Talk:John Boone

Continuation
I think we can have our cake and eat it too. In the main Red Mars article, we keep the bullet-point descriptions--but we wikilink the character names to more detailed articles (which I'll write as I get to it, as per John Boone). Satisfies? [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 23:38, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Meelar, the writing's on the wall for these pages
Meelar, it looks like you're the only one voting to keep the pages as separate. All the contributors have made good points: Sorry to rain on your parade. But it's apparent from the comments that there's no place for these pages on wikipedia as separate entities. Mercurius 00:40, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * 1) Where is the evidence that characters like 'John Boone' have influenceced any other literary works? Is he cited in other SF novels? No. Has he emerged as some kind of 'archetype' that pops up in SF literature elsewhere. No. His influence is confined to the Mars Trilogy. Thus he is of minimal encyclopedic interest.
 * 2) There is nothing more you can find out about John Boone on wikipedia than you could find out by reading the novels. Thus how is this contributing to 'human knowledge'? Encyclopedias are supposed to condense information from a range of sources about a topic. But there is only one source of information about Johnn Boone: The Mars trilogy.
 * 3) I think you're wasting your time writing a column on Boone for this encyclopedia. By all means write a fan page for Boone and the others, and host it somewhere else. I'd be the first to read it. I like the characters too. But they don't deserve a separate enyclopedic entry unless you can prove evidence of intertextual influence on other literary works.

Boone
Actually, looking at the Vfd, I would say that User:Stormie is a keep, as am I, matched against User:Mksmith (whose objection I addressed), User:Orthogonal, and yourself (note that I'm including only people who have looked at the page since the rewrite).

Lord knows that reasonable people can disagree on this. I suppose the root of my case to keep is the philosophical objection that we have an (IMO) decent article on John Boone. More information is better than less (when it's conveniently organized, as I believe this to be), and I don't think there's any way to fit this level of detail into Red Mars. Therefore, it gets split off into its own page--much like History of the Beatles off of The Beatles. I see this less as its own page and more as almost a virtual subpage of Red Mars.

Again, by my count, there's no consensus to remove this information. Perhaps a request for comment? I'm not trying to stonewall, but I do think that more community involvement might help settle the issue (especially since policy in this area doesn't seem particularly clear). Best wishes, [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 00:55, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

What I don't see the need for is for all the characters in the book to have their separate pages. Better, perhaps, would be to have a separate page for all the characters in the book - i.e. you have the pages Red Mars and Characters in Red Mars. Average Earthman 13:30, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * That could work. I'd just like to keep this information (esp. now that I've spent so much time defending it ;). I should probably get on the rest of these, to bring them up to snuff. Perhaps today or tomorrow. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 17:18, 2004 Jul 19 (UTC)

Resolution
I merged John Boone, Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars into a new article called Mars trilogy. I took the liberty of removing the VfD tag since the issue is now moot; I hope that is OK. Gdr 22:17, 2004 Oct 20 (UTC)
 * Acceptable, but only as long as the content remains. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 23:40, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)
 * Well done. By the way, I asked Frank Chalmers and he said "Of COURSE you should f%$&%$ delete John Boone!" ;)  Mercurius 09:48, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)