Forum:Novel articles

Forums: Village pump → Novel articles
(This topic is archived. Please do not edit this page!)

TL;DR: This isn't good enough, and we should probably adjust policy/guidelines to fix it.

Because it's easier to have an example, consider War Crimes:

• The {{novel}} banner at the top of the article is stating the bloody obvious. It should go away.
• The opening paragraphs are okay, covering the novel/author/basic setting. Things could be better:
  • The "The trial is presided over..." sentence, complete with a reference, probably made more sense in an earlier draft. Now, the reference is redundant (as the novel itself can be used as a source of that claim), and the the sentence flows rather oddly into the second paragraph of the lead-in.
  • The second paragraph adds some more minor details about the plot (while teasing the existence of things the article doesn't discuss at all), and then moves on to list the major characters. The last sentence is just puzzling.
• Description is copied, verbatim and unreferenced, from some official description of the novel somewhere. This should never happen; we should not just republish Blizzard's/publishers' descriptions of books (or, for that matter, game features).
  • Similarly, we should not republish previews, excerpts, teasers, or "summaries"; adding an external link is sufficient.
• Characters: we're now up to five columns in that table: "Major", "Supporting", "Minor", "Visions" and "Mentioned" characters.
  • My typical browser window is not wide enough to fit that comfortably; Garrosh help you if you're on a mobile device.
  • I think these lists proliferate because they're essentially collections of effortless, epeen-wagging trivia. Beyond the Major (and perhaps Supporting) characters, I simply don't see any reason to care who appeared briefly, or was mentioned in passing in the novel.
  • This also seems to be an invitation to add empty, or pointless, subsections to these characters' biographies
    • I've adjusted Project:STUB to explicitly disallow this. If you're considering adding one of these to an article, you now need to provide actual content.
• Locations is, similarly, a trivia list of limited value.

All-in-all, the useful content in that version of the article is limited to a basic-facts introduction and a list of major characters.

How would a good Novel article actually look like?

• The article should have a lead-in paragraph covering the basic details: novel, author, basic setting, its role in the overall story progression. We seem to mostly have this down, with various degrees of success in transitioning from a pre-release to a post-release lead-in -- some of the articles linked above transition between future and present tense somewhat arbitrarily.
• Maybe an infobox. I'm not sure if it's relevant for us to list US/EU/UK prices.
• A Plot section that describes what actually happens in the novel, major subplots and all. Spoilers are okay.
• External links: previews, reviews, interviews, etc.

This replaces the existing Description/Characters/Locations with a single section that's should cover the relevant content of all three of these in readable prose. In some cases, such sections already exist.

To summarize:

• Project:STUB was changed to disallow adding sections containing stub tags and no actual content.
• Characters/Locations sections in novel articles should be replaced with a single Plot section covering the events of the novel. Relevant characters and locations will appear naturally within that plot description.
  • In articles where such a Plot section already exists, I suggest we just axe the characters/locations outright.
  • If no Plot section exists yet, we should limit the Characters listing to Major/Supporting only.
  • In the future, we should avoid creating the Characters/Locations sections in the first place.

In general, we might want to adjust Project:MOS to emphasize that we: (a) do not want to republish content from external sources (b) do not want to create lists of trivia, such as the lists of characters or locations in novels.

Thoughts? — foxlit (talk) 23:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

I agree with every point you've made. Especially the WP:STUB change. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 23:04, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

I will say, though, on further reflection, that the list of minor characters (not the Mentioned list; I've long maintained that that should die in a fire) is helpful for creating pages from red links (generally for characters who have brief appearances in those novels and then never show up again). -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 23:12, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

The value there seems to be in seeing which characters are already on the list (as the effort in adding a name and creating a single-sentence stub article seems approximately equal); perhaps we could use categories for that purpose instead. — foxlit (talk) 23:41, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Agreed!--LemonBaby (talk) 05:15, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

I agree with these changes, but a small section for major characters won't do any harm. --DoomeЯ TC 13:31, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

That's how it starts! First, we need a small section for Major characters; then, we'll add some minor characters (because unlike Majors, we probably wouldn't mention them otherwise?); split Major into actual Major and Supporting (because back when this was "Major", we might've listed a few too many names under that header!); and hey, let's not forget everyone who was mentioned (bonus points for characters depicted on stained glass windows).

