Wikipedia:Featured and good topic candidates/Marvel Cinematic Universe films/archive2

Marvel Cinematic Universe films

The Marvel Cinematic Universe films are an American series of superhero films, based on characters that appear in publications by Marvel Comics. The films have been in production since 2007, and in that time Marvel Studios has released 20 films, with 11 more in various stages of production. The series has collectively grossed over $17.5 billion at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing film franchise. The first film was 2008's Iron Man, which began the franchise's Phase One and concluded with the 2012 crossover film Marvel's The Avengers. Phase Two began with Iron Man 3 (2013) and concluded with Ant-Man (2015). Marvel began Phase Three in 2016 with Captain America: Civil War and concluded with Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019. Kevin Feige has produced every film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while the films are written and directed by a variety of individuals and feature large, often ensemble, casts. Many of the actors, including Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, and Samuel L. Jackson signed contracts to star in numerous films.

Comment: Considering that there are lots (and lots) more films coming, I think it would be wiser to nominate this as "MCU Infinity Saga" or something along those lines, so that it could be a complete, finished topic; then, when further films come out, this topic won't keep becoming incomplete and in danger of delisting, and, if someone makes another GT for "Phase Four" or whatever comes next, then that and this could be combined into an overview topic for the MCU as a whole. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 15:43, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Agree with Bryanrutherford0, we should restructure and limit the topic to the "Infinity Saga" to avoid having to repeat this process with every new film.--TriiipleThreat (talk) 20:57, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  - The problem with that is that the Infinity Saga does not have an article (Oinkers42) (talk) 21:02, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    - True, but there seems to me to be precedent for that sort of thing. Grabbing a random example from WP:GT, I see that Wikipedia:Featured topics/Classes of supernovae has for its main article Supernova, which is not just about the classes. I think List of Marvel Cinematic Universe films would still make an acceptable summary article for an "Infinity Saga" topic. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 21:17, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose on the grounds that I agree with Bryanrutherford0's assessment that we should limit this scope to prevent the topic from lagging in getting films nominated and being delisted (as has already happened to this very topic). And as such, if we limit it to the Infinity Saga, then Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One, Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase Two, and Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase Three need to be included and all three are not GAs (yet). Or alternatively, we make three topics: a Phase One, Phase Two, and Phase Three one, which can lead towards a larger "MCU films" topic of which each is a subtopic. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 03:29, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the three-topic option (by "phase") would also be a natural way to handle this, if the Phase articles could be gotten to GA. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 18:16, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose agree with the assessment above; "Phase one/two etc." would be the best way to handle this. By promoting the current topic, we'd be allowing a continuously unstable topic every year, which is surely not ideal. Aza24 (talk) 08:41, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support because it is back into completeness, the goddamned pandemic ensured there won't be new movies until May, and then it's three months until getting a GA out of Black Widow (something the editors responsible for MCU articles usually get to do, even if at times, like noted in the Topic Removal, the articles are perfunctory). It's eight months where the responsible ones can get GAs out of Phase One\Two\Three to then nominate three other GTs and reduce this into a modular topic. Better recognize their effort so far. igordebraga ≠ 03:11, 25 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sadly, oppose Despite what I'm pretty sure people have said about me, I sincerely love these films, even after COVID and Disney+ killed the momentum (I lost interest in Harry Potter during the long wait between books 4 and 5), and think Wikipedia should provide them with the coverage that they deserve, especially now that the first "saga" has ended and can be viewed and studied from a distance. Unfortunately, this is not the case right now. Apart from the unambiguous copyvio that was the immediate cause for the Black Panther article being delisted, there are a large number of issues that have been brought up over the years and ignored by the small cadre of editors who "own" these articles, and these aren't "new" issues that could not have been addressed until Spider-Man: Far from Home had been released on home video. To give just one example, I've seen the fact that the cast lists are formatted to match pre-release "spoiler-free" first-party advertising materials, and contain character descriptions that are "unified" across multiple films but frequently don't make sense in individual articles' contexts, brought up several times, with all but three users generally agreeing that it was problematic, but because those three users were the only ones who consistently showed up... This set of circumstances imply that all of these articles fail the stability criterion for being GAs. On top of all of that, the Black Panther article was relisted as a GA under highly questionable circumstances, with the nominator claiming in an edit summary that the copyvio issue had been addressed despite otherwise never having even acknowledged that there was a copyvio issue: what actually happened was that he and a number of other editors managed to drive the person who pointed out the copyvio (me) off the site, and he waited until it seemed like a certainty that I wouldn't be coming back before immediately working to undo the delisting, without any kind of reflection about why the delisting had actually happened.

I really feel like the community shouldn't be rewarding this kind of behaviour and promoting articles that (let's not mince words) definitely include a significant amount of textual plagiarism, either in the form of unmarked quotations or quotations that are too long and make up too much of the articles, and these circumstances needed to be brought to the community's attention. Given that a number of the other "oppose" !votes above seem to be based primarily on the good-faith but incorrect assumption that these articles don't have inherent problems and would change to "support" if the name of the topic were changed, I felt it was important to point out the problems as well.

