User talk:Erik/FFW

Clean-up

The lists are a quick run-through of the production listings found at The Hollywood Reporter. Not all links will be perfect, so they'll need to be addressed. Films in preparation and preproduction may not warrant existence per WP:NF, but some films in preproduction will be entering production very soon, so they could be looked over. (Check THR link to see when filming for it starts.) We could try to clean up the films in production for the basic film article layout (clean templates and so forth), and remove items that are already well-addressed like The Dark Knight (film) and Valkyrie (film). Any other suggestions are welcome. This is a preliminary step to Girolamo's proposal of future film maintenance, so just take in the overview of what Wikipedia has. —Erik (talk • contrib) - 16:11, 18 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone through the film titles, correcting disambiguation links and adding notes. These do not include films in the post-production process that have yet to be released, for which we can extract information from the ComingSoon.net Release Dates feature or use the studio's upcoming films web pages. If we devote time, we could set a pretty nice precedent with this wave of releases for the next year or two that new users can follow. —Erik (talk • contrib) - 19:34, 18 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

White Jazz

I was going to either merge outright, or propose a merger, for White Jazz (film) into White Jazz (the novel). However, the latter appears to be little more than a stub; therefore 90% of the merged article would in fact relate to the film adaptation. Would we consider that an acceptable result, or given the well-cited history of the project, should it remain in its own article? Best regards, Liquidfinale ^{(Ţ) (Ç) (Ŵ)} 12:43, 22 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the content can be more succinct, and considering that the planned production is not until December, merging would be the best step. It won't be hard to undo, and seeing something like The Lovely Bones (film) almost stumble right before the start of filming with Gosling's departure shows that nothing is certain in the industry. However, you bring up a good point about a project's development history. My issue with keeping an article about such history is that it will not usually amount to anything more than a few paragraphs. Perhaps we should seek some kind of criteria to determine how much information there should be to warrant a stand-alone article about a film that never enters production. —Erik (talk • contrib) - 15:26, 22 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If no-one does so in the meantime, I'll do the merge for White Jazz, or at least propose it, tonight. The second point, which relates to the notability of incomplete films, might be a little more problematic. I don't think any would argue with the notability of, say, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (which, after all, was the subject of a highly-regarded documentary), but were White Jazz or The Lovely Bones to collapse a couple of weeks into filming, would they be notable enough to keep the articles for? WP:NF refers the question to the general notability guidelines, though these could be easily-misinterpreted - general coverage of production (of which there is lots for these two examples) might not be an assertion of notability; said coverage would I think have to explicitly analyse the collapse of the production. Perhaps this is something which should be brought up at WP:NF and (if agreed) the guideline reworded to this effect. Best regards, Liquidfinale ^{(Ţ) (Ç) (Ŵ)} 15:42, 22 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This reminds me of Watchmen (film), whose content is far more about the development history of the project than it is about the current production. The collapsed projects have been covered posthumously in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made and Entertainment Weekly. I think that there is a clearer case for films that have entered production rather than films that never cross the threshold. The example you named is a great one, and I wouldn't contest an article like that. In the case of White Jazz and White Jazz (film), there is an unfortunate imbalance that seems to force a better article into a lesser article. Perhaps above a certain KB? I just measured, and the film article is currently 9 KB (this is without an attempted compression of the content). Perhaps part of the criteria for the evaluation would be for significant coverage by a reliable source some time after the project dissipates? A source revisiting the failed development or production would be a good sign of continued interest, but it still feels like we'd be swimming in murky waters. My concern is that this would give an argument to editors who watch over articles of films who are still dwelling in the deepest depths of development hell. —Erik (talk • contrib) - 15:57, 22 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]