More seriously, I simply don't see the benefit of including a separate list of major characters, considering all of them should already appear in the plot summary. — foxlit (talk) 08:13, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, the benefit would be for the people who do not want the novel to be spoiled for them but still want to see which characters feature in the novel. I guess we can have a small summary which tries to mention the major characters and events of the novel before we go into a detailed plot section. --DoomeЯ TC 17:46, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Wouldn't a list of major characters be, in and of itself, a spoiler? -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 17:57, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Not really. For example, just because you know a film features the Avengers (all of the major characters), in no way does it mean the film is spoiled, as you don't know the story. --DoomeЯ TC 18:02, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Personally, if I didn't want to be spoiled, I wouldn't open the article at all. Plus, let's list off some major characters whose appearance in the books would definitely qualify as spoilers: Benedictus in Twilight of the Aspects. Deathwing in Day of the Dragon. Xavius in Stormrage. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 18:17, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Prior discussions of changes to the Lore policy suggest that we don't actually care about people who want to avoid spoilers. — foxlit (talk) 18:18, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Ah, my bad. You can forget everything I said. --DoomeЯ TC 18:48, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

I totally agree with the removal of 'mentioned' characters, and probably also minor characters. Regarding major characters, I'm not sure it's definitely the right decision to remove them. It's handy to be able to scan the character list, and while in theory every single major character would be mentioned somewhere in the description, this is definitely not going to happen every time, and requiring it could also lead to awkward sentences like "X and Y and Z were also there." and "A, B, C, D, E, F and G discover that…" rather than speaking more generically or functionally. This could lead to a less readable text, and would lead to a far less convenient listing of characters. It might be worth mentioning that Wikipedia provides character lists for its novels, whether it's Of Mice and Men or The Golden Compass.

It wouldn't be too hard to say "only list major characters in character sections", to stop things spiralling out of control. We could specify degree of involvement to say where to draw the line. -- Taohinton (talk) 14:06, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia's approach to novel articles is different from ours by necessity: the novels they have to cover are set in different universes, with different, and often original, characters. There are generally no per-character articles on wikipedia, so for smaller novels, the novel article itself (or the List of X characters article) serves as a collection of mini character pages (for what it's worth, sequels like The Subtle Knife seem to have no character sections; and seem closer to warcraft novels conceptually). Notably, there's also actual, readable prose in Wikipedia's character listings, unlike our current collection of bare links.

While badly-written attempts to shoehorn characters into the plot description seem possible, I'm not sure if it's going to be an actual problem. It seems to me that there should be a natural way of including major characters into the plot description, and any "X was also there" clauses should just be edited out as bad writing.

In general, I think that avoiding a (limited) list of characters neatly sidesteps having to draw lines between major/supporting/minor characters in the first place: if a character is naturally mentioned in the plot summary, great; if they aren't, I'm not sure we lost anything of value. — foxlit (talk) 21:12, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Somewhat tangentially, I think it would also be a good idea to note in the MOS that, in character pages, you shouldn't create a new section for every book/short story/expansion that character has been in unless they have a major presence in each. This is a perfect example of what not to do: there are four sections that consist entirely of a single sentence. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 21:48, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

I agree, and would perhaps go a little further, noting that source-based sections are generally detrimental to character biographies, and should probably be avoided entirely unless there's a specific need to identify particular sources (i.e. conflicting accounts of some event). Character biographies should essentially be coherent retellings of the character's story so far, rather than a list of appearances in various media; using per-source sections seems to encourage people to create sections with content that would otherwise be too insignificant to be included in the biography. — foxlit (talk) 11:10, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Initially open-minded about novel section-stubbing, I now agree that it is definitely not good, and should be stopped and/or reverted. If editors were consistently going round filling in those stubs, I think they might be fine (if the content itself was not ridiculously minor), but the reality seems to be that they become permanent fixtures, with almost no-one even trying to flesh them out, apparently including the editors who put them there. I'd therefore agree with removing them.

*deletes far longer write up of pros and cons of section headings* Short version: Regarding the removal of source section headings, I can see the argument for their removal improving flow, although I also find their presence in larger articles to be quite effective. They definitely have their down-sides though. If we remove them, I would suggest that we should add references for each paragraph (or sentence, as appropriate) to source the content. This need only be "War Crimes" or "Patch 5.4.0", but would allow readers to see what type of content it is (novel, comic, game) and which instance/its date/its author. It's nice to be able to know whether something took place in a WCIII mission or was dreamed up by a third-party novelist, and refs also facilitate further reading and exploration, and would solve the current problem of lack of links to related pages (due to non-linked section headings). Without this, source will be very unclear, and very tricky to ascertain, and we will have effectively deleted the references for all that content.

