Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Novels

Character lists and the use of bold

See discussion Talk Great Expectations and Project Novels. I suggest modifying the guideline for characters to read as follows:

3.3 Characters

If appropriate, a character section would consist of brief character outlines, as opposed to a simple list. Characters' names should only be indented (though subsections may be used for lengthy descriptions); bold should not be used. Most articles do not need this section. Instead, a finely crafted plot summary is used to introduce the characters to the reader.

Ennis Del Mar or Ennis del Mar

There's currently a discussion on the appropriate spelling of Ennis Del Mar that could benefit from additional opinions here - Talk:Ennis Del Mar#Ennis del Mar (not Del Mar). I asked for additional opinions at WT:CHAR but thus far without results. Thanks! DonIago (talk) 19:39, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning this. There is now a discussion requesting a move here. It's an interesting situation, and the intuitions/opinions of various different editors are not in alignment, which is why there is a conflict/discussion going on. The gist is that the author spelled the fictional character's name "Ennis del Mar" (and some Wikipedia editors think that should settle the matter). However, later on, there was a movie (Brokeback Mountain). In the written screenplay, the fictional character's name was spelled "Ennis Del Mar". There are any number of film reviews, etc., etc., that spell the character's name by capitalizing the "d" in "del". For some Wikipedia editors, the fact that outside notable sources spell it that way should trump the spelling of the author, Annie Proulx. While none of this seems like a hill for anyone to die on, it's interesting, and in case any of you want to weigh in on it, here is where the "move" discussion is taking place. Novellasyes (talk) 13:28, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

It's entirely possible that I'm more interested in this situation as a precedent-setting exercise than I am in the capitalization of a single letter that I suspect 99%+ of Wikipedia readers will never notice/care about. I was a little surprised that I couldn't find any clear policy/guideline for this scenario. DonIago (talk) 15:20, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

I agree! It is extremely interesting from a guideline/policy perspective. There have to be a number of other instances where something like this has happened (i.e., original author spells something one way, later productions surrounding the story do it somewhat differently.) Novellasyes (talk) 15:45, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

See RfC on changing DEADNAME on crediting individuals for previously released works

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#RfC: updating MOS:DEADNAME for how to credit individuals on previously released works
This potentially would affect a significant number of articles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:34, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Publication dates for serialized novels

I suggested this here [1] but just to check. I'd like to change the section on publication date to read:

The novel's earliest release, or publication in book form; if it was previously serialized, do not give the date of serialization. If not formally published, use the date written; this would be highly unusual for writing of notability.

CohenTheBohemian (talk) 04:21, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Proposal to ditch the "pages" count for novel pages and replace it with a "words" count

The pages count for books, at the moment, is a near-useless way to gauge how long a book is, as pages aren't standardized and can have different amount of words depending on the text size. Dune (novel) for instance, is listed as having 896 pages, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is listed as being 766 pages. This is in contrary to the fact that Dune is actually a shorter work of fiction, being 187,240 words while the Harry Potter book is 257,154 words.

I will make the argument here that there exists no encyclopedic value for how much pages the first edition of a book has, and thus should be mass-removed from all pages about novels. After all, the page counts for novels vary widely depending on the edition, and for books like Dune or The Lord of the Rings which get reprinted dozens of times in different formats, it can vary by hundreds of pages. However, there does exist encyclopedic value in the word count for the first edition of novels, as this isn't bound to font sizes and usually only changes if the author makes edits or changes to the content of the novel themselves.

Functionally speaking, this will entail adding a new "word count" parameter for the Books infobox. Pages should only be used as a parameter for mediums like comic books, which are usually standardized to appear the same way no matter the edition. Of course, all novel pages as they exist right now will have to be changed to remove page counts and introduce word counts, but I believe this will be useful for readers and introduce more encyclopedic value to the Wiki. HadesTTW (he/him • talk) 21:36, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

@HadesTTW, how are you going to get word count? Schazjmd (talk) 21:51, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I would expect that it could be done by just counting the words of an e-book, after verifying that it doesn't contain any textual differences from the first-edition. Starting from the first line to the last line.

Editors would then cite wherever did they get the e-book from- for example, if it was from Amazon. I know that's citing a primary source, but keeping WP:ALLPRIMARY in mind- even if we used secondary sources for word counts, they must have gotten the word count by just counting themselves.

I am aware that getting word counts for books will therefore be more complicated than getting page counts- which secondary sources currently just do by opening the last page and writing down the number. However, I'm sure that it isn't a hard enough process that we couldn't do it for most novel pages- barring the ones that don't have e-books or reliable word counts on the internet. HadesTTW (he/him • talk) 22:05, 20 April 2024 (UTC)