Talk:A Terrible Vengeance

Tag-stacking
When I came to this article, it had 6 or 7 tags, which I see as excessive. It's flawed, but having too many tags tends to discourage fixes by overwhelming potential editors. The basic issue is that the article is a mere plot summary, so I left that tag up. The article does need context, but that's clearly implied by the "plot" tag, so there's no need to duplicate. As for notability, it's a major story by a major historical writer. Merely mentioning that it's a Gogol story is an establishment of notability, much as mentioning that a play was written by Shakespeare precludes any further need for notability-puffery. Mr. IP (talk) 04:26, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I have reduced the number of templates down to just one. Note that your opinion about notability is insufficient evidence: reliable secondary sources are need to confirm your assertion. In Wikipedia, notability is not inherited, not even from the most famous authors. There should be lots of reliable secondary sources about this story that can be cited, so leave the cleanup template until these are added. --Gavin Collins (talk) 15:50, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

This definitely needs the plot summary weeded, but I'm not sure where to start. SarahTheEntwife (talk) 00:48, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Synopsis
I restored the more complete (and likely over-long) synopsis that was trimmed by Special:Contributions/2600:1006:B02F:EE16:126:ED33:D5BE:3273 in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Terrible_Vengeance&oldid=652929583. The synopsis was indeed too long (and is again too long), but that trimming simply cut out portions without joining the remainder into a consistent whole, and it lost central moments, such as the moment at the end of the piece where the very land rises up against the sorcerer. We are better off with too much synopsis than with aggressive trimming that leaves an incoherent rump of a synopsis. I would like to take another crack at tightening the synopsis, but I'll have to re-read the piece first to do it well enough. Avram (talk) 06:50, 26 May 2015 (UTC)