Talk:Book:The Colour of Magic

Seeing the list of books mentioned here, I'm going to suggest another thing from the German Wiki: A namespace for books. i.e. Book:The Colour of Magic So you can still make a page telling you that The Colour of Magic is octarine or Mort is the name of Death's... --Death 09:50, 5 Aug 2005 (CEST)

I think the only exception is Mort, who is both a Character and a Book. It's not as if words are automatically linked just because there's a page with that title, so that doesn't really pose a problem.

Well, that's not the main reason for an own namespace, just an additional pro. I'd also suggest Game:. --Death 17:06, 5 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Other examples are Pyramids, Eric, Moving Pictures, Sourcery, Small Gods, Hogfather, The Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Monstrous Regiment and the Book:Thud and the Game:Thud --Death 10:00, 8 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Well, it sounds a bit like missuse of namespaces to me but maybe I'm just too used to the system of Wikipedia where the entire encycolpedia is in one namespace. Jeltz 12:22, 8 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Okay, I've added a Book: namespace and Game: namespace, with Book_Discussion and Talk_Discussion. --Sanity 13:33, 8 Aug 2005 (CEST)

That means moving all the pages and changing all the links, doesn't it? --Death 12:23, 9 Aug 2005 (CEST)

While talking about books: A template for things that should be mentionend when describing a book might be usefull. They could be used to create a new book page by writing {{subst:book}} and saving the page. That would give you an empty layout where you just have to fill in the details and book pages would look similar. (I better move this to somewhere else) --Death 17:12, 5 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Good idea about a template, although I have no idea how to make one. But, so, what are we going to include in an article for book? How about

• Blurb
• Major characters
• Minor/Supporting characters (whichever term you like better)
• Notable mentions (ex. "Stoneface" Vimes)
• a spoiler warning
• Plot summary: starting with which characters at what location, and how the story went on, whom the characters meet, where they go next, how the story concludes....
• Cover (for the UK 1st ed.s it's worth the description)
• Other stuff / copyright info / collaborators ex. Josh Kirby for Eric, Paul Kidby for The Last Hero, etc.
• category, that is, what series

--Vsl 03:29, 10 December 2005 (CET)

That list should cover most things. The only additional things that come to my mind are

• List of locations
• Book interpretation: not a plot summary, but an interpretation of the plot; the meaning of things seen from different perspectives
• links to other related books or media such as films, interviews, theater productions or discussion threads on AFP

BTW, now that the most obvious articles are almost covered it might be a good time to start thinking about quality. I think the "article of the week"-concept from Wikipedia is great. Link to one article on the main page and ask everybody to contribute to it. --Jogibaer 17:22, 11 December 2005 (CET)

Sounds like a good idea to me too. Are we going to nominate for the Article of the Week or just pick one at random? --Sanity 17:58, 11 December 2005 (CET)

I am not sure what is meant by book interpretation, and how far and how deeply we're going to interpret things. I feel there is some risk that there will be controversial opinions posted in the interpretation, controversial not only in the sense of, to take a random example, "is communism a good thing?", but in the sense of, say, "did Terry really mean to refer to communism when Nanny said 'it's easy to hold things in common when we have nothing' (or similar) in Maskerade ?" Also we may be copied wholesale by kids writing literature-analysis homeworks, and that's not a very good thing. --Vsl 20:03, 11 December 2005 (CET)

I see your point. Especially books like Small Goods or Interesting Times can lead to some controversial discussions. However, I have seen really good articles written by fans about the books. Some things I read on AFP have given me great insight into the books I did not have before. If someone wants to find this kind of information shouldn't this wiki be the place to look? Actually, in some articles you can already find some things going into that direction: Twoflower, Rincewind. Ok, those are no book discussions, but the articles include more than just facts. All in all I can see arguments for both sides. We will have to decide which way we want to go. But of course, almost every decision can be changed, if the need arises. ;-) On the other hand, maybe we should postpone the discussion until the first book interpretation is really posted. --Jogibaer 22:06, 11 December 2005 (CET)

Yeah, we'll see what a book interpretation brings. I agree that book discussions offer good insights. On the trends so far, new users seem to register to write new articles, and old users haven't written many book interpretations, so we'll probably be waiting for quite a while... but it's good to keep the place open.

I just don't like the thought of kids copying and pasting a whole paragraph into their essays. That will sort of diminish the education that could potentially be got out of looking up articles in online communities. But I suppose that'll be a choice to be made by those kids. --Vsl 23:06, 11 December 2005 (CET)

As for the article of the week concept, it's a good idea. I think for now we can pick one at random because even the long articles still have important aspects that are not covered (ex. the article on Vimes has a lot about his personality but not his method of working or his actual political power in Ankh-Morpork; the state of the article on Angua is about the reverse). We can also make a list of things that are specifically requested, for example, a photograph of a UK jelly-baby sweet. By the way, should we make a format for character pages like we want to have a format for book pages? A format layout is a good invitation for people to fill in information in different sections. --Vsl 17:39, 12 December 2005 (CET)

Filing (lack of)

Gods, what a mess this is! Don't they teach the alphabet in school any more? Knmatt? --Old Dickens 18:55, 10 October 2009 (UTC)