We'd probably also need to add some new section headings (with improvised titles) to break up the huge write-ups on the bigger pages. We'd probably also be best adding introductions such as "During the events of Shadows of the Horde…" in some places, since without headers chronology will sometimes be missing. -- Taohinton (talk) 14:06, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

"What do we replace them with?" is a really interesting question. References do seem like a possible solution, but are also a little clunky (it's unclear what to tag in a large chunk of information from the same source; and one would have to follow them to know where the information lead from).

On some level, I think our biography sections might be too long for their own good (looking at e.g. Jaina Proudmoore). At its core, the problem is that the subsections seem to attempt to retell events of every single setting the character appeared in, which really should be handled by the source material articles themselves. Having biographies focus only on significant events and developments for the character in question might also limit the number of artifical headers we'd need to introduce. Perhaps we should hold a "Rewrite Jaina's Biography" mini-contest to explore the alternatives.

[On a side note, {{novel-section}} can be already link to specific novels, this just isn't used all that often.] — foxlit (talk) 21:52, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

I agree that refs aren't a perfect solution, and something which clearly source would definitely be better. I'd be open to hearing alternate suggestions, but I'd definitely say we need something if we remove the headings. In terms of which bits to tag, I agree that's always unclear. I think tagging the first line of a section from a source would be fine; when the content starts to draw from a new source, the first line of that should be tagged in turn. I think this would work okay, although I'm sure it wouldn't get applied evenly (but then what does).

Regarding the content, while I still see some value to the idea of at least mentioning each major event in a character's story (e.g., if Jaina spent 6 months in X location doing Y, it would seem weird not to mention it somewhere, but if it didn't actually develop her character in any way, does it need mentioning?) I also definitely see the way it causes people to list each event, rather than focusing on the significance. Certain edits earlier today have reflected that tendency to tell the whole story, and not just recount the parts relevant to the character. On the other hand we have one-liners about someone standing in a room during such and such an event, which are still unnecessary and don't add to the article.

On a separate point, recent edits such as this illustrate my earlier point about the need to adjust the writing if we do remove the headings. Source- (or subject-) switching sections need to start with things like "Since X" or "Many years later" or "When Y". Sentences like "Though Jaina would rather come to Darnassus' meeting, [she stayed in Theramore]" provide no context whatsoever, and without the section heading above them, will be very, very confusing. This is in addition to the need for sourcing.

The reality is we will still need headings, especially on the bigger pages. I think with big sections like this, the current headings are probably perfect. Removing the {{Novel-section}}, etc, tags would change things, but there's no benefit to removing or altering the heading itself. In other places, I guess we'll need more all-encompassing headings such as "Darkspear Revolution" to cover certain time-periods. In many cases, expansion headings ("Mists of Pandaria") might actually be very appropriate for showing the era (providing very clear time-period context), but used as a rough indicator rather than a precise WoW-specific term.-- Taohinton (talk) 15:33, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Regarding the stub policy, is this change intended to apply to all use of stubs throughout the site? The discussion here suggests it's intended to counter the plague of empty novel headings, but its current phrasing also prohibits strategy stub sections on new boss pages, for example. Is this intended, or just something that hasn't been distinguished? -- Taohinton (talk) 14:06, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

I think it's okay if it applies globally. For articles missing significant sections, the stub tag at the top of the article could be used to indicate which sections are desired (e.g. {{Stub/Novel|A plot summary should be added.}}; this is desirable anyway, as it provides an easier way to tell when a stub is no longer a stub); for boss strategies, there's also {{Stub/Strategy}}. — foxlit (talk) 20:15, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

As a side note, the "source section heading" tags used to be used to point out discrepancies, and not to point out that content comes from sources (which should be obvious from properly cited things). I think that it limits the idea that multiple sources can talk about the same topic. Remember, things on Project:NEWS are bad.--SWM2448 21:36, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Manual of Style changes

I've updated the Manual of Style with some of the changes discussed in this thread. Comments are welcome; think of the linked diff as a first draft. — foxlit (talk) 23:09, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

The "Lore character articles" section is generally good, I'd say. I get that "should not be overly long" is probably intended as a general warning against rambling (which is fine), but just how long is "overly" long is obviously hugely subjective, and not a subject that's yet been discussed in any detail. -- Taohinton (talk) 15:55, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

