Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Novels

Notice of External links noticeboard discussion

We just need the intention behind WP:ELNO #12 elaborated on. I posted there using those words, the issue was addressed, and yet the editor who did not get the consensus he wanted continues on at Talk:Planet of the Apes (novel)#EL. The EL we want to restore to the article at issue was cleared at WP:Media copyright questions/Archive/2013/March#External link copyright issue. We are looking for additional comment at Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard#Planet of the Apes (novel). - Gothicfilm (talk) 05:04, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Planet of the Apes (novel) RfC now posted

Others can comment at Talk:Planet of the Apes (novel)#RfC: The Sacred Scrolls external link. - Gothicfilm (talk) 23:50, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

The Death Cure

There is an ongoing disagreement over sourcing on a plot summary and characters section at Talk:The Death Cure#Delete by Qworty. Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 03:58, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Category:American women novelists

There is a discussion about Category:American women novelists, and a seperate one about Category:American men novelists. I was thinking that people in this project would be interested in weighing in on those. On the American women novelists category, it is the second discussion that specifically relates to that category.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:11, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Fukkatsu no Hi

The page has gone live, but this needs book RS reviews. Help whenever you can especially if you have a copy of the book as well. Thanks! --Eaglestorm (talk) 08:20, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Derivative works and cultural references templates

FYI, I have contacted the derivative works template creators and leading editors for the templates at the following novelist pages: Charles Dickens, Stephen King, Jane Austen, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Agatha Christie, Bram Stoker, Felix Salten, Arthur Conan Doyle, Truman Capote, Curt Siodmak, Dashiell Hammett, Émile Zola, Washington Irving.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 03:59, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Since I am the creator or all the derivative works templates on the following pages no notifications were made although they each have multiple templates: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde (mostly plays), Alexandre Dumas, Hans Christian Andersen, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, A. J. Cronin, Ernest Hemingway, H. P. Lovecraft, John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, Wilkie Collins, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Henryk Sienkiewicz.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 03:59, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

If you are watching pages for many of the most important novels, you have probably noticed that over the last 7 or 8 months I have created hundreds of templates for derivative works and cultural references for novels. Check towards the bottom of User:TonyTheTiger/creations#Templates_Created to see what I call multimedia franchise templates. There has been debate at Fyodor Dostoyevsky regarding the stack of templates at the bottom of the page. For novelists, these templates do two things. First, the sheer number appearing on a page is a very rough metric of cultural significance of the author. To the best of my knowledge, the novelists with the most works templates on their pages are Charles Dickens (11, 6 created by me), Stephen King (9, 4), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (6, 6), Jane Austen (6, 5), and H. G. Wells (6, 4). Those are the extreme cases of what this could look like. Second, if I were studying any of these authors, I think these templates would teach me something that augments the encyclopedic content of the page. Each individual template gives single-click single-glance access to all derivative works that are notable (enough to have WP articles) for the authors works that are notable enough to have such a template (I restrict myself to a minimum of four related WP articles). These templates are of course reliant on the WP beavers having created all the right articles. These templates don't always point to the most notable works by an author. I am sure some Ernest Hemingway fans are a bit disappointed on which templates are available and which aren't. Nonetheless, I think WP is better served by including them on author pages than excluding them.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 06:01, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

They are disturbing and avoid opening the main navbox. They are simply not needed in the main article. If someone wants to see film adaptions, he can read to the novel articles. The film adaptions are not even discussed on the article. Readers are not interested in the film industry when reading Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky never wrote screenplays nor directed any of those films. Some of them differ significantly from the original works. Regards.--Tomcat (7) 10:16, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

