Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Writing about fiction

Infobox character and WAF

Editors of this page may be interested in Template talk:Infobox character § Removing parameters regarding WP:WAF. Izno (talk) 17:33, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

I was about to post a pointer to that myself. It's important to review this for guideline compliance. Just because random editors have added a number of in-universe infobox parameters doesn't mean they're all a good idea or have consensus to be there.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:29, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Quotations

In the section about quotes there is a sentence "If a plot summary includes a direct quote from the work, this must be cited using inline citations per WP:QUOTE." WP:QUOTE is an essay. Guidelines do not derive from essays. Essays do not have community consensus. DrKay (talk) 17:31, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Easy fix. --Izno (talk) 17:35, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

MOS:PLOTSOURCE and WP:PRIMARY.

While MOS:PLOTSOURCE hedges a bit about allowing primary sourcing for plot summaries (it does obliquely discourage citing too much text this way when it says using brief quotation citations from the primary work can be helpful to source key or complex plot points), it still contradicts WP:PRIMARY, which says, of citing primary text, to be cautious about basing large passages on them, something that MOS:PLOTSOURCE has certainly contributed to being done without any real caution. I feel that MOS:PLOTSOURCE needs to reflect that caution more directly; it ought to be reworded to something like Any lengthy, in-depth plot summary for a work, on a page about that work, should ideally be cited to secondary sources. When secondary sources are unavailable, brief summaries can be cited to the work itself; however, per WP:PRIMARY, such citations should be done cautiously and with an eye towards avoiding too much text without secondary citations. Secondary sources are absolutely required for summaries that perform any sort of interpretation or analysis. Possibly even a specific length should be suggested for primary-only summaries (I would say a few sentences at most.) There are currently far too many articles with massive multi-paragraph sprawling sections that cite no sources at all outside the primary text; encouraging this on a large scale goes far beyond the caution WP:PRIMARY suggests and inevitably results in large amounts of original research or interpretation, even if inadvertently. It also risks placing WP:UNDUE weight on aspects of the text that have received no secondary coverage. --Aquillion (talk) 21:44, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

+1 czar 22:23, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Disagree. Such wording would cause problems since editors would go around hacking plot summaries that do not have inline citations, and "lengthy, in-depth plot summary" is already debated enough. One editor's "plot too long" is another's "length is just fine." We have guidelines such as MOS:Film and MOS:TV to guide on this, and having inline citations in the plot summaries is not standard. We just had a discussion about sourcing the plot section at the WP:Neutral noticeboard: Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard/Archive 81#Plot summaries. I will alert WP:Film, MOS:Film, WP:TV and MOS:TV to yet another discussion about this. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:31, 1 June 2020 (UTC)