As an example, the part of Vol'jin's bio covering the events of Shadows of the Horde should summarize what he did during the novel, and not be a play by play of the entire thing. That's usually where overly long bits originate: editors who don't know how to summarize. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 16:39, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

I can agree with that. Related point: that fuller text should probably be moved to the Shadows of the Horde page, because that page ironically features only a brief summary (actually the official preview). Unless you think that any retelling in that detail is too much, even for the novel's own page? -- Taohinton (talk) 16:46, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

I hadn't actually looked at Vol'jin's Shadows of the Horde section until now, but good lord does it make my point very well. I see no problem with moving it to the Shadows of the Horde page, even if it could still stand to be truncated later on. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 16:51, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Regarding "description" and not republishing Blizzard content, I'm not wholly in agreement. For a period following the announcement of the book and before it is released, that is pretty much the only info there is to go on. I think that putting that under "Official preview" or something is a good addition to the page, rather than having an empty article with just "is about Garrosh's trial in Pandaria for war crimes". However, these should always be quoted (in italics or such), referenced and shown to be from Blizzard.

Following release, official preview sections can be replaced by a wiki-written summary, but I'm always on the fence regarding removal. Preview flavor serves a different purpose to a dry summary text; one gives drama, mood and a brief impression, while the other provides a clinical synopsis of the specific events of the novel. Depending on the individual case, I can see the two coexisting well enough. -- Taohinton (talk) 17:01, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

The intended result is that sections like [1] [2] [3] [4] should be replaced with external links and/or original prose.

I don't think reproductions of promotional content fit well with our overall article style. These sections seem to persist way past the time when they're the only possible source of information (none of these examples are of unreleased content), and seem to displace original content rather than supplement it (e.g. Celestial Tournament, where most of the prose is borrowed from a preview blog, and no comprehensive description of the tournament exists). I think that preventing such material from being incorporated into articles concerning unreleased content will eventually lead to better articles for released content. — foxlit (talk) 22:03, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

I get the idea that if a big void is left, editors will eventually fill it in, and I absolutely agree that in most cases original prose is far superior (I often go to lengths to turn quotes into original text while still avoiding plagiarism, rather than just using the quote).

However, while the above is a nice idea, it should be noted that this is no guarantee that any such content will be added, within say a year of the release of the relevant subject, or even several years later. There are many areas of the site that have simply stayed entirely empty for years after the introduction of a feature, in spite of a complete lack of quoted text. Rated battlegrounds is one example - we don't have even basic information as to what goes on there, never mind discussion of gameplay differences. This is not due to someone having pasted in a Blizzard write-up - it's simply that no-one has ever in all these years gotten round to writing anything for that page. It's been nearly 5 years now for that page. If we had the choice of adding a brief and decent Blizzard description, would you say that would make the page worse?

If we could be certain someone would write something up, I'd agree with the point, and for thriving areas, maybe that will work. When pages go years between edits, I'm not convinced that an all but blank page is always superior to one with a short official quote.

I agree that having a quoted write-up probably deters editors from writing something themselves though. For me, the issue is a matter of trade offs though, rather than a "don't use any quotes at all" kind of situation. I'm not convinced we would have more than a couple of lines describing the Celestial Tournament otherwise, even by now, perhaps ever. Some stuff just never gets written, especially these days.

Regarding the examples, in all cases the text should be italicised or such, and described as official (one of those edits is mine, but I wasn't sure about how to quote text at the time). These examples all include summaries and excerpts, which I think is fine but should definitely be placed under separate headings. I still don't see something like the first example being a permanent problem, or that the quoted text should be removed; italicised and properly marked, yes. Excerpts are cool for those of us who don't own the books (and shouldn't deter editors from adding summaries or other content in any way).

