Talk:Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Plot section: excessive rambling OR, not encyclopedic
This is a long, long, way too long rambling compilation of everything in the story with zero citations. Plot summaries need sourcing too, particularly when they're this long. Are there any third-party reliable sources covering the plot of HPMOR? If not, this really needs to go - David Gerard (talk) 22:08, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
 * As MOS:PLOT states, plot summaries are not required to cite sources, as "it is generally assumed that the work itself is the primary source for the plot summary". I'm not aware of any rules suggesting that plot summaries without third-party sources must be deleted, and it seems to me that the complete absence of a plot summary is a considerably bigger problem for an encyclopedic article about a work of fiction than an overlong one.


 * I agree it's bloated, but this is the first draft of an attempt to summarise a sprawling work of serial fiction consisting of 620,000 words across 122 chapters. (If anyone's curious, I read HPMOR a year ago but noticed there didn't actually seem to be any summary of the full story online, which was my motivation for writing this in the first place. I skimmed the entire story again to do so, and while it's possible I made mistakes, I was hoping that other editors who know the story would help iron those out.) For the record, I don't think a 1700-word summary is wildly unreasonable for a story this long, though Wikipedia doesn't appear to have any guidelines on this specific medium. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, an article about a five-hour play, currently has a plot summary that's over a thousand words longer than this one, and isn't tagged as needing work. (BTW, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the original work, but this is most definitely not a "compilation of everything in the story" – I've left out huge swaths of material, including a lengthy Ender's Game pastiche which forms much of the fic's middle section, because I needed to keep the word count down and thought it ultimately had very little impact on the main story.)


 * Anyhoo, best wishes. —Flax5 20:18, 22 December 2016 (UTC)


 * True :-) I have read HPMOR, slogging all the way through to the end ... man, a book where you could just cut chapters 26-99 and lose very little of value ... let's see what we can do with it then - David Gerard (talk) 23:52, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
 * The story peaks at the scene where McGonagal turns into a cat. You can stop reading before the end of Chapter 2. (edit: and the plot summary doesn't even mention it!) - Resuna (talk) 21:57, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia editors shouldn't bring their opinions into editing. Anyhow, I've rewritten the plot summary per MOS:PLOT at barely under 700 words and did copy editing for spelling and grammar, so that's resolved. IdiosyncraticLawyer (talk) 15:54, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Speedy deletion under section A7
This is a Harry Potter fanfiction of very limited notability. The page also seems to basically just be a spammy regurgitation of the plot. Fqn9010e0754032 (talk) 03:56, 10 June 2017 (UTC)


 * I'd say it meets notability - it's got more RS news coverage than any fanfic other than Fifty Shades Of Grey - but the rambling plot regurgitation is a huge problem. It really is pure fancruft - the RS coverage barely cares about the plot. (Instead talking about it bringing science to magic, even though there's literally two scientific experiments in the book, both of those before chapter 30.) How can we cut that back? - David Gerard (talk) 10:46, 10 June 2017 (UTC)


 * As far as notability is concerned, it has been mentioned in both the Washington Post and The Atlantic. -

Filled out from RSes, shuffled content
The Vice review/interview cites Yudkowsky's stated purpose. I've quoted directly for now. Also filled out some other bits - David Gerard (talk) 16:28, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

Plot is unacceptable
The plot needs to be completely reworked. As someone who read this there is NO detail. I am going to try and work something up. LordFluffington454 (talk) 21:05, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * I think you need to read the AFD - a ridiculous plot summary nearly got the article deleted last time. There is almost no RS coverage of the plot either - the plot is not of encyclopedic significance. Unless you've found some. But don't do synthesis - David Gerard (talk) 22:29, 15 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Done. IdiosyncraticLawyer (talk) 15:54, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

