Talk:Biographies of Authors (series)

Revisiting with {{cite source}}

Recently I've been using {{cite source}} and its lovely namedpart variable to make our citations of The Book of the War ^[+]Loading...["The Book of the War (novel)"] more specific across many articles. Given the preponderance of redlinks on this page, it made me wonder: rather than treating Biographies of Authors as individual stories within a series within an anthology within a series, could we just cite {{cs|Biographies of Authors (short story)|namedpart=Captain Robert Scarratt}} rather than {{cs|Captain Robert Scarratt (short story)}}? – n8 (☎) 20:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Wouldn't this necessitate us treating Biographies as one unit, thus being valid or invalid as a whole? (And, tbh, I do mean to write these, I just honestly got so depressed when I realized that I had to re-write my summary for First Draft that it made me lose a lot of motivation for summaries. I keep meaning to get back to it. I just fundamentally feel I don't understand that story.) Najawin ☎ 20:16, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not thrilled with the proposal, though I see where it's coming from. Citation is only part of the issue: there's also the mix of valid and non-valid entries, and, bluntly, the fact that they all have different authors. Surely it's more legible to each give them their own short page and infobox than to have a single page whose "Writer=" infobox field contains an unwieldy list of names… Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:25, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

"the fact that they all have different authors" – to the contrary, 11* of the 13 entries we (will) cover were written by Simon Bucher-Jones. This makes it roughly comparable to A Hundred Words from a Civil War, which was ~90% written by Philip Purser-Hallard but also included contributions from a much larger number of other authors. But the point about the mix of valid and invalid is well taken; while I think that problem could be easily surmounted with a bit of creative thinking, I agree it's not purely trivial. – n8 (☎) 19:10, 27 November 2023 (UTC)