My view on it is that these quotes can add to the page, and handled correctly needn't be a problem. They whet the appetite in a way a summary never does, and except for the Jaina example don't actually seem to have stopped editors from adding full-length summaries. I'm intentionally avoiding editing the pages while they're under discussion, but I've minorly adjusted Thrall here to show how it might look (still needs refs). -- Taohinton (talk) 17:45, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

To clarify, I am passionate about original prose, and spend a lot of my time writing exactly that; I'm just also aware of how often (and how long) it goes unwritten. -- Taohinton (talk) 18:00, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

So that's a soup of different issues:

• If Rated battlegrounds is missing significant content, it's not clear to me why it is not marked as a stub. Part of my annoyance with reproducing Blizzard's descriptions is that they tend to (badly) mask the shortcomings of the article, making it less clear which topics need more editorial attention.
  • A brief and decent Blizzard-written description would not be harmful, but most of the examples of such descriptions that come to my mind are neither brief nor decent -- their writing style is often the antithesis of what ours should be.
  • I don't particularly like the choice between having articles include some content that doesn't quite fit, or having articles with no content at all. If the tradeoff between quality and quantity is unavoidable, I'd prefer quality to quantity. In a hypothetical situation where (1) The Wowpedia article for some topic is incomplete, (2) An editor is aware of a third-party preview/description/material that would be relevant in the article, (3) The editor does not have the time or desire to adapt that material to fit the article; I would prefer that the editor (a) Inserts an external link to the external material into the article (b) Marks the article as needing attention (probably a stub?).
• Reproducing excerpts of novels just seems wrong to me, perhaps for the same reason I don't expect Wikipedia's book articles to reproduce the book's back cover, or excerpts available elsewhere on the Internet -- I don't view "[to] whet [the reader's] appetite" as the purpose of either website, so that reasoning isn't particularly compelling (and attempting to generate excitement seems contrary to NPOV). To me, including external links to such content seems sufficient: if the reader is actually interested in reading an excerpt, it would be easy to find it in the External Links section; otherwise, requiring everyone to scroll past the reproduced content (ToW) to reach actual Wowpedia-original writing seems annoying.

Having said that, I don't think that it's impossible that quoting Blizzard source material, when done properly, can improve the quality of an article; it's just that in the set of articles I'm currently thinking of, existing attempts at this do not fit well with what I think the rest of the article should be like. It's important to note that Project:MOS is a guideline, and the particular clause we're discussing includes "If possible," -- there's a fair bit of margin for individual editors to make decisions that they feel best fit a particular article. The purpose of the guideline is to specify what we should aim for, and, to me, that should include having our articles be original rather than republished content. — foxlit (talk) 22:13, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like we just have different approaches to the subject :) I get the desire to produce a full-on Wikipedia style presentation, but in some cases I feel a softer and slightly less hard-line approach is nice, and perfectly suitable. Our liberal use of images (pretty much just to give flavor and add nice 'feel' to pages, rather than for reasons of strict necessity, e.g., how many pictures of mages do we actually 'need' to explain the term?), presence of unreferenced equations and theorycrafting ('original research' - absolutely not allowed) and of course the 'silly' pages, are good examples of where we provide a service that's just not 100% encyclopedia. I write in a few mediums, and there are advantages to all types of presentation - Wikipedia-style is great for documenting and detachedly analysing, but isn't half as handy or readable as a fansite class guide, for example. I don't think it's bad if we're less than 100% hard-line; I think we have to find for ourselves just how strict we want to be. We're certainly not up there with Wikipedia though, in terms of what can and cannot feature on pages. So to me it's up to us to decide where to cut it.

Rated battlegrounds simply never got beyond a list of bullet points, but seemingly never got marked as a stub. To be fair there are many pages on this site which have been out of date (for example) for years without being tagged, so that doesn't surprise me too much. Don't misunderstand me; I'd always far rather have original writing. I've just grown more pragmatic over the years regarding the likelihood of stuff getting written. In some cases after years of being empty pages, I'd rather settle for adding something quoted than leave pages that should be full of info almost completely empty for another few years, at the least. I get how quoted content can 'mask' lack of content, but other pages have been stub-tagged and starkly lacking for years and still haven't seen any edits.

Regarding ToW, that is indeed too much official description (only one is needed), and I would suggest any excerpts go below the summary anyway, as on the TotA page (so little need for scrolling). I'd agree that it isn't our purpose to generate excitement, and I would never suggest that articles use emotive language in describing novels. I guess it's a perspective/'feeling' thing; featuring excerpts or summaries doesn't *feel* wrong to me, and as such I look purely at what it adds to the page in terms of content, and I see that being worthwhile. -- Taohinton (talk) 00:19, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

It should perhaps be mentioned that many other areas of the site quote extensively from Blizzard sources, with blocks of non-original text marked only by references, particularly on lore subjects. In many cases paragraphs or individual lines are quoted verbatim or close to it, and combined to form the body of the article. This is obviously a different example of usage, but might be worth mentioning in terms of overall policy. In these cases it can be hard to paraphrase without plagiarising, and the original text often conveys meanings and subtleties which cannot generally be re-written anyway (especially when the quote itself is intentionally elusive); but the quotes again usually fail to match the wiki's style, being often recognisable by the choice of language. -- Taohinton (talk) 01:05, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Character lore articles

In terms of what exactly is relevant detail, I think it might be worth discussing whether we're trying to tell complete stories, or simply mention the character's own 'story' and their role in events.

