Talk:Generations (review)

Review Protocol Suggestions

Okay, so we currently have three reviews of TGC episodes. If we want to keep them around (and I have no problem with that, I suggest with adopt some guidelines for how reviews should work:

1. Anyone who wished to may write a review, commentary, or ramble for any Gargoyles story (TV series, TGC, Marvel comics, Disney Adventures comics, SLG comic, whatever) excluding fanfiction, which is not covered on this site. Since this is a wiki, I think we should give everyone a shot at voicing their opinions, even if it means we end up with 79 reviews of "Future Tense."

2. We can either have a single review page for every story and each person's review would be a different section (this could potentially get very long), or create a separate page for each person's review with the title format "The Mirror (Demonskrye's Review)" and link to all of them from the story's main page.

Aside from that, we can make any other rules we think are necessary, such as no references to fanfiction, no direct putdowns of the creators, and so on. And we should probably make a "Reviews and Commentaries" category if we decide to go ahead with this.

Thoughts? -- Demonskrye 10:37, 14 May 2008 (CDT)

Good points all, but I don't think we should necessarily dictate absolutely everything. For example, I wouldn't want separate pages for each person's review if half of them were only a single paragraph long. We could say that reviews can go in a single page, but split off exceptionally long reviews and link to them. Some (e.g. Todd Jensen's, as now) could even go in the main article for the episode. I don't know. Just my thoughts. -- Supermorff 13:40, 14 May 2008 (CDT)

That's a good idea, I think, for anyone who wants to write reviews. But what about summaries? Most of the episodes on here don't have one.--PGFish 20:47, 14 May 2008 (CDT)

Well summaries should definitely go on the main page of the episode, and there should only be one of them. So if you feel like adding a summary, or a piece of a summary even, then other people will add and edit later on. Business as usual, really. -- Supermorff 06:23, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

It's certainly something we should continue to tackle, but I think review are going to be much easier for people to write than summaries. I did summaries for all three episodes in the Season One "Trio Triptych" and it took quite a while. "Deadly Force" was an especially big undertaking. I think we should have a discussion about what we want the story summaries to look like. The reason the ones I wrote took so long is because they're very detailed; I would watch a little of the episode, write a sentence or two, sometime rewind the section I'd just watched to recheck something, and try to document the whole episode. It gives the reader a pretty clear picture of what happens in the episode, but it takes a really long time and makes for a long read too. We could certainly do shorter summaries, just a paragraph or two outlining the major events of the story. It would be faster to write and quicker to read, but not as thorough. It would also probably mean deleting the summaries I already wrote, but that's OK with me. I think we do need to make some kind of decision on a format for summaries, since we don't want long, detailed summaries for some articles and short, major points ones on others. -- Demonskrye 06:40, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

I don't see why we couldn't have both on all pages - a short summary for users who just want to find out what the episode was about, and longer summaries for people trying to find specific things. This is a long-term plan, of course, because as you said it takes ages to write the long ones (did I ever thank you for that, by the way? If not, thanks), but in the end I think it'll probably be worth it. I know I've used the ones you already wrote to find specific things that happened in the episode. Anyway, what do other people think? -- Supermorff 10:38, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

I took a stab at this on The Thrill of the Hunt making the "Summary" section a short write-up of the episode and putting the longer one into "The Story" (either heading being subject for change). I included a few subsections in "Summary": "Main Plot" for the major thread of the episode, "Subplots" for anything not directly related to the main story but still important, and "First Appearances" to list any major characters, locales or objects that appear for the first time here. I don't really like the main plot summary I wrote and the formatting for the First Appearances section needs work, but it's a suggestion for how this could work. Thoughts and opinions welcome. -- Demonskrye 14:18, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

Looks fine, although sometimes subplots are hard to distinguish. It might be just as good having all plots and subplots under the same heading, separated where necessary by paragraphs. But, no, it looks good. "First appearances" could just as easily go under "Continuity" as "Summary". -- Supermorff 14:52, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

I like it a lot. And I think the "first appearances" section is a good idea too on its own. I'm willing to write a few long summaries-but not all of them. There's some really good one already at the GFW. Could we implement those somehow?--PGFish 17:01, 15 May 2008 (CDT)