Category talk:Literary collaborations

It strikes me that this page should be for the works which are collaborations rather than the authors who are collaborators, with the possible exception of collaborative entities, such as Ellery Queen. Shsilver 14:04, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree. A collaboration is a "joint intellectual effort", which means this category should include the literature, not the authors. Except in rare situations such as Ellery Queen in which the "author" is, in fact, a collaboration. — Malik Shabazz (Talk | contribs) 21:20, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Category

Dear all, I would like it if you had had discussed this with me first before starting to remove it from the articles I had added it to (I only created it within the last 24 hours so you could assume I'm around. I'm fairly new here and am trying to do the right thing so please help me if you htink I'm doing the wrong thing). I did think about the issue you have raised here, ie works vs people, but decided that the category could cover both the works and the people and this is how I had started entering it. If you do a Google search under "Literary Collaborations" you get the names of people - as well as some of the works they collaborated on. If you do one on "Literary Collaborators" you tend to get more on ghostwriting and other aspects in the first hits. I suspect that we will not, here in Wikipedia, necessarily create articles for all the collaborative works and therefore could lose the ability to get directly to the people who undertook them. I thought about using Literary Collaborators but think the term does have some different connotations - if you think we should have that as well let me know, but I really do think we should categorise the people in some way. Thanks for thinking about all of this Sterry2607 00:00, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Answering myself after doing more research. How about I go ahead and set up Literary Collaborators as well? Question then is where to put the Pseudonymous ones like Ellery Queen? I'll wait a few hours and then, if no response, go ahead and set up the new Category. I'll add all the names removed from my old one and add them to the new one. (You can let me know what you think about Ellery Queen, Michael Field, et al). That seems the sensible thing to do. There is quite a bit of academic interest in these collaborations - in the works and in the people and how they went about it. I thought we could avoid two headings but am happy to go that way. Sterry2607 00:30, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Oops, I see it's been done. Great, thanks Sterry2607 00:01, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Hi Sterry2607. I commented above that I thought this category should include works and not people. Shsilver created Category:Literary collaborators and moved all the writers from this category to that one, a little faster than I would have, but what's done is done.

As a friendly suggestion for the future, when you start a category, think about a sentence or two that you can write about all the things in that category. It's a great help for readers and editors to understand what the category is supposed to include. Category:P-Funk members and Category:Black rock musicians are pretty good examples. Confession: I wrote the first one. :-)

Likewise, if you had written a few of your thoughts about this category ("This category includes works of literature that are collaborations and the writers who contributed to them."), there would have been no confusion. — Malik Shabazz (Talk | contribs) 00:28, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Sort key

There are a couple of odd sorts here - see the novel starting with G under "1" and the novel 1633 at the end under "}". Can't quite work this out but they have a special sort key it seems which may not be relevant to alphabetic category listing. Sterry2607 (talk) 22:18, 30 December 2007 (UTC)