If someone is reading a biography and it misses critical events or the end of the bigger story (perhaps because that character wasn't involved), the overall narrative may be confusing and filled with holes - no mention of someone being dead, or how the enemy was eventually defeated, or that the person who they thought was dead actually wasn't dead at all. This detail is relevant to the story, but may or may not be significantly relevant to the character. The temptation then becomes to tell the whole story on each related character's page. This could work, but IMO only if the detail is kept to a minimum.

In theory, we shouldn't be telling the full story on any page other than the source or specific subject page. However, this presents some issues because in many cases there is no specific page, and the only way to read about those events is in the Biography section of an involved character. For example, the whole Katrana/Onyxia episode doesn't have a page of its own, and if we take all the excess detail off the Anduin and Onyxia and Varian pages, each would only hold pieces of the story. From a Wikipedia-style standpoint, this is correct, but it may inadvertently make the lore less accessible to readers - they would have to read all three pages to get the whole story. Overall, I think this is probably the right approach, but with a little room for overlap to stop things getting stripped to the bare bone.

Once Anduin is freed, we don't really need a whole paragraph telling in full detail how the Varians defeated Onyxia - at least not in terms of the biography. But do we not even mention the re-joining of the two Varians? Do we mention that Onyxia was defeated, or just leave it hanging and then jump straight into the next section? Do we wrap up the story elements, or just surgically state Anduin's involvement in events? I think one question is whether we expect the reader to know about the events already and so provide no context, or expect that they don't, and provide some context. Big events might seem obvious but stuff from books and comics definitely are not. Again, if we remove section headings we'll need to add more time-period context.

Finally, there's the question of whether we're telling a story or recounting facts. Things like "She reflected on how things had changed over the last few months." might be appropriate for telling a story and establishing mood, but are they necessary for a biography? Conversations that reveal the character's feelings on matters might be relevant, but just recounting interactions between characters probably isn't. Inconsequential events ("he thought X but then realised Y and had to settle for Z") should also be omitted. -- Taohinton (talk) 16:42, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Character biographies should essentially be a concise summary of a single story (that of the character), and not a collection of truncated summaries of each source material the character appeared in.

The appropriate place for the summary of the Varian/Onyxia story is probably the (presently non-existent) Plot section of The Comic Volume 2 (or perhaps the individual issue articles). While this will almost certainly come back to bite me, we could also create synthetic articles for summarizing specific story arcs -- we already do some variation of this in the various War/Battle/Conflict articles. — foxlit (talk) 22:27, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

I'd agree with the approach of saving the full write-up for the dedicated page, but ironically it brings the issue of section headings and content sourcing back up ;) That is, no-one's ever going to look for The Comic Volume 2 to read the full story, unless there's a fairly obvious link to that page in the relevant biographies. Without a link, cutting the content in the biographies would be understandable but would more or less just remove the story content from the site (relatively few browsers of Anduin or Jaina will spend time going through the comic pages). -- Taohinton (talk) 17:52, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

I don't think it would be hard to integrate those links into the biography text, anchoring to particular events or actions: "During the [[...|peace summit at Theramore]], ...", "When Anduin was [[...|kidnapped by Onyxia]], ...", "Chosen to play the defender at the [[...|trial of Garrosh Hellscream]], ...". — foxlit (talk) 20:33, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like a workable solution. Might need the creation of a few pages and transplanting of existing text to arrange. E.g., the The Comic Volume 2 and its sub-pages currently (ironically enough) comprise only a brief quoted official description and a list of characters and locations; all actual original description is found on the character pages. -- Taohinton (talk) 00:25, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Heh.--SWM2448 20:19, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

*facepalm* -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 21:34, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Now even I agree that it is too much :D Don't want to see Baine who got far more attention than Jaina :D --Mordecay (talk) 21:37, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Agree, that's way too much. At least we've found an extreme we can probably all agree on as a marker for how much is too much :P -- Taohinton (talk) 01:00, 18 June 2014 (UTC)