that should be considered in regard to that individual work. [[User:Schreibenheimer|Schreibenheimer]] [[User talk:Schreibenheimer|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 15:05, 24 February 2023 (UTC) | ||
:::: You guys did a great job on this one. Even though it got VERY confusing. I'm just happy to be here. [[User:OttselSpy25|OS25]][[User Talk:OttselSpy25|🤙☎️]] 16:46, 24 February 2023 (UTC) | :::: You guys did a great job on this one. Even though it got VERY confusing. I'm just happy to be here. [[User:OttselSpy25|OS25]][[User Talk:OttselSpy25|🤙☎️]] 16:46, 24 February 2023 (UTC) | ||
== Conclusion == | |||
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I'm going to echo [[User:OttselSpy25]]'s last comment above — "you guys did a great job on this one", to the point that writing a fitting closing post is a daunting prospect for this humble admin. Not because consensus isn't clear (it's abundantly clear), but because so many other users shined slightly different lights on the problem in so many structured, lengthy, closing-post-shaped arguments of their own. Here's my stab at it. | |||
=== What are we validating? === | |||
==== "Works of fiction" ==== | |||
Firstly, just to get the obvious out of the way; '''as per clear community consensus, the current Rule 1 of [[T:VS]] is hereby abrogated'''. It will be replaced with a new Rule 1, to be phrased as "'''Only works of fiction count'''". This primarily validates the sources designated as "Type A" and "Type C" in the discussion (although this is an ''ad hoc'' terminology and distinction which '''will not be maintained''' in actual policy going forward; a non-narrative work is a non-narrative work whether or not it has a particular framing device, much as a novel is a novel whether it's got a first-person narrator or not). | |||
Now, the initially-proposed phrasing was the slightly-different "''Only fiction counts''"; but the change is '''not intended to mean that ''all'' fiction counts''', only that being fiction is the ultimate ''sine qua non''. We simply ''must'' introduce a concept of "completeness". [[Chris Chibnall]] musing about a character's fate in an interview, some worldbuilding detail on the back of a trading card right alongside a quick briefer on what stories this monster appeared in, those things are perhaps ''fiction'', but that doesn't make'em valid; they're not ''works'' of fiction, just blobs of fiction mixed in with something else. I know some people wish we could do otherwise, but [[User:Schreibenheimer]]'s concerns are not without merit in that regard. | |||
==== Type Ds and real-world bleedover ==== | |||
Where does this leave the so-called "Type Ds, then? On a case-by-case basis, with a presumption of non-validity. A "reference book" which continued plentiful new fictional information and ''happened'' to cite its sources in plaintext rather than footnotes or parenthetical ''could'' be considered "a work of fiction"; it's certainly a bounded thing. However, the ''default assumption'' with such a work should be that it's not so much a work of fiction as the printed equivalent of a convention panel where writers discuss the characters: nuggets of fictional information conveyed from a real-world perspective. An inclusion debate would generally be required to rule in such a source. (However, it can ''of course'' be used as a source for {{tlx|conjecture}} page-names. And works which cite explicitly in-universe counterparts of the real-world stories are simply ''not'' works of this type, they just look deceptively like them; such cases were ''always'' valid, ''modulo'' narrativity, as the narrative ''[[The ArcHive Tapes (audio anthology)|The ArcHive Tapes]]'' demonstrates, and will remain so.) | |||
It should also be clarified that this wholly applies to non-book-length works of fiction printed within broader works that also include reference material. To my mind this almost goes without saying (any DWM short story or comic is already printed within a resource which also contains BTS-focused features: an issue of ''Doctor Who Magazine''!), but in the Wiki's early days it seems that some material, like the fictional contents of ''[[Doctor Who: Cybermen]]'', was invalidated due to concerns about being "both" an in- and out-of-universe book. But in this case, as in others where the in-universe and out-of-universe sections are just that (different, delineated sections), there is no bleedover, and thus no obstacle to validity. | |||
