Remakes with different titles:

I've been noticing that we don't have a consistent procedure for a remake of a work that has a different title from the original. I don't know if it needs to be set in stone, but a "how-to" page with guidelines might be in order.

For example: The Shop Around the Corner and You've Got Mail each have separate pages. Both are adapted from a Hungarian play called Parfumerie, which does not have a page. The page for The Shop Around the Corner also mentions the two musical remakes, In the Good Old Summertime and She Loves Me, neither of which have their own pages.

If I wanted to add tropes for the missing versions of the story, would they get their own pages? We could easily end up with five different pages with largely overlapping tropes, since the basic storyline is the same in each. On the other hand, if we tried to group them all one one page (maybe in different folders), we'd be uniting five different versions set in different countries and time periods, so there would be a lot of divergence as well. And if we did put them all on one page, the logical place would be under Parfumerie, the original version of the story that spawned all the others—but that's probably the least well-known work in English-speaking countries.

On the other hand, Lady for a Day was remade as Pocketful of Miracles, and both of those movies are indexed on the Lady for a Day page. The same basic story was also remade with several twists as Jackie Chan's Miracles and again as the Bollywood movie Singh is Kinng (neither of which have pages). All of them are based on the story "Madam La Gimp" by Damon Runyon.

So, how many pages should there be for situations like this? Suggestions?

edited 20th May '15 11:26:04 AM by jayoungr

Opened and moved to the right forum.

Thanks, wasn't sure where to put this question (I hesitated between several different forums).

Ideally, each gets its own page. The cases where they are merged are largely due to editors finding it easier to just tack stuff onto an existing page, saving themselves the trouble of writing a new description, indexing, and all the other little things that go along with making a new page.

My suggestion, if you feel like fixing this, is to start a page of the original work (properly namespaced) and create folders for the works that don't have a page yet.

Then Cross Wick every remake to the original. If the page hasn't been made yet, the Cross Wick should be a redirect (so if someone did a search for the right page, they'd find the work at least).

At this point, it might be easier to give each work its own page. The ones that are closest to the original already have their own pages, and it seems a little funny to give the very close adaptation its own page while the one that's set in a different time period and has extra subplots goes with the original. I guess trope overlap isn't necessarily a bad thing.