WP:Novels is the third largescale project where some of the editors questioned whether my templating efforts were being properly used. In the prior cases, the consensus was to keep deploying them as I suggested. If these templates keep the main navbox from opening, you can set the collapsibility of the main navbox so that it remains open in the presence of other navboxes. Dostoyevsky is an author who at all times seems to have a current, upcoming or recent adaptation. Thus, there is probably some interest derivative adaptations of his work among people who are interested in him. The fact that the article does not mention derivative adaptations of his work is very likely a deficiency of the article and nothing to promote as an argument. Most biographies of authors include content related to the "legacy" or "cultural impact" of the subject's work. The fact that this biography does not is not something to boast about. Until you are able to cobble an appropriate section together these templates are somewhat of a substitute and once you do, it will still be a complement by adding further detail. There is no reason that the reader has to want to see every link on a template for each link to belong on the template or for the template to belong on the page. There are some derivative works that are remote enough that it is unlikely that a reader of the main bio is directly interested in that subject. However, readers of other subjects on the template will find them interesting. I don't buy the "disturbing" argument. What does that mean? Do these templates cause nightmares? They don't have any popup feature. They are not jumping off the page. Wikipedia has a longstanding tradition where the racists run around behind me and make sure that no significant change that I try to make to the project gets implemented. It is as if they don't want me to outshine them in some way and will take any action regardless of its detriment to wikipedia to do so. Please assess this debate based on its merits to WP:Novels and WP as a whole.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 14:41, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

TonyTheTiger: I completely agree with your rational and sentiment. It is very important to build the network, and though cultural reference sections are often impossible to maintain, navboxes provide a robust way of drawing the readership's attention to the larger context of the works. Furthermore, it helps in building the web of links, and deorphaning articles which have strong cultural relevance. I am completely unsure what Tomcat7 is refering to when he says that "Readers are not interested in the film industry when reading Dostoyevsky". By and larger, most of the people reading content on Wikipedia, will be focused on popular culture, not high culture artefacts like works by Dostoyevsky. If anything, by including reference to the list of derivative works amongst various articles, especially those with the popular culture focus, we get the opportunity to enlighten our main audience that popular culture is extremely dependent on a tradition. I greatly appreciate your work Tony, and would like to suggest that most of us that do regular works in the Novels area would agree with that sentiment. Curation of Novels on Wikipedia is rather poor, and any work that supports the organization and better networking of the content should be applauded, Sadads (talk) 19:54, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I think these nav-boxes are an excellent resource, just because someone might not know adaptations exist doesn't mean they won't be interested when they see the link, and they are not intrusive into the main body of the article. GimliDotNet ^{(Speak to me,Stuff I've done)} 20:03, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm not a member of this project, but TonytheTiger asked me to comment, so I will. It's my view that the navboxes for individual works are fine in the articles about the works themselves but inappropriate in the articles about the authors. To my mind, a mess like that at the bottom of Charles Dickens is both unsightly and pretty much useless. A reader who's potentially interested in characters/adaptations/songs-from-the-musical of Oliver Twist is likely to be looking at Oliver Twist (either before or after looking at the Dickens article), and may thus have a use for the box. A reader who's looking at the Dickens article for biographical information about the author, not so much. Deor (talk) 10:54, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Though I understand the impulse to reduce excess at the bottom of articles, the real question is who looks there? Generally, its two types of people: Wikipedians, who know how to do a quick one over and decide what they are looking for; and users who want more information related to the page, whether in the form of sources, external links or other material on Wikipedia. Both of those groups aesthetically, don't have very high demands: as long as the links and the information is organized both groups benefit from additional links; it allows them to navigate to what they deem appropriate for them, instead of what we deem is related to that particular article. As long as all of the navboxes are not open, but rather are collapsed, it provides a choice of expansible menus of items to our audience who may have objectives other then what we anticipated. I know many cases in my own life where I have gone to an Author page looking for information about an adaptation, and had to click through a chain of links, when it is significant enough for the author's page to have information about it

There is also a another series of questions: do we, as individuals who regularly spend excessive time thinking about items often accepted within proper literary discourse, have the proper perspective to judge what is "useful" for our audience? Why not make the Author's page a portal to everything related to them, instead of limiting it to those things which have reached the place of canons? Canons are radically controversial because they assume certain works are aesthetically or thematically superior because of an arbitrary set of values created by publishers, editors and academics (in this case, whether or not it is by the first author in that branch of literary tradition). Why privilege the canon, when most of our readership is looking for media outside of it? Wikipedia is a populist item and is distinctly not paper. Therefore we should create as many opportunities for information to be reasonably connected and may help the public. These connections force readers to meaningfully think the relationship between distinct knowledge items instead of relying on some filter that we place on it through tradition. When I do outreach, the thing most people talk about is the usefulness of the links between Wikipedia pages and with the rest of the internet. Why not encourage those items on each page? Sadads (talk) 13:16, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

