Talk:Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Screenplay

RfC
Should the Canadian Screen Award for Best Screenplay be handled as one article, or three? Bearcat (talk) 15:32, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

The core issue is that under Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television rules, separate awards for "Best Original Screenplay" and "Best Adapted Screenplay" are presented if both categories have received at least five eligible submissions in any given year — but if either category fails to reach five submissions, then those categories are collapsed and a single merged award for "Best Screenplay" is presented. This may seem like a silly rule to have, but in a country with a relatively small and underfunded film industry it is actually a real issue: since the separate "original" and "adapted" categories were first introduced in 1975 the categories have had to be collapsed 12 times, most recently in 2001. So I originally opted to combine the winners and nominees from all three categories (original, adapted and merged) in one article, with yearly headers to clarify that year's situation, because I didn't see the value in making the reader bounce back and forth between three separate articles to figure out the yearly successions.

Within the past 24 hours, however, another user spun the original screenplays off into their own separate article, while leaving the adapted ones inside the existing article. There is now no way to see any list that places 1987 winner The Decline of the American Empire between My American Cousin (1986) and Night Zoo (1988) — instead, it now falls between The Grey Fox (1983) and Milk and Honey (1989), which is simply not its correct context. The reader now has to bounce back and forth between two different articles to get the real context, exactly as I had been trying to avoid when I first decided to combine them in one article. And furthermore, there's no valid reason to decide that only the original screenplays warrant their own splitout, while the adapted screenplays are "lesser" and just stay in the merged article — either original and adapted both get spun off to standalone articles or neither of them do, because it's an WP:NPOV violation to decide that one category is somehow more important or notable than the other. And then the reader has to bounce back and forth between three separate articles to get the full context, which again I don't see as valuable.

This is also not just a theoretical exercise: given what the current world situation has done to film production and distribution, there is a very real possibility that next year's awards will have to collapse the categories again for the first time in 20 years, because of a serious downturn in the number of films eligible to be nominated for anything.

So there's no case for just two articles here — we have to either keep them all in one merged article, or split both the original and adapted categories off so that there are three articles. I don't see a lot of value in the latter, but I'm willing to defer to consensus if other people feel strongly that the latter is warranted — so my question is, do we want one article here or three? Bearcat (talk) 15:32, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't see any evidence that WP:RFCBEFORE has been observed, so why have you gone straight to a full-blown thirty-day formal RfC? -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 19:14, 11 May 2020 (UTC)


 * One article Makes the most sense. Kingsif (talk) 19:34, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
 * One article for the reasons given by Bearcat. The format of the single article as it existed up until a few days ago makes a lot more sense than having two or three separate articles for the screenplay awards. Mathew5000 (talk) 03:45, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I would like to see a separate article established for Canadian Screen Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and would be willing to do it. The first breakout article demonstrates it would be long enough and well referenced enough, and would be less cumbersome and thus more useful to navigate for readers interested in screenplays. Ribbet32 (talk) 18:35, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Do you have any rebuttal to Bearcat's arguments for keeping a single article? You say that three separate articles would be "more useful to navigate for readers interested in screenplays", but what about the lack of context in the newly created breakout article Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Screenplay, where the listing jumps from 1983 to 1987 and then to 1989? In fact there were award winners for original screenplays in the intervening years (1984, 1985, 1986, and 1988); why should readers have to look to a different article (Canadian Screen Award for Best Screenplay) to find them? Mathew5000 (talk) 20:22, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think most readers are stupid, they would know Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Screenplay is about the Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Screenplay, and if a year is missing no Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Screenplay was awarded that year. I don't think it's asking too much for readers to click on a link for the winners of Best Screenplay, where you will find the winners of ... Best Screenplay. Another option is to insert a bar for those years "No award for Best Original Screenplay; Best Screenplay awarded instead". It's also worth considering that on the American side, they did opt for two rather than three articles with Academy Award for Best Sound and Academy Award for Best Sound Editing (Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing is just a redirect - the two Sound categories will be combined next year). Ribbet32 (talk) 02:22, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Looking at Wikipedia's articles on the Oscars, a closer analogy is Academy Award for Best Cinematography. For some years (e.g. 1956 and 1958) the category was split in two, with separate awards for Best Black & White Cinematography and Best Color Cinematography, while for other years (e.g. 1957) the category was combined. Wikipedia lists all cinematography nominees and winners in a single article. Mathew5000 (talk) 05:30, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
 * The fact that two longstanding decades-old categories are only just now going to be combined into one brand-new merged category for the first time next year is not an accurate or useful analogue to this — Mathew5000's cinematography example, where there's already been an inconsistent and unsteady wobble of split-merge-and-split-again in the past, is much more relevant. And secondly, nobody said this was about readers being too "stupid" to click on another article for other information — the question is about whether there's any value in forcing them to do that in this context, not about whether they have the intellectual capacity to understand what they're being forced to do. Bearcat (talk) 13:43, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Support single article: Makes the most sense, same as having the Canadian Film Awards, Screen Awards, and Genies in the same place. It forms one coherent topic, and the combined tables are not cumbersome. There's no good reason for the split. (I also understand why, following a bold split of an article, an editor might not have the patience for pre-RfC discussion.) – Reidgreg (talk) 18:16, 19 May 2020 (UTC)