Acceptable length of page quotes?

When looking at pages like Illegal Gambling Den, Bleak Border Base or Suits: Absolute Power I wonder who is actually reading that Wall of Text of a page quote? Does "clear, concise, witty" also apply here? Is the purpose of a page quote more than to prime the reader with a snappy dialog/monologue sample? Is the length of Evilutionary Biologist or Mistaken for Servant justifiable to that end? Where to draw the line between reasonable and unreasonable length?

Edited by eroock on May 20th 2023 at 8:25:00 PM

Surprising we don't have a page on what makes a good quote. Then again, we have a whole forum dedicated to picking good images while quotes only have a thread.

I'd be down with codifying a better page quote policy. The way I see it, quotes break down along a couple of lines.

First, you have work page quotes versus trope page quotes. A work page quote just has to showcase one or more key elements of the work's premise. A trope page quote, on the other hand, has to provide a clear example of the trope. In practice, this should mean that typically work page quotes are shorter than trope page quotes.

Second, you have the quote's format, and there are two main formats used on our site. You have direct quotes, where some of the narration or a single character's dialogue get quoted sentence by sentence. You also have script quotes, which uses script format to show multiple characters talking to each other. (To illustrate using some pages linked in the OP, Illegal Gambling Den has a direct quote, and Bleak Border Base has a script quote.) Any quote length guidelines ^note These are probably going to be relative to the description length, as the difference between the site on mobile versus desktop restricts our ability to put hard numerical limits. we implement are going to have to differ a bit depending on which format the quote is in.

Any formal quote policy we make is going to largely center around these two aspects of page quotes and how they feed into each other.

Edited by TotemicHero on May 20th 2023 at 12:07:14 PM

Text-Formatting Rules (for how to quote 'narration' vs 'dialogue', ) and What to Put at the Top of a Page are the closest we've got to formal quote policy, I think.

Broadly, I think a work page can afford to have an expository monologue or something, but a trope page quote should be able to clue the reader in on the point of the trope in only a few lines (even if the trope is about a monologue).

Edited by Synchronicity on May 20th 2023 at 12:06:43 PM