• I think the navboxes in themselves are great additions but I think they should be applied judiciously. For instance, I came into this because of a Divine Comedy navbox in Dante's article, and I have no objections to that, as I stated in that discussion. For the Dickens page, I don't think that half a dozen or more boxes is the right way to go, because I think that a. Dante, for instance, is much more identified with the Comedy than Dickens with any one of the novels now navboxed, and thus b. one is forced to put in a large amount of such boxes in the Dickens article leading to the clutter currently at the page (Tony, I don't mean clutter pejoratively--there may be a better word). Imagine what it would look like on Shakespeare's page! For Harper Lee, for instance, it's a different issue and compares to Dante's case. Sadads, sure, we're populist, but that's not the issue here: if a member of the populus (such as students who aren't literary specialists) are looking for such information they're just as likely, if not more likely, to go the article of the novel--I think we can certainly expect them to do that, that's not too much to ask. Drmies (talk) 14:12, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
  • If having a "half a dozen or more boxes" leads to "clutter" why not just collapse them as above rather than remove them entirely from the page?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:12, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
• Remove - agree with Deor and Drmies. They're ugly, and not necessary. Can go to the individual articles if necessary but not stacked up in bios. Truthkeeper (talk) 18:38, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
• The people that want to remove the navboxes, forget one crucial aspect of navboxes: they aid navigation. On a medium such as Wikipedia, navigation is essential, and all related articles should be linked. That is not always possible in the prose, so navboxes are a good substitute. You cannot expect al (new) visitors to know to get to the right articles fast, so navboxes helps those to navigate more easily. A page like Charles Dickens is a central hub to all his literary works and derivatives, so those navboxes are appropriate. To remove them just because there are so many in some instances ("cluttering"), breaks consistency between all articles in general. — Edokter (talk) — 09:38, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm not unaware of the navigational usefulness of the boxes, but everything doesn't need to be crammed into the highest-level article. Look at Solar System. Though there is a navbox for each planet (and for some of the other bodies), those navboxes aren't present in the general article; rather, they are used in the articles Mercury, Venus, etc., and the navbox {{Solar System table}}, which is in the Solar System article, serves as an aid to navigation to the articles containing the subsidiary navboxes. The same arrangement should apply in the case of these biographies. Deor (talk) 11:25, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

IMO, it would not be wrong to have the planet templates collapsed at Solar System.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 15:36, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Edokter, the law of diminishing returns applies here. Having a navigational template for Dickens's works is proper on the Dickens page; having one for each one of his works is not. I stand by my earlier point that this should be a matter of judgment. Tony, in response to your comment above, my point was about already-collapsed boxes, such as I found them on the Dickens page when I looked at it a few days ago. For my taste, that's already too much. Look at the bottom of Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands (I'll never get used to having a king)--five boxes, besides a bunch of other stuff. Five, maybe six, that's about as much as I could stand for--maybe less. Drmies (talk) 15:13, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't recall Dickens ever being collapsed, but if you say so. In terms of every work having a template. There is almost no novelist for whom each novel is notable enough to have a navbox. I only create navboxes for works with at least 4 related WP articles in addition to the work's article itself.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 15:30, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘This thought just came to mind. When I see advertisments for Dickens' movies they always say something like "A Charles Dickens Classic", "A Charles Dickens Tale", etc. Thus, outside of the classroom, the way most people are introduced to Dickens is in this type of media exposure. When those people come to WP, what do you think they are looking for?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:40, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't think the nested navboxes are a problem at all, any more than, say, the ton of awards navboxes at the bottom of movie pages. My perdonal view is that there's no compelling reason to get rid of them. Kuralyov (talk) 03:55, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Categories