I'm not interested in getting into fights over this general topic anymore. Please don't ping me -- I don't want to discuss this beyond leaving this statement, and if you don't believe me, that's your business.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:25, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If you genuinely believe this, can you give more precise, citing specific examples, starting perhaps with the article which you think is in worst shape? El Millo (talk) 02:33, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For reasons that should be obvious, I don't like to keep "records" of which articles have particularly severe problems, but to reiterate the concrete example that I already mentioned, virtually every sentence of Black Panther (film)#Pre-production includes some amount of text within quotation marks. Without checking every source, it would be difficult to say how much unmarked quotation exists (but to be clear, any amount of the latter should be a deal-breaker, and it was sheer random luck that this was caught), or how much of the articles misrepresent their sources when attempts are made at paraphrasing (see here, where a needless talk page back-and-forth took place on the talk page because multiple editors refused to accept that they had misread a source).

As for cast lists relying on pre-release spoiler-free advertising materials and consequently misrepresenting the actual film and the consensus of reliable secondary sources, Avengers: Endgame is easily the worst example: Gurira, Wong, Favreau, and Paltrow all get bullet points despite their appearances all being minuscule cameos, while Cumberbatch, Holland, Saldana, Mackey and Slattery have substantially greater roles in the film but get lost in a sea of names at the bottom of the section because their names appearing on the poster would have been a spoiler. This is true to some extent for the majority of the films: in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Cardellini, Kim and Serkis each has substantially more screen-time, dialogue, and presumably coverage in reliable secondary sources discussing the film, than Atwell, Elba and Skarsgård combined, but the latter three get bullet-points and character bios that have virtually no relation to their role in the film because contract negotiations (maybe...?) resulted in their names appearing on the poster.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:16, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The Black Panther problem shouldn't be too hard to fix. Regarding the Cast list, there's a reason for them being as they are. In order to avoid a pointless edit wars about which characters deserve a bullet point, as it is the case with the "Starring" parameter on the infobox, it's been decided that we go by the billing block. Exceptions have been made, for example at Spider-Man: Homecoming, where a few more characters were included in the Cast list, but generally we stick to the billing block, unless something specific is brought up. You may be right about Endgame, we should probably give further thought to that. —El Millo (talk) 03:35, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You think a problem that would require opening, loading, and reading through hundreds of advertisement-heavy entertainment sources for each of around two-dozen articles "shouldn't be hard to fix"? You're entitled to your opinion, but I disagree. I also disagree (for the reasons I explained above and another that I hadn't managed to express until just now below) that the cast lists are fine the way they are. I don't have either the time or the inclination to argue this further, which is why I asked not to be pinged back, and only saw your non-ping above because of an edit conflict with a now-abandoned addendum. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:54, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I was referring to the Pre-production section having too many quotes, where simple paraphrasing would solve the issue, I wasn't referring to the article as a whole. —El Millo (talk) 04:00, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe paraphrasing would solve the problem for that one section, and maybe it would solve it for the whole article; but "paraphrasing" in this case would involve opening hundreds of external links, locating the relevant text in the sources, verifying that it is accurately reflected, but not plagiarized, by the relevant text of our article, then repeating this whole process for the other two-dozen or so articles, which is far from "simple". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 19:17, 31 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) This just now occurred to me, but downplaying information (keeping it out of the lead and infobox entirely, and not giving it appropriate emphasis further down the article, essentially hiding it within a barely-readable block proper nouns underlined and in blue) that a film's marketers considered to constitute spoilers, for that reason, is arguably a violation of WP:SPOILER, and doing so because their names had less marquee value at the time of the film's release would arguably be worse. If someone tried to remove Anthony Daniels from the lead of Star Wars (film) or Tom Cruise from the lead of Tropic Thunder because the films' original posters didn't name them, no one would take such a ridiculous proposal seriously, and yet these films are treated as exceptions because three or four editors refuse to take seriously the idea that we shouldn't just be parroting marketing materials. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:54, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If you find that proposal so ridiculous, then suggest a clear method to decide which actors get a bullet point (or inclusion at the infobox) and which don't. —El Millo (talk) 04:00, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Actors/characters whose presence in the film merits more than two sentences of descriptive text get their own bullet points. Any bullet point that consists of nothing more than the name of the actor, the name of the character, and an unsourced character description should ... well, the current "sea of links" below the bullet points, with little or no prose explanation for those readers who don't already know who all the actors and characters are, is also a problem.

I'm pretty sure I have already presented this proposal (or a variant thereof) several times; it is not your responsibility to know that, but it is inappropriate for you to specifically request that I make a comment that is off-topic for this discussion after I have already told you that I don't even want to engage in on-topic discussion of this matter. The fact that the problem exists is enough of a reason to oppose the present proposal; possible ways to fix the problem are not going to reach a conclusion in an FTC discussion, so why you are requesting them is baffling.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 19:17, 31 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I just wanted to know if you'd already thought of a better method to either replace or improve the current one that's being used. The two-sentence rule makes sense to either give a bullet point to a character that isn't in the billing block or take the bullet point out if they are. It might be off-topic but I still thought it was important to hear what possible solution you might've thought of. —El Millo (talk) 19:31, 31 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I reluctantly oppose even with the articles being promoted. As mentioned before, this is an ongoing topic that isn't complete when there are more films to come at some point (even if the next installment won't be distributed anytime soon). I agree with the suggestion of splitting into phases as those are finished, and giving each phase its own separate nomination to avoid repeating the process of demoting the topic with one or more films lacking featured/good status. No objections to having each MCU phase article also be part of an overarching topic and also nominating that for FT/GT at some point. That'll save people trouble in the long run. SNUGGUMS (talk / edits) 19:02, 1 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Closed with consensus not to promote - GamerPro64 00:42, 6 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]