Italicizing work series and "unofficial" titles

For Looney/Melodies specifically, those are anthologies; compilations of short works, which falls under "Any work of standard/long length". Each Short Film is released as a portion of the same cartoon series. Classic Disney Shorts, in contrast, I'd call "an organization of multiple storyarcs without a central theme". The page is compiled based on the works possessing similar elements, but it is not presented as a single work or a single storyarc.

Most fanfics are short, but anything over X chapters (how many X is enough?) we can call a long work. If you don't know the length of the work, default to italics. If you know the fic is short, use quotes. Most of the fics I prefer are either ongoing or possess over fifty chapters, so it is possible for one to qualify as a "long work".

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

@crazysamaritan:

I was not referring to e.g. sinkholing Hermionie to Harry Potter, I was referring to the quite frequent use of italicizing Character Titles when referring to the character and not the work; like "Secret Wars features Spider-Man as a major character." In that context we're not talking about Spider-Man (the comic), we're talking about Spider-Man (the character). The Comic Book/ namespace page is being used as a character page in that context, so it shouldn't be italicized.

If the rule becomes to italicize Franchise and unofficial titles, the same could be said for the difference between Harry Potter (book) and Harry Potter (character). Like...IDK if he's come up in any media outside the series but for hypothetical example: "Epic Movie features a Cameo by Harry Potter" vs " Epic Movie features a Cameo by Harry Potter."

Harry Potter is a book, Harry Potter is a character.

edited 29th Jan '16 11:05:15 PM by randomsurfer

"Epic Movie features a Cameo of Harry Potter from Harry Potter."

Scientia et Libertas | Per Aspera ad Astra Nova

I sort of regret adding that paragraph re HP. It happens a lot more to eponymous comics; also the occasional TV entry. Not so much in the Literature/ namespace.

—>"For Looney/Melodies specifically, those are anthologies; compilations of short works, which falls under "Any work of standard/long length". Each Short Film is released as a portion of the same cartoon series. Classic Disney Shorts, in contrast, I'd call "an organization of multiple storyarcs without a central theme". The page is compiled based on the works possessing similar elements, but it is not presented as a single work or a single storyarc."

Okay, I thought I understood the distinction you were making, but here I think I've lost it again. What is the difference between Classic Disney Shorts and Merrie Melodies? Unless I'm remembering totally wrong, they were pretty comparable in structure: animated short films that featured several recurring characters but had no plot connections, that were originally released individually and only later collected into anthologies.

As ~SamCurt showed, the example violates "State the source". The work page should never be used as the character's name. It should be written as "Secret Wars features Spider-Man, from Spider-Man, as a major character."

"originally released individually and only later collected into anthologies"

That's the part that's wrong. As I understand it, each Short Film was released as a portion of the Merrie Melodies or Looney Tunes series (Read about Melodies here). Classic Disney Shorts, in contrast, is a name given to the collection of shorts, and not even the name of the after-the-fact anthology. The collective name of the multiple anthologies is Walt Disney Treasures. Thus, Classic Disney Shorts isn't presented as a cohesive whole, but as works possessing similar elements.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Personally I think the system should just automatically italics all non-trope pages. Some work pages already do this like World Of Warcraft, which it just does it, I didn't do anything but type it.

Wait, you can add italics to a custom title? Really?

World of Warcraft

World Of Warcraft

Or in other words, he added the italics marks without thinking, and then thought he didn't. Whoops!

edited 30th Jan '16 5:37:06 PM by TotemicHero

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

@crazysamaritan: I posit if not aver that most single-character-named Comic Book/ namespace pages are written about characters, even if they also appear in a Character Title.

To take ComicBook.Spider Man as a Trope Overdosed but otherwise representative example, there is one relatively short run comic with the name Spider-Man, lasting only 8 years from 1990-1998. Spider-Man's primary book is The Amazing Spider-Man, running more or less continuously since 1963, yet we have no page on that book. (The blue link is because of the film of the same name.) Should we trope each comic book that Spidey appears in separately? i.e., The Amazing Spider-Man, The Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Giant Sized Spider Man, The Sensational Spider Man, Avenging Spider-Man, etc. etc. etc.? That's not what we currently do. We trope all Spider-Man's works, and often we also trope his appearances in books outside of those named ...Spider-Man..., on the ComicBook.Spider Man page.

EDIT: Further, the ComicBook.Spider Man page starts "One of Marvel's most popular superheroes, Spider-Man is a comic book character created by Stan Lee..." so it says itself that it's about the character and not the book.

EDIT #2: OK, it appears that we trope the character Spider-Man on the Franchise.Spider Man page, while ComicBook.Spider Man is something of an index of well-known story arcs that Spidey has appeared in. Still, the Franchise/ page starts with a similar line "Spider-Man is a Marvel Comics superhero created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962." A character, not a work.

edited 30th Jan '16 11:32:07 PM by randomsurfer

It's a franchise centering on that character, not the character himself. It's not Characters.Spider Man The Character.

