User:MZMcBride/Edit summaries

A place to explain some of my past editing.

The West Wing episode stubs

It was 2006. I was bored. And Wikipedia was a much different place.

I saw how The Simpsons had articles for individual episodes while The West Wing only had season lists. I think it was one large list of all The West Wing episodes, broken down by season in sections on the page. I took the Simpsons model and made stubs for a whole bunch of individual episodes. Maybe all of them up to that point, I don't really remember. The plot summaries came from that bigger list. I should have made this clearer in my edit summaries. And while some of the plot summaries sounded like they came from elsewhere (maybe a TV guide of some kind?), I didn't bother researching them. I wanted to make some stubs.

Anyway, here we are six years later. (Has it really been six years?) Some of these articles have been deleted. Some have been merged back to season articles. I still think that you could write decent articles for each individual episode, but I'm not sure how necessary that information is here, on a general-purpose encyclopedia. (Our The West Wing article still says: "With a budget of $6 million per episode, many consider each week's show to be a small feature film." It wouldn't be difficult to find enough information to justify individual articles.)

My personal view has changed and I now believe that season lists are probably better. Individual == headers == for each episode would be nice, with a little infobox in each section along with a short plot summary and any other key details from the episode. Really each of these should be able to be summarized in a paragraph or two. The titles should remain redirects to the season lists with appropriate anchors, in my opinion. It'd also be nice if someone resurrected the deleted titles through a deletion review or whatever. It's silly to have just a few not redirect to the appropriate page section.