FYI for Wikiproject novels: discussion here re categorization. Truthkeeper (talk) 16:31, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

• FYI - Category:Asian-American novels nominated for deletion: [1]. Truthkeeper (talk) 17:37, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

this nom for Asian-American novels was withdrawn. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 03:05, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_25#Category:American_men_novelists

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_25#Category:American_men_novelists. Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 07:12, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Novelist genres

1. Hi - as a result of all of the hoopla, some editors have been creating new genres under Category:American novelists. My thought was, we already have an existing Category:American novels tree, and the genres should, in general, match 1-1. So first, any thoughts on that?
2. Secondly, a specific question on Category:American LGBT novelists, which was recently created - as a way of capturing writers who write LGBT-themed novels (and not to capture writers who happen to be LGBT) - I think this naming is confusing, and I'm wondering if you all might have a suggestion on a better name, then we can nominate it for renaming.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 16:25, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Let me be hopeless today. We have already cats such as Category:Canadian historical novelists and Category:Welsh fantasy writers. The latter is small enough and the names so distinctive that I know them at a glance to be fantasy writers who are Welsh rather than writers of Welsh fantasy--such as Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, who wrote Welsh fantasy novels. The former is big enough and opaque that I can't know at a glance. I am sure that both category names have double meanings for our visitors, same as Category:LGBT novelists (or same by nationality).

And what is a novel? Do we want to see moved from Novels by writer to Books by writer every subcategory that includes one article about a book that is not (whose content is not) a novel? Or reorganize to give every such writer a books category with a novels subcategory?

By the way, how many British books by writer subcats contain only one page? and why isn't British novels by writer one of its + subcategories?

Almost every deceased science fiction writer from the U.S. wrote at least one novel at least one short story. Should they all be in cats American science fiction writers, American short story writers, and now specifically 20th-century American novelists? (Philip K. Dick#External links; see also toda's preemptive edit summary[2]) Plus American historical novelists if one book was a historical novel? --P64 (talk) 18:04, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi P64. Yes, you've raised a good many questions. I fixed that one issue re: British books by writer not containing British novels by writer. As to your broader points, my general feeling is, we should try to follow sources and notability when deciding where to stick someone. If someone wrote 100 sci-fi novels and one essay, I would not put them in Category:American essayists - similarly, even though everyone - including me - has written a poem or two, I don't think that gets you into Category:American poets - there has to be some body of work for which you are known - not just dabbling. Imagine if someone wrote a bio of said writer - would they say "Ernest Hemingway, novelist, did XXX"? Probably not - they'd say "Ernest Hemingway, writer, novelist, journalist, fisherman, etc etc etc" - so some people like him have so many facets that they end up in many many categories. That's my view. As for the sci-fi writers, for now I'd say they should all definitely be in Category:American science fiction writers and Category:20th-century American novelists - I think all novelists will eventually be in one of the by-century cats, as it diffuses the overly-large Category:American novelists cat. But anyway, that's a broader discussion... --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:25, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

• On the science fiction writers, there are lots of people who have only written screen plays or plays that are science fiction. Our current tree does not allow us easily to categorize these people by the nature of their work. My general view on poets, is that they should have to be published. I generally focus most on what it says in the lead, but if the article lists multiple short stories, multiple novels, multiple poems, published collections of essays, says the memoirs or autobiography is widely read, or such, we should so categorize.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:40, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
• On the other hand Mike Allen (poet) appears to be a science fiction writer who has never written a novel. Short stories yes, a novel, not as far as anything in the article on him says.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:42, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
• The general consensus is Nationality identified + occupation means the person is of the nationality identified. This might mean we should rename Category:American young adult novelists to Category:American novelists who wrote young adult literature or something, since its contents are not young adults who wrote novels, but people who wrote young adult novels. I have still not figured out a better name though.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:44, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

• Note: Input welcome to this CFD discussion: Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_May_15#Category:American_LGBT_novelists.