plot summary
I don't agree with the removal of the plot summary a while back. I've been reading parts the novel and it's interesting, but I don't feel likely to plow through the whole 2000 pages, so I find the summary relevant and helpful. The existence of Cliff notes shows that extended summaries are an established and valuable form of exposition about literary works. I know some people got bent out of shape about the long summaries present at one time in the articles about Rowling's versions of the Potter novels, in some cases with the idea that the summaries might interfere with Rowling's book sales (as if we were her literary agents), though I found those useful too. In HPMOR's case that issue doesn't apply at all since HPMOR is online and people can read it for free and there are no sales to interfere with. So I'd like to restore the summary. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 05:16, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree that the current summary is lacking in places but the alternative you suggest is far-too-long and rambly. I think a more concise version would be ideal for the article Zubin12 (talk) 08:59, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't think it is too long. Rambly, ok maybe, but TIND.  HPMOR has more words than War and Peace (which has 587k) and the War and Peace summary is much longer than the removed HPMOR summary and all of it is relevant.  The Rowling HP summaries plus the multiple spin-off articles about the individual characters, places, magic cookies, etc. dwarf the HPMOR summary (Rowling's HP novels add up to around 1.1M words though).  If anything I'd like to see the HPMOR summary (and fiction summaries in general) fleshed out even more.  I can possibly clean up the writing in the old HPMOR summary a little, though I don't want to mess with it too much since I haven't read the book.  Here's a 46k word negative review of HPMOR:.  *That* is too long, but 1k-5k would be fine imho. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 10:11, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I've read the entire series and while it's long, not a lot of the writing is needed for a plot summary as a large part of it is just tangents explaining various concepts or world-building. Those negative reviews you have pointed out are let's reads which are going to have a high-word count as they are done by reading the book. All the spin-off aspects of the original series are notable in their own right and therefore have content that isn't needed for the summary. The summary should only explain key-events and avoid going on side-notes. Zubin12 (talk) 11:01, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * This is an encyclopedia article, not fancruft. The plot itself gets just about zero coverage in RSes - it's literally not notable. A summary may be appropriate, but a stupendous slab of fan-oriented WP:OR like last time is really not appropriate - David Gerard (talk) 14:45, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks but I was hoping for the opposite of fancruft: more of a straightforward "here's a 3-minute overview of what happens in the book so you can save yourself the hassle of actually reading it", and/or to help spot the parts that look interesting. The hugely detailed coverage of every aspect of the Rowling books is more what I think of as fancruft.  As another example, I appreciated Wikipedia's episode summaries of the Breaking Bad TV series very much.  I watched a few episodes on TV but found the summaries of the rest sufficient to satisfy any desire I might have had to watch any more.  Similarly with the summaries of the Rowling books since I got bored with the actual books after the first few.  By contrast, I read LOTR all the way through many years ago, so have never bothered to look at the Wikipedia summaries and don't feel any wish to. That's what an encyclopedia article is supposed to do, imho: present an overview of a topic so you have a broad picture of it, that lets you decide if you want to pursue specific aspects in more depth.  The deleted HPMOR plot summary was 1286 words/8.7k of text including notes.  That is really not so lengthy.  I remember the table of contents of Robinson Crusoe summarized the individual chapters in about as much detail as the excised HPMOR summary did.  But that practice has apparently gone out of style. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 18:23, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Again, you're using examples where there's extensive RS coverage of the plot itself - those books' plots are clearly notable in themselves. Do you have any RS coverage detailing the plot of HPMOR? A vast proportion of this article shouldn't be an editor's synthesis - the present plot summary is already 25% of the article text - David Gerard (talk) 06:40, 5 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Where is the policy stating that the notability of a plot must be established separately from, and in addition to, the notability of the work? I've never seen that suggested on any other article. Surely if a work of fiction is notable enough for an article, one of the basic utilities of that article - and the main reason most readers will come to it - is a summary of the story? And plot summaries are generally unreferenced - when editors wrote Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, they based it on the script, not on a patchwork of reliable sources commenting on the specifics of that script. References are only needed for contentious or complex plot-points, like Thanos's identity in The Avengers (2012 film) - it's not WP:SYNTHESIS to read a story and say what happens in it. (I'm not necessarily asking for my summary to be reinstated - I'm aware it was too long and detailed - but it seems to me self-evident that there should be one.) —Flax5 11:01, 5 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree with Flax5 that objection against an exapnded summary simply because it isn't mentioned by any secondary sources is kinda silly and isn't policy. The problem is that the suggest summary isn't encyclopedic being mostly fan-cruft and I don't think anybody is willing to read the entire serise(which is longer than the original 4 harry potter books at this point) to create a new one or even fix the old one.Zubin12 (talk) 11:18, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Categorisation needs to be from a Reliable Source
The reason for any categorisation needs to be clear. The guideline, WP:CATV, says:


 * Categorization of articles must be verifiable. It should be clear from verifiable information in the article why it was placed in each of its categories.
 * A central concept used in categorising articles is that of the defining characteristics of a subject of the article. A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having—such as nationality or notable profession (in the case of people), type of location or region (in the case of places), etc.

So don't add categories because you think it was in the story text somewhere - that's original research, unless you can find an actual reliable source that mentions it, and it's duly cited in the article body - David Gerard (talk) 00:05, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

A source
In case anyone is looking for a good source for the article, check out Katharine McCain, ''Sensibly Organized. Filling in Gaps with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality'' // Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction / Ed. by Armelle Parey, Routledge, 2018, ISBN 978-0-429-79588-6. The text is partially available on Google Books, the full text can be obtained from the author herself on request (or from me). --colt_browning (talk) 13:20, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion: You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 14:51, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
 * HPMOR cover in English.jpg

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion: You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 11:51, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Обложка Гарри Поттера и методов рационального мышления.png

This is retarded
Are we sure this deserves a WP article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.156.143.4 (talk) 21:25, 12 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Of course it deserves an article. It satisfies the Wikipedia's notability criteria. It's also likely among the most famous fanfics of all time.--Thereisnous (talk) 19:08, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Reception
Additional notes of praise aren't what the section needs. HPMOR seems to have received enough attention that cherry-picking is an issue. Besides, it's getting repetitive. The best thing to add would be reliable summaries of overall reception. Failing that, negative reviews for balance.WeyerStudentOfAgrippa (talk) 14:16, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Unrelated "See Also" topics
Why are there are random Harry Potter Fanfictions (My Immortal, Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles, All the Young Dudes) listed under "See Also"? Are these just plugs?

It would make more sense to me to include significant digits, which was directly endorsed as a successor by the author of HPMOR. Dakusan (talk) 04:37, 29 May 2023 (UTC)