On a separate note, [[User:Chubby Potato]]'s point in his above pseudo-closing-post regarding informational features which acknowledge the existence of the Doctor or the like despite being mostly educational '''is endorsed'''. These things are valid. | |||
==== Illustrations & artwork ==== | |||
While [[And Introducing...|some things]] we already have pages on as "comic almost-stories", and things like graphics and maps, can definitely be validated on this basis, some degree of caution is warranted regarding the broader class of illustrations. ''Some'' illustrations are genuine ''works of fiction'' — some even functionally "tell a story" — but we shouldn't start creating bespoke source page on every single untitled picture of the Doctor printed in DWM. As a rule of thumb, '''illustrations with titles''', or otherwise treated as their own items in whatever publication runs them (e.g. their own entry in the Table of Contents), can safely have pages created about them, but '''untitled ones should probably require their own case-by-case discussion'''. | |||
=== How are we validating it? === | |||
A whole new class of valid sources necessitates some forethought about implementation, and I am happy to see that the matter has already been discussed at some lengths. Apologies if I must pull some of the following out of my own reflections, however; don't worry, the more tentative of the following is only a first draft, and it would not be [[T:POINT]]-breaking to suggest changes here or there, whether on individual prefix talk pages or as part of a broader effort to overhaul citation policy (I know some people want to overhaul some of our established prefixes as it stands, e.g. the arguably-obsolete difference between [[WC]] and [[TV]]). | |||
* By and large, pages about non-narrative sources should use '''a "Summary" section and/or a "Contents" section''', depending on what makes most sense, in ''lieu'' of a "Plot" section. | |||
* In terms of terminology, for categorisation, [[Tardis:Disambiguation term|dab-term]] and appearances-table purposes, '''"feature" should be used for most prose or comic non-narrative pieces which aren't printed individually. Illustrations, graphics, diagrams and the like should be referred to by the word "illustration". "(webcast)", "(home video)" and "(game)"/"(video game)" can continue to be used regardless of narrativity.''' For the time being, '''whole non-narrative books will continue to be dabbed as "(reference book)", but due to the confusion with real-world-focused reference books this is not ideal and should be replaced with something better as soon as possible''' (I am hopeful that a suggestion will emerge on this archived thread's talk page). I suppose that if it comes to it, a non-narrative TV or audio piece should be dabbed as simply "(TV)" or "(audio)", but fortunately I'm not aware of any such work currently existing on the Wiki, so good-oh. | |||
* In terms of [[Tardis:Prefixes|prefixes]], '''[[PROSE]] can be used for all prose non-narrative fiction. As suggested by [[User:SOTO]], [[GRAPHIC]] will be used for graphics, illustrations, etc. [[GAME]], [[WC]], [[HOMEVID]], and, should it come up, [[AUDIO]] and [[TV]] are unaffected.''' As an additional point, I will take this opportunity to right an old wrong by '''introducing [[POEM]] and the matching dab term "(poem)", which can be used for text stories in verse, whether narrative or not.''' (If we're going to have valid "poems" at all, it makes no sense to keep dabbing some of the valid contents of ''[[Now We Are Six Hundred (anthology)|Now We Are Six Hundred]]'' as "short stories" but not others.) | |||
I keep rereading this and telling myself I ''must'' be forgetting some aspect of the "how", but nothing's coming to mind and the clock's ticking, so I do apologise for any oversight. Again, that's what talk pages are for… Still, I think this is a good enough roadmap to get us started. This won't be implemented in a day, anyway. | |||
This is a big step for the Wiki, and I ''am'' sympathetic to the few voices who expressed concerns. But [[Tardis:Neutral point of view|we must be unbiased]] and cover the DWU to its fullest extent. Casting out an entire medium of art was never a real option, and I can only mourn the fact that we've lost so much time in our documentation work, and must now play catch-up to this extent. | |||
'''Thank you again, everyone, both for the work put into this thread, and for the work that is yet to come in implementing it!''' | |||
[[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 19:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC) | |||
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