• Also, any other thoughts on the above? Should we try to align novelist/novel genre categories as directly as possible? --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 22:33, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Help diffusing Category:American novelists by century

I have realized that we probably should diffuse this category by century. Why? 1-even the "this is a distinguished category" notes on the women and men novelists categories are not very good at preventing that diffusion, because people do not need to ever look at a category page to add people to it, or remove them from it. 2-the genre categories often do not fully cover the novelists. Many novelists have written works that are historical novels for example, but have also written several other works that are not (Charles Dickens is the example that comes to mind the fastest), and so often when we put someone in a by genre cat they really should be in the parent, which is going to create a mess if left. 3-there is a clear change of novels and novelists over time. The century cats are still going to be immensely large, and Cateogry:21st-century novelists has a very high overlap with Category:20th-century novelists, although not as bad as you might expect, however it groups people more closely. I have gotten to the start of the D section, and also fully dispersed Z, but there is still a lot more to do, so any help would be appreciated.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:19, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Fantasy writers

Category:American fantasy writers is a sub-cat of Category:American novelists. At one level this seems like an inproper rlationship. For example Malcolm Marmorstein wrote the screenplay for Pete's Dragon, which is categorized as a work of fantasy. How exactly then do we not put Marmorstein in the fanstasy writers category, and if we were to do that, what should we do about this. I am torn between three solutions. Personally I think the best would be to create Category:American fanstasy novelists, and make that a sub-cat of both Category:American novelists and Category:American fantasy writers, then just have Category:American fantasy writers be a sub-cat of Category:American fiction writers. This way we could put any screenwriters, dramatists and playwrights, poets, short story writers or other writers of some type (I am not sure what else there is, but I am sure we could find some other way to write fantasy) who were not also novelists in the parent category. There are two potential reasons to not do this, 1-some people might say "this is really meant for those who wrote short stories and novels, not screenwriters and playwrights", I am not sure why that would be, but it might be. The other issue is that at least between fantasy novelists and fantasy short story writers there is a fairly high overlap. To make this even more of a mess, it is not always easy to say what is fantasy and what is science fiction, but I am assuming that sine we have the two different categories someone knows.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:26, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

• considering there is an anthology called "Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre", the idea of fantasy poems is actually clearly in existence.John Pack Lambert (talk) 03:31, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

I just thought of another way to write fantasy, in songs.John Pack Lambert (talk) 04:57, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Category:Novels by country

I'm somewhat irritated by Category:Novels by country and its subcategories. Apparently those categories are effectively "Novels by author's nationality", and we seem to use them indiscriminately, irrespective of whether the author's nationality is mentioned or discussed in the novel article. The case in point is The Picture of Dorian Gray which is categorized as an "Irish novel" without any reliable sources to that effect merely because Wilde was born in Ireland; see Talk:The Picture of Dorian Gray. That seems to violate WP:CAT, which states:

• "Categorization of articles must be verifiable. It should be clear from verifiable information in the article why it was placed in each of its categories."
• "A central concept used in categorising articles is that of the defining characteristics of a subject of the article. A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having—such as nationality or notable profession (in the case of people), type of location or region (in the case of places), etc."

Is there some sort of consensus to simply ignore those parts of WP:CAT when categorizing novels by author's nationality? Huon (talk) 01:51, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

My sense is, the by-nationality subcats get a bit of flexibility in terms of WP:CAT, since diffusion by nationality is quite common in many trees. Thus, you might have a poet who is regularly called an amazing poet, and then in another article called a Frenchman, and they may rarely call him a French poet - but if we have reliable sources for the intersecting bits, then we can pull them together into a by-nationality sub-cat. The other question you're asking, which is does it even make sense for a novel to have a nationality, there I don't really know. How would you classify The Picture of Dorian Gray? It seems you're also wading into issues of Irish vs British identity, and that's a little minefield in a teacup... For the vast majority of novels, this categorization-by-nationality of the person who wrote it (or, really, the place where it was first published?) is not debated - but you've run into an edge case. Note that any given novel could be placed in several places - so if you think its a quintessentially British novel, it can be placed there as well. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 02:21, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