Scientia et Libertas | Per Aspera ad Astra Nova

Type W o W without spaces and you get World Of Warcraft

The namespace for troping characters is the Characters/ Name Space. Franchise/, Comicbook/, Film/, and the rest are pages for works. Characters are a part of most works, but even if the work would possess a Character Title, the rule is that those pages are for the work in general, not a specific character. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is case-in-point.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Another ambiguous case that just occurred to me: what about Franco-Belgian Comics?

They usually have a main name for the series, but are composed of many "albums" which are standalone works. Does an album count as a short work (quotes) or a long one (italics)?

It really depends on how long these albums are. Are they similar to an issue of a comic book, which is a short work that gets quotes, or are they more like a trade paperback, which is longer? And do the comic strips within them also have titles?

To use an analogy familiar to many tropers, The Order of the Stick is a webcomic with an ongoing storyline; it's a long work that gets italics. Each strip is a short work with a title which gets quotes. But it is also collected into trade paperbacks with their own titles (On the Origin of PCs, No Cure for the Paladin Blues, etc.), which I think would also get italics because, like anthologies, they're collections of short works.

If your long work (comic book, TBP, novel, anthology, album) has shorter subdivisions (comic strips, issues, chapters, short stories, songs), then those subdivisions get quotes, and the work as a whole gets italics.

Still up in the air is what you do with an even longer work—a series of novels, of movies, of video games, or a franchise of multiple media. This is how I should have framed the problem from the beginning.

EDIT: typo

edited 2nd Feb '16 6:00:24 PM by HeraldAlberich

Aren't there existing style guides for this sort of thing?

Also, I'm pretty sure quite certain that any Album, which is a collection of "Songs", goes in italics.

edited 2nd Feb '16 9:22:57 AM by MrLavisherMoot

simple as

Yes, but as detailed in the first post, the problem is that they don't agree. We need a rule that makes sense for the wiki's purpose which can be applied consistently. And albums (edit: of songs) are not under discussion, really; no one disagrees about their formatting.

Edit: Wait, I see; we're talking about "albums" of Franco-Belgian Comics, not albums of songs. I used "album" in both senses in my previous post; sorry if I was unclear.

edited 2nd Feb '16 10:32:05 AM by HeraldAlberich

Also, since it was talked about over the last couple of pages, personally I'd format it as Star Wars Expanded Universe (franchise title in italics; everything else in plain text).

Or just Star Wars expanded universe (title case only applying to the franchise title; everything else in sentence case).

edited 2nd Feb '16 3:10:56 PM by MrLavisherMoot

simple as

Unfortunately, Franchise.Star Wars Expanded Universe and Franchise.Star Wars Legends have pages of their own, and links can't have partial emphasis; it's all or nothing. The only solution would be to pothole two separate links to the same page (i.e. Star Wars Expanded Universe) every single time one wanted to link to those pages, which is far too cumbersome.

...ah. Kind of overlooked that.

My avatar seems appropriate. :P

edited 2nd Feb '16 4:32:37 PM by MrLavisherMoot

simple as

@Sam Curt:

Wick Check:

• Franchise.Spider Man [1]: 5284 including redirects
• ComicBook.Spider Man [2]: 2083 including redirect
• Characters.Spider Man The Character [3]: 3, all of which are indices

Obviously people are troping the character Spider-Man as either Comic Book/ or Franchise/.

edited 4th Feb '16 7:47:18 PM by randomsurfer

Character pages generally aren't supposed to be wicked (indexed, but not wicked), Work pages are. So the numbers look correct.

Past that, we told you it violates State the Source, not that it doesn't happen.

---

For Franco-Belgian Comics, it looks like each album is short. Given that each is under 60 pages, it is shorter than a novella, which can go in "short" or long pretty much arbitrarily.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Wick checks don't show what's troped. They show what's linked.

Check out my fanfiction!

With all the recent activity in the subforum, maybe some more tropers would like to weigh in.

To recap, a short work (a short story, a TV episode, a song) is emphasized with "double quotes", and a long work (a novel, a film, a TV series, a video game) with italics. A collection of short works (an anthology of stories, an album of songs) is also emphasized with italics.

For the purposes of our media-focused wiki, how should we emphasize collections of long works, such as book, film, and video game series, or multimedia franchises? Existing style guides disagree on this point. Do we pick one and follow it, or do we come up with our own rules, such as those proposed in Post #20?

Does the discussion so far make sense to everyone, or is there more to add?

A work is a work, everything in the work's namespace should be italicized with no exceptions.

The wiki can be set up to auto italics it which was a thing on the Wo W page before someone cut it, I now really really regret saying something about that btw . It should be a blanket always happens thing and get rid of the unnecessary markup.

edited 13th Feb '16 9:33:20 AM by Memers