User:Masem/notplot

Remember, first and foremost, WP is a highly generalized encyclopedia; people should be able to read any topic without a priori knowledge and come out from the article with a better understanding of what that topic is and why it is important, regardless of the type of work. If, in satsifying the highly generalized reader, some elements of a more specialized nature can be added that can help those that know the topic already to learn more, but these should not overwhelm the generalized information. For fiction, the priority in these articles is to explain to the reader that will never watch or read the work, but needs to learn about it for research purposes, why that work is important without having any understanding of the work; in achieving that, it is expected to provide some plot information as needed, but the "why", through reliable sources, is going to come from the real-world context of the work - did it win an award, was it highly or poorly received, etc. If all that is provided for a work, character, episode, etc is plot information, it fails its duty in informing the causal reader appropriately. Again, this mimics all the other "not guides": a travel guide may be useful to those that visit a location, but without telling why those places are important, it is indiscriminate information. Yes, real-world information does not exist anywhere in the pillars because it is a term that only applies to fictional works; the point is that to show that a fictional work or element of it is not indiscriminately added, and to that, you need to show why others needed to know about the work. If it is the case that the general reader needs to know about the episode was a significant turning point, or that a character was key to the resolution of the work, these statements cannot be stated from primary sources only without engaging in original research, though evidence from secondary sources are completely appropriate. But as long as the article can satisfy showing why the fictional element is important, then plot and other details, within balance to help fans to learn more, are reasonable inclusions to that article.

Also, we are talking about the ultimate fate of such articles. Instantaneous evaluation of a plot-only article right now should not be means for deletion, but instead, such articles need to be given a fair amount of time (about a month) to show good faith efforts to improve and include the real-world context, after the article is tagged for lacking these through notability. Plot-only articles that, given this time, fail to still show why the fictional element is important, should be deleted -- but only after considering if there are merge targets that the information can be transferred to. Lists of Episodes and List of Characters are two well accepted article formats that one can group plot-only information as an adjunct spinoff of the main article on the work of fiction itself. Doing this, we do not lose coverage of these topics (redirects are cheap), only deemphasize them as stand-alone topics since they cannot show the "why" from above. Other types of information should be readily moved to offsite wikis and linked in from WP so that fans will still be able learn more. All this helps the maintainability of WP; instead of dozens and dozens of articles that each have to show their real-world context to describe why they aren't indiscriminate information, we instead have one or a small number of lists that are much more maintainable.