+1. Well explained, and well done on the Categories work more generally! Sadads (talk) 02:49, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't categorize the books (as opposed to the authors) by country at all, but, say, by language, unless it's an example of a specific national style or has themes strongly relevant to that country. I don't think that's the case for Dorian Gray, so I'd argue it's better off in Category:English-language novels than either Category:Irish novels or Category:British novels. Huon (talk) 03:14, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, for that sort of organization to work, it assumes that readers and scholars of the literature understand things as transcending the geographic boundaries in which they are written. This is simply not the case, most scholars specialize in a literature based on the nationality of the author (for instance I am taking a course in Irish literature, in which many of the works are considered Irish by scholarship even though many of the authors haven't lived in Ireland for years). And secondly, the limits of publishing industry ensure that works maintain the artificial and sometimes confusing boundaries of nationality, simply because publishers tend only to distribute works to the country in which they are initially written and/or the author feels most aligned, unless they are a big hit like Harry Potter. Nationality provides one of many meaningful lenses in which, as OWK points out, to capture most works, even if they are blurry with works like Dorian Gray, Sadads (talk) 03:30, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

• I would also say that literature is generally divided by nationality. The actual tricky point is novelists who changed nationality. What is the nationality of the works Lolita for example?John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:14, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Nabakov s described as a "Russian-American". He spend several years in Germany as well. He had been in the United States for 15 years when Lolita was first published, so most would agree it was an American work. Except it was first published in Paris. I would say, generally where a novel is published has no relationship with its nationality.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:17, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Last I checked verify was a pillar. We can't guess at what we think is right; we have to source and cite what we add, even at the category level; and we have to use good quality sources - we can't go by what the WP page says. This, in my view, goes to the heart of why diffusion is difficult. Novelists are artists, and to oversimplify, tend to disregard boundaries. Truthkeeper (talk) 09:59, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

I think this gets to the heart of the issue - to what extent is it worth it to diffuse, and if so, to what? We have a similar challenge over at Category:American novelists - some want to diffuse to by-century categories like Category:20th-century American novelists, others are resisting. My case for that is the same as for the novels - by diffusing to the by-century cats, you remove any question of *who* gets to be an unadorned novelist, or which book gets to be an unadorned novel, and you completely eliminate any notion that being in the head cat is some sort of accomplishment or award for literary merit. It is the ultimate in POV to say "Well, this is a great *NOVEL* - no genre attached, whereas this one is a great "war novel" (but it's *not* a novel!). Why can't something be both? If you categorize by century, or year, or etc etc. as you've done in novels and as we're proposing to do with the novelists, everyone is in an undifferentiated, un-adjectivized list, simply sorted by a completely neutral time period. Then, in addition, they can be added to genres or ethnicities or genders as necessary. If you take a look at A Farewell to Arms, it is also in nationality-specific cats, and so-called "international" cats for novels - and is placed in several genres besides. I'm not sure what's wrong with that - it's more like saying "we know this is a novel, and it may fit into 100 boxes, but we've decided to track these 5 boxes for now, so we'll stick it in 3 of those" All categorization is oversimplification in some sense. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 12:03, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

As the discussion here started around whether a novel by Oscar Wilde should be regarded as an Irish novel, my view is that it must; novels may be classified very broadly, e.g. (as Huon mentions above) by the language in which they were written, in this case Category:English-language novels; but when a particular author firmly identifies his nationality, as Wilde did, there is no reason whatever not to classify his/her works as "nationality" novels. Portrait of DG must be categorised in Irish novels and, due to the carelessness of other editors, that automatically includes it in the Category:English-language novels (as though all Irish novels were in the English language). Brocach (talk) 00:40, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, you've just run smack dab into the partial subset issue; wherein not *all* members of subcategory Y of a parent cat X can also be said to be X. This sort of thing is endemic, and I promise you it is not a slight against the Irish language - it's really because people use categories more to describe relationships and proximity, as opposed to rigid set membership and so on. To further detail why these sorts of things crop up, today Category:American novels is a subcat of Category:English-language novels. Now, if someone were to add a spanish-language novel, written by a US citizen living in California, to the list of Category:American novels, no-one would complain. But due to its presence in Category:English-language novels we now have a logical inconsistency - a member of the subcat is clearly not a member of the parent. Again, this is endemic, it happens all the time, we can try to address egregious cases, but I don't think it can be completely solved. In the case of Ireland, for example, Category:English-language Irish books and Category:Irish-language Irish books could be produced, but this would require a split of the whole Category:Irish books tree, by language. Ugh. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 01:05, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Presentism

