Category talk:Multiple Works Need Separate Pages

Given the recent thing about splitting the Overwatch supplement works into 52 pages, many for works under 5 minutes long, I figure I'd start a topic here. It seems really inefficient and inelegant to split things like short story collections or other anthology material released on the same banner. This kind of collection will naturally and purposefully have many recurring themes, characters, plots, and other elements that would lead to a lot of duplication.

I propose an amendment something like the following (exact text still adjustable)

"Works released as a collection (such as a book of short stories), serial publications, or works otherwise released under a single banner and meant to be consumed together may share a single page. Religion and Mythology (Classical Mythology) may also have a single page. Individual works within these (The Iliad) may have separate pages if a page creator is willing and able to make a full page for them on their own."

Some other examples of how silly this policy can get un-amended: Trying to split something like The Elder Scrolls: In-Universe Books would be crazy. Especially since multiple books have extremely vague names ("Thief", "Trap", "Bone"), or are deliberately meant to play off each other. The longest (by a significant margin) is the The 36 Lessons of Vivec at only 16,000 something words, while most are closer to ~1100.

There's at least twenty separate versions of King Arthur by separate authors and that's only counting the ones we can put an individual's name on the creation of. These have some seriously unreconcilable differences between authors (even the ones hired to complete another's work!). While Libeaus Desconus and Le Morte d'Arthur could be given their own page, trying to demand separation of Chestre and Malory is futile.

In-fact, the same can be said for a lot of comic books. Anyone who has read both will say "Stan Lee's X-Men" and "Chris Claremont's X-Men" are totally different things that just happen to share a (loose) canon and some characters (many of whom changed radically under Claremont).

In my defence, that page of 52 titles had no indication whatsoever that they were collected into larger works for publication. For all I knew, they could have been 52 separate Russian-novel-length works.

(No, I don't have time to go look for myself. There are less than a handful of mods looking after the entire wiki. If I went and looked for myself, I'd be doing nothing else, including working and eating and sleeping, and I still wouldn't have time to see them all.)

And this is a prime example of why we discourage list pages on All The Tropes. How is somebody supposed to know the difference between over four dozen titles found in a handful of collections and over four dozen long works, unless we tell them on the page?

I think this may be better discussed on a case-to-case basis. By example this Elder Scrolls example, I would never approve of a separate page be given to these books if its proposal was brought to me today. We apparently inherited it from Tv Tropes, where the MWNSP pages' rules doesn't exist.

I think your King Arthur example actually fires back at you: those are definitely not the same work and need to be split. Things written centuries past the initial legend are basically fanfiction, and we give fanfiction separate pages from the initial work.

Claremont's X-Men and Stan Lee's X-Men is not very different of soap operas which go over decades: cast and writers change but it follows a single timeline.

...doesn't the rule apply more to multiple works of the same name, rather than supplementary material?

In any case, the Overwatch scenario is already being discussed, and the comics and trailers at minimum are all published together, which means we can probably group the other supplementary material similarly - that reduces the number of resulting pages and imo all but solves the problem.

In general we don't want multiple works wedged into one page, even if they are from the same franchise. (Anthologies, which some of the works being discussed here seem to be, are a borderline case -- if they were packaged and presented to the reader/viewer as a single unit, we generally approach them the same way, though.) However, bundling multiple works into a single page just because they're all related -- such as the Brady Bunch Spin-Offs page -- ultimately shortchanges the works. They get insufficient attention and analysis, and one gets the feeling that the idea is less to explore them than to simply catalogue their existence. And we're not about cataloguing things. We're about analyzing how they work.

And we're not about cataloguing things. We're about analyzing how they work.

Which is what lets us use the s30 "Fair Dealing" exception in UK copyright law, and use a limited set of copyrighted works to illustrate our pages here.

If we move toward simply cataloguing things, we lose the Fair Dealing exception.

Point being, we want to handle this scenario in a way that's most conducive to analysis, so it's worth viewing it through that lens. I think if we group an anthology of related works or the like together, we should emphasize that relation as well their stand-alone traits in our analysis - simultaneously covering the common themes of the grouped works and the individual themes of each one. Seems doable to me on paper, anyway.