So far, through D, we have about 7 times as many articles in Category:21st-century American novelists as Category:19th-century American novelists. If the categories were balanced from year to year it would be the other way around. I guess though there are lots more people at any given time in 21st-century America than there were in 19th-century America. I still have a feeling that we have an over abundance of people in the present category and an under abundance of people in the 19th-century category. I am not sure if there is any easy way to fix the problem.John Pack Lambert (talk) 02:26, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Thats a problem with the internet and research more generally...I would suggest that it is not fixable, and that most encyclopedias will be presentist anyway. Part of the reason we should be doing outreach like WP:GLAM and Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program, is that most of the conversations in those spaces are not as presentist as the pop culture focus of the internet more generally. I strongly encourage you to write articles that are about important historical materials such as those listed at Template:JFCooper for example. Just a thought, cheersSadads (talk) 02:47, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

• Well, I did manage to add B. H. Roberts to the 19th-century category by hunting down information on a novel he wrote, and Susa Young Gates to the 20th-century cat by digging up a novel she wrote. Actually, few would accuse The Brittanica of being presentist, so I would not say it exists in all encyclopedias. With user generated content, we do have the problem that besides people being more likely to write bios of authors they read and the internet having a lot more stuff of living authors, some articles are created by the people themselves or their publicists. On the other hand, a very high percentage of articles that get put up for deletion are on living people, so there is some resistance to the problem.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:10, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Defense of by century categories

In high school I had a couse that was "20th-century American literature". It seems fairly obvious that people support at least some novelists by century categories. It also avoids the problem of how to deal with novelists who wrote some novels that were clearly in specific genres but also wrote other novels that were not in geners we have categories for.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:34, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Don't confuse subject-by-century with person-by-century. It's simple to delineate a subject, like literature, with 1900 and 2000 as cut-off dates. You can't do that with authors, though, because of the ones whose careers overlapped centuries. Is Stephen King a 20th century novelist? Or a 21st century novelist? Do you diffuse to both categories? Or one (which one)?OttawaAC (talk) 02:57, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

You stick him in both. Not really a big deal IMHO. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 06:43, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

• I would estimate at present over half of Category:21st-century American novelists are also in caegory:20th-century American novelists. There is no limit to how many categories people can be in. However creating these categories reduces how many categories people should be in, and sometimes really does, some of these people were previously in Category:20th-century American writers, Category:20th-century novelists and Category:American novelists, so by putting them in Category:20th-century American novelists, they moved from being in 3 categories to only being in one.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:11, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Navigating this project

Haven't been here for a while, and I just kicked off The Underpainter and would like to invite others to have a look at what I've done so far and add/modify if they wish, but I'm not sure how to bring it to people's attention. Deb (talk) 17:39, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at Category_talk:American_novelists#RFC_or_not.3F

You are invited to join the discussion at Category_talk:American_novelists#RFC_or_not.3F. Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 02:36, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Richard Castle

The Richard Castle article is mixing the fictional character history, with the real-life nom-de-plume history. Particularly, real-life e-books and ISBNs are being used to represent the fictional works. While ghostwritten novels have been released, this should be clearly segregated from the in-universe versions of those books. There should be a separate section on how the fictional character has become a real-life pseudonym, instead of making representations that appear to have a fictional character write real-life novels. -- 65.94.76.126 (talk) 12:02, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Discussion about novelist categories

Greetings! You are invited to take place in a conversation happening Category_talk:American_novelists#Stalemate here about how to move forward with discussion on subcategories of by-country novelist categories.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 14:48, 22 May 2013 (UTC)